Fourth Genre

The Pursuit of Happiness

2023-12-21T12:45:17-05:00

On Loving, Losing, and Mostly, “And-ing”

2023-11-24T22:25:57-05:00

In Lost & Found, Schulz meditates on the meaning of losing (your keys, your language, your mind) and on seeking and finding (answers, love, meaning in life). Both remind us that our worlds are large, mysterious and expansive. Schulz also hones in on what she misses most about her father – his inner light. Kalpana Mohan also ruminates on her own relationship with her beloved father in Daddykins, and along the way sheds her own inner light in the way she treats her world as expansive and inclusive. Both books beautifully illustrate that happy families can indeed be interesting and unique in their own ways.

Thinking Like an Essayist

2024-01-03T14:37:06-05:00

Still Life

2023-07-11T12:38:10-04:00

Sea of Troubles

2023-03-07T19:04:02-05:00

Flattened

2023-05-06T18:28:58-04:00

Comfortability

2023-07-19T18:06:51-04:00

Salvation

2022-12-20T14:34:39-05:00

DESSERT

2023-02-28T21:39:51-05:00

11 Stones and an Outlier

2023-04-28T16:55:38-04:00

The Hanker Chiefs

2023-10-13T14:55:36-04:00

Memory, Silverback, Woman

2023-02-23T13:06:24-05:00

This is How You Protect Yourself From a Rapist

2023-04-06T20:45:47-04:00

Strata

2023-05-15T10:26:47-04:00

Maundering Women

2023-08-10T10:37:49-04:00

Sentinel

2023-02-17T13:06:12-05:00

Collected Pleasures of a Collector

2023-03-03T13:28:01-05:00

Waterfall Children

2023-05-04T11:43:46-04:00

A lyric essay examining the death of the author's mother through personal narrative, familial history, the history of CPR, and metaphor.

What Water Is

2023-07-19T23:43:28-04:00

"What Water Is" recounts the author's fear of water, stemming from incidents in childhood, and explores her subsequent realization that she considers and water an enemy and treats swimming as a series of battles she always loses. The essay also describes her simultaneous fascination with the power of water, which becomes a lifelong obsession. When in middle age she decides to try yet again to conquer the water by learning how to swim more efficiently, it finally occurs to her that water was never the enemy and cannot be conquered. The enemy, in fact, was always herself, her own impulse to fight such an awesome, uncontrollable force, rather than to move with the water, to surrender to it.

Tick Season

2023-02-25T11:28:53-05:00

Following the Ink

2023-04-13T23:17:30-04:00

Divination

2023-07-06T11:41:22-04:00

Behind the Fence

2023-08-22T10:06:45-04:00

This is an essay about visiting the 2018 Berthe Morisot exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art with my mother. Mt mother and I both realise that Berthe Morisot, although a celebrated Impressionist in her own time, was completely overlooked in the Western canon. I look back on my mother's life path and that of myself, and realise we were both held back in pursuing what we loved. But is it ever to late to change the past?

Those Who Came Before

2023-02-22T20:23:19-05:00

Memory Cut

2023-10-19T18:19:31-04:00