Uncategorized – Dispatches from Storyville

We Can’t Return, We Can Only Look Back from Where We Came

–Joni Mitchell I am, at long last, back on my bullshit. If it wasn’t exceedingly obvious, I was in a dark place the last time I wrote here. I’d been searching for a full-time job in one of my fields (broadly, nonprofit communications, fundraising, and event planning) for going on two years. I’d had a…
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When Her Birthday Comes

Tomorrow (the 13th) is my birthday. My 48th birthday, to be exact. Today marks three years since I sat in the orange leather chair in the living room of our sweet little cottage in Shreveport and listened to my (now) ex-husband enumerate the many ways he felt I had failed him and our two children.…
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Runs in the Family

(Trigger warning: Vegans, beware. Lots of, uh, shall we say, “farm-to-table”-type meat talk ahead.) The lack of a very specific type of impulse control, it would seem, runs in my family. Because we’re not all genetically related to one another (my mother, for example, has no biological connection to my brothers’ half-brother), I must assume…
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Home Alone

I’m bad at titles, OK? Just ask any editor I’ve ever had. In this writer’s humble opinion, thinking up catchy titles should be in someone else’s job description. You want me to birth the baby AND give it a name? Has no one except me heard of delegating responsibilities? My therapist would say that bit…
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Squared Away

Getting a blog post out this week has been hard. Charlotte and her younger daughter move next week, and I start a new part-time job (!) two days before they do. Add in a full schedule of classes and life in 2025 (Jesus, just this WEEK), and I have been struck with the worst anxiety…
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Memento mori

Lately, I’ve been contemplating why, exactly, it’s so important to me to live in New Orleans. Unfortunately, this is something I’ve had to give a lot of thought lately. The federal attack on transgender rights, along with those in the legislatures of Louisiana, Texas, and just about every other Southern state have made it necessary…
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The Board

When I was younger, before I met my kids’ father, I dreamed of – was sort of obsessed with, really – finding The Great Love of My Life. As a lonely, bookish teenager, I devoured love stories. They weren’t just romance novels, although, as a voracious reader at the mercy of my rural school library,…
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La Tricoteuse

Neither the threat of a looming recession nor monthly economic blackouts can keep a real clothes horse down, so, at the start of Mardi Gras Break, I committed to doing less doomscrolling and more sewing. In addition to keeping my wardrobe nice and full, sewing calms my mind in a way even writing can’t. Writing…
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On Perspective

A few days ago, Charlotte came across this quote by Toni Morrison and sent it to me. Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their…
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The Cure

The past couple of weeks have tested my ability to manage my course load, writing, working (or trying to), my contributions to The Resistance, my commitment to overdressing, cultivating community/a social life, and, most importantly, being a mom. There’s obviously the challenge of being present in Harper and Truman’s lives when I live six hours…
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Category: Uncategorized