Original essay · Family
How My Family Turned My Father's Rage Into a Punchline
A lost rental car key in Kauai, a house pulled apart, and the sentence my family has been laughing about ever since. Read the complete essay.
Read the essayEssays & Reflections
Shorter pieces about the rooms I grew up in — a kitchen sink, a garden gate, a notebook kept beside a hospital bed — and what a family carries out of them.
Featured original writing
Written exclusively for JoWonders.com.
Companion piece · Writing Life
I Thought I Was Writing. I Was Grieving.
A reflection on grief, writing, and the unexpected beginning of a memoir — the sixty thousand words I wrote before I understood what they were for.
Read the essayEssays on submission
Some essays are currently being submitted for publication. As they are published, links will be added here.
- Family
- Grief
- Memory
- Caregiving
- Humor
From the writing desk
An author's notebook
Now and then I share something shorter here — a paragraph about a book I can't put down, a sentence I overheard and wrote on the back of a receipt, a note about what memory does to chronology. Less a blog than a desk drawer left open.
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