What I have learned from storytelling is that stories move, the pieces arrange and rearrange, and that motion is everything, like the difference between stasis and change.

I was sticking to my story, unwilling to let the story become or move. I mean, if I let them go, who would I be?

Whose grief do we carry in our bodies?

a story growing in her body. When I was sixteen, we moved from Washington State to Gainesville, Florida; my father got a raise and a new position at his architecture and engineering firm, but the story they laid down upon my body was that we moved there for me, for my competitive swimming career, which was bullshit. So forgive me if I bypass that s

The mind-fuck has to do with the idea that memory is both embodied and disembodied. The stories we collect and repeat exist in a kind of narrative sphere that is a little apart from our bodies. Ancestral stories, generational stories take on lives of their own. Memory inhabits us and we inhabit memory—as if there is a story realm we step into and o

I never meant to become any kind of grief or death ambassador. I just wrote about my experience when my baby girl died, and then the deaths piled up over the years, and more and more people brought their death stories to me, so exploring the space of death has taken up a lot of my adult life and my writing. It’s true that I don’t flinch when someon

I can’t believe I was worried if I was fat in that moment. That I was self-conscious about my American flab, my pendulous tits, my too-blond stand-out-everywhere-we-went hair, my transparent blue eyes, my I am not a young hottie with insufferable perky titties and a high-up ass like all the other dark-haired women Devin’s eyes were drawn to. I look

Memories are conjurings.

These pages show you how I read my own embodied past, how I imagine a map for myself that loosens the grip that sorrow has on my soul without erasing my experiences, and how the map moves.