I didn’t say, as they told me how they owned a boat and spent much of their summer cruising Maine’s coastline, that my mother’s biggest dream was to get out of West Virginia, that her biggest love was the ocean, that she hoped to die listening to the sounds of the waves.
“Like homing pigeons,” a man in a New York bar once told me about Pittsburghers. “You leave. You go back. You’re lucky. There aren’t many places like that.”
Touring the area my grandmother grew up, only a few hints of the coal mining history remain.
A poem by Kynala Phillips.
By now I should understand that when every choice starts to feel like a miscalculation, a mistake, I’m up against forces bigger than myself. Yet I was secretly, irrationally angry at them for succumbing too willingly to death without any burning or raving or raging. If they’d just tried hard enough, I sometimes thought.
The idea that non-white immigrants are, generally speaking, new to the Midwest could not be further from the truth.
From pyramids to barefooting, water ski clubs have been a Wisconsin family tradition for sixty years.
Andy Warhol meets the Breatharians.
One writer's Memorial Day quest to discover his ancestors—and their final resting place.
"When Kathy heard that Nana was ready to die, she called us."
Pittsburgh was once a Black Muslim refuge. Here's one family's story.
The stories of workers and their families reveal "unintended consequences" for life and health in the community.