Out now: the March 2019 issue of Columbus Monthly magazine with a feature article I wrote for the medical guide advertising section. The piece was about the groundbreaking immunotherapy, trials, treatments, and techniques coming out of the city to help cancer patients.
I particularly enjoyed learning more about how CAR T-Cell Therapy works (it’s game changing), but my favorite part was interviewing my friend Sarah who survived breast cancer. The strength and faith on her is truly awe-inspiring.
This winter’s cold has been unrelenting. But I still want to go out, even if it means wearing three layers underneath my heavy-duty winter jacket. Same? These three activities offer a cozy and cavernous getaway while we count down the days to spring.
The OG brownie is at The Palmer House, a historic Chicago hotel that Rudyard Kipling long ago described as “a gilded mirror rabbit warren crammed with barbarians.”
Today, I recommend going barbaric on the hotel’s OG brownie. It’s as decadent and rich as the golden drapery and as opulent as the soaring ceilings. The confection was concocted in the late 19th century under the direction of Bertha Palmer (watch the video below for more) for the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in 1893. Pro tip: Get dinner at the burritos and bowls quick-service spot right outside the hotel so you don’t feel totally gluttonous after downing the whole dessert by yourself. Because you will.
On a recent round of The 10 to 10, we rolled into Bucktown and ended up walking to Wicker Park. We passed a boutique record shop that seemed worthy of a step inside.
It was more than a record shop, though. Hidden behind an unsuspecting “secret” doorway was Dorian’s, a midcentury mod-style restaurant, tucked away with tiki-themed drinks (and a mocktails option!), jazz spinning on the sound system, and a charcuterie board complete with pickled grapes.
At Three Dots and a Dash, go on a warm adventure beneath the city. Located in the River North neighborhood, no treasure map is required to find it: Just look for the sign in the alleyway off Hubbard and head down the dramatically lit stairwell to a dreamy tiki hideaway. At the grass-skirted bar or a cozy booth, surrounded by chic wooden fixtures and sunset lighting, order up some small bites, a cold pressed juice or handcrafted cock(or mock)tail. The team of mixologists makes its own syrups, such as falernum and allspice, to keep things fresh. The exotic combinations are designed to give even the most well-traveled tongue an exciting new taste.
Zero Proof is a brand new biweekly podcast featuring me and my forever-friend/ former-editor Shelley Mann Hite. Read our story here.
On each episode, we read and discuss one book about sobriety, self-growth, or surviving—and then thriving—in spaces that profit when we numb ourselves, from ourselves.
Episodes one and two launched today over at ZeroProofBookClub.com! Add that link to your bookmark bar or follow us on Instagram @zeroproof.
First up (on episode two), we discuss “The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath” by Leslie Jamison and dig into our own varied approaches to recovery.
We’re also featuring Zero Proof drinks (get it) that pair with each book. After all, we know book clubgoers need something to imbibe. We just don’t think it has to be alcohol.
“The Recovering” pairs well with an Iowa Fog, considering all that time Leslie spent at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. ☕📝 It’s our take on the classic London Fog: Steep a mug of Earl Gray tea, add a drop of vanilla, then top it with steamed milk. If you don’t have a milk steamer at home (who does?), you can get the same effect by beating milk in a saucepan over low heat with your hand mixer. Beat for a few minutes till your milk is nice and frothy.
I can’t wait to share more episodes throughout our first season! Up next, we’re reading “The Body is Not An Apology” by Sonya Renee Taylor. Episode three drops on March 11.
And, of course, this policy of denial is just another form of lying — a fanciful story we tell ourselves about our future even as we fight to free ourselves from the personal lies of our past.
Nancy A. Nichols, Memoirs of a Used Car Salesman’s Daughter
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
This closing line from Nancy A. Nichols’ issue of True Story gave me a lot to chew on as I rode the train home (these mini magazines with one longform true story per issue are so perfect for commutes).
If you haven’t read On Writing by Stephen King yet, get a copy now. Stock up on cute highlighters while you’re at it. (He’s also hella feisty on Twitter.)
If there is any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects.
Stephen King, On Writing
I love this golden nugget quote in the chapter about theme. It’s so true, right? Even those of us who can only hope to be Stephen-King-quality after a couple lifetimes know this feeling. Hitting that sweet spot where things you didn’t even know were in you fall together into a cohesive story or paragraph or sentence? It feels otherworldly.
Keep writing! Chase those ghosts! <3
“And let us all thank Willa Cather for My Antonia.”
Barbara Kingsolver in the acknowledgements of “Unsheltered“
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
Hooray! I’m so honored that some of my photography was chosen to be in Issue No. 6 of Barren Magazine, “Distance Lines.”
“Barren Magazine is a literary publication that features fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and photography for hard truths, long stares, and gritty lenses. We revel in the shadow-spaces that make up the human condition, and aim to find antitheses to that which defines us: light in darkness; beauty in ugliness; peace in disarray. We invite you to explore it with us.”
I make the Barren Magazine reading rounds on my CTA commutes. Wanna read it? Check out Issue No. 6 and others here.
Saul Leiter was a pioneer of American color photography. His painterly images of 1950s and 1960s city life are so wistful. His work makes me see bad weather, stinky streets, and the humans who inhabit it all — differently. Better. More lovingly.
“A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.”
Saul Leiter
^ Same.
Here are five of his most lovely snow-filled images that might make this seemingly never-ending winter snow a lot more bearable. At least more beautiful.
Read more about the artist’s life here. Also this: “Saul Leiter, the quiet genius who made the mundane beautiful.”
The powerline danced in the corner of my eye. Usually I wouldn’t notice this movement, it being one of millions happening outside my double kitchen windows every day. Above the dusty windowsill, beneath our hastily hung curtains, another world thrived every day just five feet away and I always miss it. The world outside, a mere backdrop for breakfast, for the daydreams in my head.
