Nonfiction

Select Writings

Matriarch Pink: Some Notes on Gender, Religion, and Power

Fourth Genre

"I wish Eve would've asked me to defend her," a top civil rights attorney said to me in 2018, a nod to the fact that I am suing a fundamentalist Christian college in Chicago. "She made a good defense. No mens rae. But she needed an appellate lawyer." I'd called him to discuss my gender discrimination case: Garrick v. Moody Bible Institute. Almost immediately he wanted me to know, "I'm Jewish, but not practicing." This attorney has a bulldog insignia on his website and a black gunslinger mustache hooded above his poetic lips.

All of Adam's defenses—blame Eve, blame God—shouldn't have held up, he said as I listened. All these years later, we're still using this ancient story to wield power over women. Forty-seven years of legal counsel firing at me at eighteen dollars per minute, eleven hundred dollars per hour. But this man took my call gratis. "I've been defending women since the seventies and you would not believe the reasons employers give for paying women less than men.

 

Photo by Kelly Neil on Unsplash.

Eggs, On Not Choosing Motherhood (or, as Newsweek entitled it: I Found Love in My Forties—It Was Too Late For Kids)

Newsweek

At 40, single, and working as a communications professor at a conservative Christian college in Chicago, I moved in with the Mennonites, a community of liberal Christians, for some company.

One spring, my five housemates and I ordered a Community Supported Agriculture box from a local farm in Illinois. From May to September, our CSA box arrived weekly with eggs of many different sizes, shapes, and colors like a Pottery Barn palette of paints—China White, Cotton White, Halcyon Green, and my favorite, Alpaca.

The Barred Owl of Tree Hollow

The Fourth River

“You here for the owls?” the man flings open his Ford truck’s white door, his accent, southern. “Damn things. Up all hours of the night. Goddamn neighbor,” he points across the street at three old oak trees where them damn things live. “She puts out half a rotisserie chicken every night on her back deck. Keeps ‘em around.”

I, myself, am pleased with the goddamn neighbor, whoever she is. A Barred Owl baby above my head just now.

 

Artwork by Dale Bridges

The Four Treasures of the Library

Eclectica Magazine

There is a Yellow River called The Sorrow, and there is a child waiting to be born this day. The child, this would-be scholar-thinker, is a girl. A perfect blue pearl is placed in her mouth or, more precisely, balanced on her pale pink lips when she is born. The blue pearl will perch, making of her mouth an oyster, a shell, an ancient skin of the deepest ocean. At her birth, her mind will weigh just under one pound, her fingers will stretch a few centimeters, and her tiny fingernails will be under five millimeters—tiny quills, the tiniest of bird pinions, new stems shooting out from pink skin. After she is born, her fingernails will never cease to grow and grow and grow. (In fact, even in utero, her fingernails are already growing.) Endlessly, she must trim and trim, cutting them back. They are magic, like the bamboo, like the bamboo of the first brushpen. There is magic in her hands. Will she ever come to know this? For endlessly, the world will tell her to forget that her hands were once a tool, a pen to dip in pools of ink, her tongue and mind, tools for communing with heaven.

Remembering Freetown

Narrative Magazine

I am not in any way prepared for postwar Freetown. Postwar Sierra Leone. The tanks parked on the roadside, the brand-new Toyota 4Runners marked UN rolling by. I am not in any way prepared, despite my ten-day Hostile Environments and First Aid Training by the British Royal Marines in the Shenandoah Mountains; ten days of mucking around with other aid workers and journalists from the Sacramento Bee, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. There are guns here, I notice. The men posted at roadside checkpoints have AK-47s. They’re dressed in uniform, blue military helmets fastened. I go over checkpoint protocol in my head, but the men do not stop our vehicle. We are waved through. “Who are they?” I ask Maureen, our local host. “Those are the UN peacekeepers,” she says.

Song of an Unsung Republic

TriQuarterly

“The smart went west,” my grandmother liked to say. She and my grandfather left Kansas City when my mom was five and never looked back. My brother and sister-in-law, who live in San Diego, have an image on their wall of the California flag, the flag of the great Bear Republic—a sturdy brown bear painted on raw oak, the bear pacing, head down, nose forward, tracking the scent, heading west. Aren’t we all heading west? Or, at least, longing to do so? This hankering to head west, to walk off one’s map. Surely, there must be more! we cry.

The Birds I Have Become

Helen Literary Magazine

“Birds are sometimes found away from their regular ranges in areas not indicated on maps.”

The bread is lifted up. A flock of Parisian sparrows flock to the feeder—a would-be She-preacher, a blond-headed, black-crowned sparrow. They flock to her right hand, beak her flesh; her crown and wrist their perch. Montmartre—white and round-shouldered, weeps in the background. The saints march in. The artists with their oil and water palettes, the bakers with their baguettes, the stone street with its cobbled, wet feet. Montmartre blinks hard and remembers. She sighs red. She sighs a wall of stones, and remembers the stone of stumbling and offense, the Rock of antiquity.

Mrs. Billie B. McClure

Christians for Biblical Equality | CBE International

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion,
or the free exercise thereof.”
— The Establishment Clause & the Free Exercise Clause
First Amendment of the United States Constitution, 1789

I.

I’d like you to meet Mrs. Billie B. McClure. In 1970 Billie McClure served as a minister in the Salvation Army (you know, of the red tin buckets, the green bills and silver bells of Christmastide—the Salvation Army). Shortly after beginning her employ, Billie McClure realized she was getting paid less than her male counterparts, so she asked some questions. Nothing was done. So she asked more questions, pointed out facts. Still, nothing. She then filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, the EEOC, a government agency housed beneath the U.S. Department of Human Rights Commission. Less than thirty days later, Billie McClure was fired, the Salvation Army noting that its disappointment and dissatisfaction with Mrs. McClure’s performance as a minister of the Gospel arose long before her filing of charges.

Billie McClure then hired a lawyer, and took the Salvation Army to court.