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The Baltimore Review
The Summer 2014 issue of The Baltimore Review is now available online. On its site, you can read not only one of my recent flash nonfiction pieces, “Cop Cars,” but also some excellent poetry and fiction from writers around the country. My favorite pieces from this issue include: Vincent Poturica’s short story “Habte,” about an Eritrean immigrant at a child’s…
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Swedish Lessons
My favorite part of reading blogs is discovering extremely gifted writers whose self-published books I might never otherwise have heard of. My most recent ecstatic find is Natalie Burg, author of the hilarious, page-turning memoir Swedish Lessons. An ambitious but slightly directionless 23-year-old fresh out of a soul-crushing romantic relationship, Burg is offered a position as…
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You’re Not as Dumb as All That
Perhaps you’ve read about this experiment from the 1980s: Subjects were told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they were asked to estimate which further statement…
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You Ain’t Smart Unless You Sound Smart
“[B]eing trailer park trash doesn’t preclude intelligence.” If only we lived in a world where this was not news. If only we lived in a world where this was not something a person could prove only by discarding the way of speaking they grew up with and adopting “standard” English. But we don’t live in that world. And that’s what…
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The Invisibility of Evil
“You will learn that when the truth isn’t pretty, expected, or delivered with a fair dose of charm, people will almost always put their faith in a lie.” So reads one of many chilling lines in H.G. Beverly‘s recently released memoir The Other Side of Charm, about her unwitting marriage to a sociopath. Before her marriage to…
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Dying to Be Me
I had the suspicion, when I ordered Anita Moorjani’s memoir Dying to Be Me, that it was going to be a book that I needed to own in hardback. Something told me it would become one of those books I would keep on my shelf for years as a souvenir of an important spiritual and intellectual turning point.…
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The Tears of Men
From Pat Conroy’s Beach Music: American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no…
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The New Domesticity
I began Emily Matchar’s Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity with excitement. Matchar’s book, released in May 2013, reports on the “generation of smart, highly educated young people [who] are spending their time knitting, canning jam, baking cupcakes, gardening, and more (and blogging about it, of course).” As the jacket copy says, “Some are…
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Ready for Air
Kate Hopper’s memoir of her daughter’s premature birth–Ready for Air–has finally arrived. And it…is…luminous. On the Brevity Blog, Hopper describes her difficult, ten-year journey to publication. The manuscript of Ready for Air was rejected over and over, by both agents and editors. Many of them complained that the book was “too dark.” Even once she completely rewrote it, it garnered…
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Nurturing Genius
Today, at age 15, Jacob Barnett is recognized as a genius. But when he was two, experts believed he would never learn to read, or possibly even speak. Kristine Barnett’s memoir The Spark (released in April 2013) tells the story of her refusal to accept the standard therapy for her son’s autism and attempt to draw him out by responding to his interests…
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Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, PhD 