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Stories Poems Essays

Results of the 2020 Place & Home Contest

Congratulations to the winners of the 2020 Dreamers Stories of Migration, Sense of Place and Home Contest. This contest honours the term “Dreamers”…

Oralia

A heavy weight presses down on my chest. It feels like a chasm is forming under the breastplates covering my heart. I take a moment…

History Lessons

Mid-way through a week of walking the vales and fells of the Lakes | My new friend Judy asks: | What do your parents do?

Incomplete Woman

Under Water

The Sunday I first went to the quarry was after I made Tito choose. He’d been back in the States a few weeks. This is what his mother…

Mumina, the Mouse and I

I arrive late at my writers group, stepping into the quiet swish of pens on paper, of fingers tapping on keyboards. I love that look of concentration…

Bring Me Your Yearning

Two days before the bicentennial and Madeline Harper’s tenth birthday, someone rowed an eighteen-foot Statue of Liberty constructed entirely of Venetian blinds…

The Psychiatric Patient Profiled in My Application

I hold the paper in my hand. My case worker is friendly, not callous or distant. I ask him to decode the letter I have received in the mail. I think it says what I hope it says…

Sunflowers

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about sunflowers—the kind that kept Van Gogh tethered to his body and that convinced Hannah Gadsby that human connection can shield us…

The Babies

The room is small, jail-like, with windows high in one wall. The air is humid. Breathing requires deep heavy intakes of energy. The bits of daylight filtering through…