Category: Writing & Storytelling

Dad Gives Me the Gold * Storytelling Audio + Text

I performed this story at Turn Me into Gold: A Storytelling Party in the beautiful St. Joseph’s Arts Society in San Francisco. It was a wonderful night with so many old and dear friends in the audience. Wish my dad could have been there. But then it would have been a different story… Dad Gives Me the Gold   It’s… Read more

The Blind Feeding the Lame: Growing Disabled with Dad * Essay & Live RISK Performance

NOTE 2023: My RISK! performance is rebroadcast for Father’s Day! * This essay about the very different experiences my father and I had growing disabled first appeared at Catapult last June. I performed a storytelling version for a live taping of the Risk! Podcast, which aired in December in an episode called “Quality Time.” Scroll down for the performance followed… Read more

We Are Vagina, an Apache Myth of the Future

Created for Sparrow Film Project, and featured in their 2015 Gala at the Museum of the Moving Image, We Are Vagina is the weird child of a film challenge, involving randomly selected myths as prompts–ours being, of course, the Apache Vagina Girls!–and, by way of an indifferent spin of a giant wheel, eras–ours being the year 3000…     We… Read more

Helen Keller on Vaudeville Provides Fodder for a Lifetime of Art!

Yes! Helen Keller really did perform on vaudeville stages for four years (1920-1924). I stumbled across this odd fact while finishing up my PhD (in 18th Century English literature) and tucked it away for further investigation. That investigation–into Helen’s motivations and the reaction of others to her short-lived but startling career move–became The Star of Happiness: Helen Keller on Vaudeville?!… Read more

Likenesses, A Family History Through Photos, Real and Imagined

My story Likenesses, about love after death, was first published in the Spring 2016 issue of FLAPPERHOUSE. You can hear a fun interview with me discussing the writing of it with the smart and charming Ilana Masad on The Other Stories Podcast, episode 63!   And, if you like to listen to your literature…   [1981]   When they found… Read more

A Flame’s Progress, Greek Easter 1981

We arrived late as always, so that there was no place to sit, though there’s not a whole lot of sitting in Greek Orthodox churches. Standing in our coats, clutching our unlit candles, we crowded in with the others who, like us, came to church but once or twice a year. I was between my mom and my Thea Yvonne… Read more