Category: Non-fiction

March: to tramp, trudge, protest, picket, advance, progress, step-out, strut, swagger JANUARY 21, 2017; THE CROWD is so jammed together that rocking foot-to-foot is difficult. On tiptoes, pink pussy hats blended the sea of heads into lilac, intersperse … Continue Reading

Susan Stinson is the Writer in Residence at Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the author of Belly Songs, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, Venus of Chalk, and Martha Moody. Her upcoming book, Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, Oct 2013), is … Continue Reading

The conference room was decorated in that sterile version of New England charm often found in banks and dentists’ offices, a family of ducks marching proudly around their wallpaper border in tiny straw hats. Old pewter kitchen utensils hung on the wall … Continue Reading

There was a time in Greenwich when people kept a car for more than a year and could look at their house and say, “Maybe this is enough.” When my grandparents, Jean and Dean Barker, moved to Greenwich in 1968, it was actually a pretty ordinary town. The … Continue Reading

A few weeks ago, I sat in the Fresh Side in Amherst, ruminating over the tea choices. Local author and professor of creative writing at Bard College, Jedediah Berry, was meeting me there to talk about writing and his very successful novel The Manual of … Continue Reading

At 10:00 PM the underground subway platform was tightly packed with Red Sox fans. It would take several trains arriving to clear the mass of people wanting to go home after a Sox victory. In the shadows at the far end of the platform, where the track d … Continue Reading

The refuse of my disease isn’t orange pill bottles or syringes. You won’t find used needles or vials on the floor or in my pockets. You won’t find anything, but if you could, you’d see only fat bottles—emptied. The big bottles wait for me at the store. … Continue Reading

“Well, your brother’s gone off the deep end…” my mother sighed, with an undercurrent of anxious resignation. She had called me from a random hotel in New Jersey, not the kind of place she would ordinarily hang out, but extraordinary circumstances cal … Continue Reading

My mother is an escort and an adult-actress, not a prostitute, call girl, hooker, whore, porn star, or streetwalker. Yes, she has a website and no, you can’t have the address. An escort doesn’t trade money for sex. She makes her living exercising the c … Continue Reading

Martín Espada graciously agreed to be interviewed by GCC student and Plum intern Tommy Nielsen. The interview took place on March 21, 2025, in Shelburne Falls, MA. Below is a transcript of that interview, which has been lightly edited. TN: I read that … Continue Reading

Ada B. Wells is not her real name, but she talks about Ida B. Wells who refused to give up her seat on the train long before Rosa Parks could even ride the bus without her mother. We had just met, and her furry top hat sat over her hair. She was lament … Continue Reading