When I was five years old my stepdad, Bill, found Precious as a stray kitten in the parking lot of his office and brought him/her home. We had him/her fixed at the appropriate time, but later, no one could […]

Clichés abound this time of year. It’s the one season in which it’s OK to speak of holiday magic or lapse into sappy memories like those that surfaced recently when I ran across a 1956 photo of 4-year-old me on t […]

In his 1971 memoir, Me and the Orgone, Orson Bean recounted his life-changing experience undergoing orgone therapy, a body-mind psychotherapy developed eighty years ago by Austrian-born psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. […]

During a late afternoon P.E. class in fourth grade, my mother came looking for me on the playground in her leather boots that zipped to the knee. In those days she wore her brown hair in a short permanent wave […]

The voice of the singer soared over the lyrics of the gospel choir that Easter morning a decade and a half ago. You plead my cause, You right my wrongs/ You break my chains, You overcome/ You gave Your life, […]

I wheel in beside the beige Buick. Ten years ago Mama had claimed its parking space twenty feet below her apartment balcony. From there she watches over her car—a proud reminder that she still has places to go, p […]

At some point—I’m not sure when—I came to accept that there are quite a few things that I can’t control. It was not a conscious decision, no epiphany, no wrestling with big ideas. It’s not really ceding control—i […]

I am a compulsive researcher. If it were not such a useful compulsion, I would need a twelve-step program to break the habit. I can get hooked on almost any research project, although I tend to obsessively […]

We have our entanglements and love affairs with places. “And the end of all our exploring,” T. S. Eliot promises, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Such knowledge may be […]

***Karen Foster is an Honorable Mention for Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

We Girls sit close together in the backseat of the car: Mission Accomplished. The Presentation of Mary Academy se […]

Choosing between life in a library or a museum—either choice seems disloyal to the other. As a poet I revel in language. I splash in sacred waters, words swirl around me like schools of fish in streams of i […]

***John Gredler is an Honorable Mention for Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

I now had the second floor at 3 East Third to myself, a mattress on the floor, my radio cassette player and piles of bo […]

***Erin Levens is an Honorable Mention of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

I know I’m falling asleep when I slip under the cowcatcher onto a bed of hay. Strands of hay poke through the bars of iron […]

The day before Halloween 1967, I came home from school, turned on the television, and discovered the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows. All I saw was the episode’s final minute:

A beautiful blonde descends a […]

***Ashley Stimpson is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

You insist it’s okay to smoke in the rental car, that you’ve done it so many times and never had to pay a cleani […]

***Anne Carson is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
Before my older sister outgrew me, outgrew our entire family’s chaos, we shared a bedroom. For a few years there, we were goo […]

***Heather Bartlett is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

“Working for 24 hours straight is all about your perspective,” he says. “Your body can handle it. Human beings a […]

Congratulations to the winners of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir contest! But first, a little whining.

Judging a contest is a lot of hard work (whine, whine). I hasten to say I don’t mean the reading of the […]

Michaelerkirche goes back to the 1200’s and looks it. Being from a country whose ancient history—as far as English-speaking people go—stretches back to Plymouth Rock, I have no local frame of reference. What is th […]

If I could erase anything from my distant past (not the recent one), it would be that first half of fifth grade from September to December of 1960. The country was on the edge of its Camelot years with JFK and […]