But on this morning, movement from something other than me seemed like a luxury. I hadn’t seen anything outside except the constant fall of soft snow for days. The polar vortex had been keeping everyone inside. The city had basically shut down. And behind our own windows, we waited. Huddled masses yearning to be free—free from the drip… drip… drip… of water from our pipes. Grateful those drips were our only problem on nights of record-breaking cold.
Now, it was 20 degrees warmer than it was less than 20 hours ago. Everyone and everything, it seemed, was celebrating. Stretching legs out from fetal positions. Popping toes warming up again on cold hardwood floor. Subtracting layers down from a hefty four to a daring two. Myself up hours earlier than usual, witness to this bouncing powerline.
I moved to the window to see what was making it shake. One by one, I watched three culprits leap from the tightrope—performers fearlessly ignoring the three-story-drop of certain death—to the oak tree that towers over the house behind our apartment building.
Squirrels. Looking hungry and ready to camouflage in a pile of wet leaves, were in a full steam chase up and down the branches. Undisturbed by the melting ice, ignoring it well, like I was doing now to my preventatively leaking faucet.
One squirrel scurried and another followed. A third, the smallest, managed with effort to keep up. It was like they were playing a game of tag. Just for fun. Squirrel tag. Animalistic antidote to cabin fever. Winner getting the belle of the walnut ball.
Leave it to me, sentimental and cooped up human that I was right then, to anthropomorphize my new bushy-tailed bffs. They, I decided with such certainty, were having fun! Expending pent up energy spent crammed inside a tree hole for the past two days, Squirrel #1’s beefy ham hock thigh shoved up against the shivering chubby cheeks of Squirrel #2. Squirrel #3 somewhere in between, mangy ears tucked in the furry arm pit of a brother.
That’s what I imagined them to be. Siblings. I guess they just had that kind of energy. Brothers and/or sisters in arms who had just survived one of the coldest nights on record. As they raced around the tentacles of our oak tree, all nature and instinctual balance, one thought raced through my mind: How the hell did you guys make it?
The tree, that masochist rejoicing in the claws puncturing its alligator bark, lifted face to sun and said, “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for.” The three squirrels paused. I feared for a second maybe they had seen me move behind the window, saw my pale ungloved hand reach to the glass as if to touch them. I just wanted to say hi. To join them, to join the tree, to shed off something of survival and say, “Yes, yes, I am here too.” But instead, determined as I watched their heaving chests and give-a-fuck-all of me, they were just taking a breather. I could almost feel their tiny heartbeats racing, beating out of their hard chests, through my fingertips on the glass.
This lasted only a few seconds. Then they were off again. Reversing course, they ran counter clockwise around the living wooden maze this time, hopping from one raised branch to the other, the littlest one leading now.
To have happy siblings is the greatest gift, right? To know those people you’ll always know as children, even as they pay their taxes and talk of 401Ks, are happy and loved, with places to hibernate, armpits to cuddle into, thighs to lean on, and tiny heartbeats to feel through their own fingertips—fingertips completely unique from mine, but forged in the same walnut tree womb. What a gift to have them and an even greater one to have the peace of mind that they are somewhere, surviving, stretching out and playing with their chosen families.
I pressed my naked hand harder on the glass. The cold was beginning to sting but I wanted my energetic neighbors to sense me before they left for the next powerline over: “Yes, yes, I am here too.”
Dawoud Bey is a MacAurthur Genius Award-winning portrait artist whose most moving photographs are black and white images in urban settings; however, his exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago happens across a different landscape.
Titled, in a nod to Langston Hughes, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” is a compilation of 25 photographs taken of places in Hudson and Cleveland, Ohio, that marked the end of the Underground Railroad.
The large-scale images are darkened to mimic the blackness of night, a time of day when it was “safest” to run. The darkness makes it hard to see what you’re looking at, inducing a sinister terror that must, when you think about it, only be .01% (if that) of the sinister terror runaway slaves felt when approaching these final stops toward freedom—a term that feels especially meaningless when faced with the final resting stop, Lake Erie and sky. Canada’s freedom on the horizon, but at what cost? How did these people ever feel free or safe or whole? It seems as impossible as swimming in the dangerous choppy waves of the photograph.
Their reflective nature is particularly Bey-brilliant. With this effect, the viewer sees themselves in the image, in this situation, both long ago and in the modern world. At first, I thought about how alone these images made me feel, no human to be found, just the potential for danger that had to freeze you in your tracks. Seeing a shadow of myself in each image, I also thought about the ways white supremacy has shaped my own understanding of the world. How its effects linger today. I thought of Flint. Of Chicago police brutality. Of my own willful blindness that contributes to modern racism.
I was moved by the titles of his images, too. A forest. A marsh. These seem idyllic to me—because they can. But in light of the darkness of these settings and the truth behind them, I understand how these words and places represented a challenge, a cover, an enemy to the people who had to escape through them without the cover of peace… or even hope… or even, sometimes, other people.
Outside the gallery is a wall of framed photographs Bey curated from the AIC’s private collection. In addition to harrowing images of the murder that racism has justified on American soil are images of people who fought back and found strength in the darkness. Their courage is breathtaking.
The landscape portraiture Bey picked to include in the roundup is also meaningful. A particular Ansel Adams image of a tree, which, in a different context, I would have mused on romantically or in a rosy awe of nature, gave me chills instead. The photograph’s juxtaposition to a lynched murder victim evoked the trauma of a tree, how everything has been affected exploited in the name of “natural order.” It’s a devastating exhibit. It’s an important one. It’s on view through April 14.
