PODCASTBENEDETTA’S LENTILS 0:00 / 0:00 Benedetta's Lentils Benedetta, my grandmother, made the best lentil soup, food that warmed body and soul on many a cold winter evening. She’d send it home with us in a Mason jar, frequently accompanied by a delicious loaf of bread. As hard as I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to […]
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SAFETY, ITALIAN STYLE 0:00 / 0:00 Safety, Italian Style When I was eighteen, my cousin Giovanni visited us from Italy. I sat in the passenger seat of Giovanni’s rental car as he sped through a red light at a busy intersection. I shrieked, “Stop. Stop. You’ve got to stop!” Giovanni smiled and said,
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FIRST KISS Debby and The Gorilla at High School Play 0:00 / 0:00 First Kiss Names are changed to protect the guilty. My first kiss was planted on me by a seventeen-year-old guy in a gorilla suit. My junior year, our drama club decided to perform Murders in the Rue Morgue. Mrs. Sardi, the
SINKING Photo Courtesy of Stormseeker 0:00 / 0:00 Sinking (Originally published in Streetlight Magazine.) I attended a state university that required you to pass a swim test to graduate. I will not mention the name of the institution because I’m about to malign them. When the orientation materials arrived by snail mail, included
FACE TO FACENEAR DEATH EXPERIENCEHUFFINGTON POST Bruce and Debby Prum on New Year’s Eve 2021. Please check out my essay on near death experiences that just appeared in the Huffington Post. (Photo by Jen Fariello)Deborah Prum’s fiction has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Across the Margin, Streetlight and other outlets. Her essays air on NPR member stations
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BRUSSELS SPROUTSA CAUTIONARY TALE Photo Courtesy of Jodi Pender 0:00 / 0:00 Brussels Sprouts I used to have impossibly high hopes for family holiday dinners. I blame Norman Rockwell. Remember his painting of a well-dressed family gathered around a flawlessly set table? The children, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents sit shoulder-to-shoulder, admiring an unpardoned turkey
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THE CELESTIAL VAULT Photo Courtesy of Unsplash Years ago, I read a book that animated and forever changed my creative process. In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers says, “It is a universal experience that a work of art has no existence apart from its translation into material form.” That is, people think a
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KILLER ANGELS Our first Christmas tree was a pine branch stuck into a white plastic milk jug. That year, we’d been married for only two months when I came down with meningitis in mid-November. Distracted by my potential imminent demise, my husband, Bruce, did not attempt to decorate. So, on Christmas Eve, a friend
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DREAMING BIGGER 0:00 / 0:00 Dreaming Bigger MEDIUM just published this essay. You can read it below. A while ago, a video made the rounds on Face Book. In it, a virtual Santa on a large screen greeted passengers in an airport lobby. As the folks had their tickets scanned, the Santa asked what
HOLDING VIGIL:FOSTER CARE Photo Courtesy of Atharva Tulsi 0:00 / 0:00 Holding Vigil One result of the overturn of Roe v. Wade will be that many more children will be entering foster care, a system that is already underfunded and overwhelmed. Years ago, at my first job out of college, I saw firsthand how a
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