Both Sides of the Brain

She sat in the doctor’s office and listened to him tell her that what he found in her colon during a routine procedure was something he’d previous seen only in Canadians and was she in fact a Canadian? No, she was born in the U.S. as were her parents. Well, perhaps one of her grandparents had been Canadian, the doctor said, but she said that each of her grandparents were immigrants from either Lithuania or Poland. So, he said, either she (without knowing it) or one of her parents must have been… Continue

They were writing buddies for many years—in the same critique group—where they learned about each other through their fiction. She relied on her friend to guide her as she wrote about the pain of her character’s chronic illness and her friend likewise probed the magnitude of rage during her divorce in order to best depict a character’s range of emotions in a similar situation. They met in coffee shops and in restaurants and in each other homes and talked on the phone, always about their work—the… Continue

My hairdresser is fifty-five, two years younger than I am, and he is fussing with the color of my hair, trying but not succeeding in making it look natural. A satellite radio is blaring in the salon and the station is set on music from the early 70s. It’s a sad love song and, in an instant, a pang of yearning washes over me and I remember who I was with when the song was new. I get out of the chair and, with goo all over my scalp, I take my hairdresser’s hand and we begin to dance. When the song… Continue

Each time I write a story I think I’ll never have another inspiration again. But then I am driving in my car, listening to a song on the radio, and an image pops into my head—one that combines a character in the song with all the “what ifs,” and a little bit of drama from my own past. I know if I wait, the thought will contract and will soon disappear, so I pull over to the shoulder of a four-lane highway and search frantically for my notebook and a pencil. A policeman stops and asks if I need a… Continue

1. The four-leaf clover I found along my driveway when I was six and imagined that I would be a lucky girl my whole life even though my big sister told me that four-leaf clovers weren’t so rare. 2. The lime turtle-neck sweater I begged my mother to buy me, but didn’t get because she explained that it would not be “becoming” due to my sallow complexion, not at all like hers. 3. The eye color of my first love, a young man who was idealistic in college and went off to the Peace Corps and a new life… Continue