Eight Gardens
On family, community, and gardening as social practice.
The End of a World as I Knew It
On childhood summers at a black enclave in Michigan, and the moment everything changed.
Scheherazaden: On the Power of Women’s Stories
Stories, recounted and repeated and insisted upon, accumulate.
Just Downriver from Detroit
"During my visits to to the nursing home, Dad and I have sometimes settled into chairs to time-travel through a photo album."
Minneapolis by Segway
"There was always a sense of something missing, a story still jumbled and incomplete..." From "Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology."
The Art of Labor
A tour of Milwaukee's conflicted Grohmann Museum. From "The Milwaukee Anthology."
Summers at White Birch Lodge
Reflections on three generations of family and community in Michigan.
Motor Nation
"Sometimes when I am driving down the freeway...I think of the reasons I love Detroit."
Akron’s Vietnam
How the war touched one Northeast Ohio neighborhood.
The Real Walleye Capital of the World
A writer goes in search of a community worthy of the title—and her own Midwestern identity.
Northwest Indiana’s Slow Burn
Water, oil, and industrial volcanoes in Indiana's Calumet region, along the shore of Lake Michigan.
Nuclear Power
A writer remembers her relationship with her father, an inspector of nuclear power plants.