The other day, at midnight, I received a phone call from my mother; she’d been stopped by the police and told me to stay on the line in case something happened. I recorded my screen until the interaction was over. Thankfully, it was nothing. This week, while trying to resolve a conflict between two first-grade boys, one White, the other Black, I heard the white child call the mother of the other child a Nigger. Flabbergasted, I attempted to explain to him the meaning of the word Nigger, why it was hurtful and dehumanizing. He proceeded to use the word three more times after my explanation.

Some weeks before, while waiting on a friend in downtown Minneapolis, I saw a man and woman huddle into a corner to unwrap a small white stone, which they put into a glass pipe, heated up, and then smoked. I looked away as soon as they’d finished, feeling I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to; everyone else around moved as if this were a regular occurrence. That same day at around midnight on a bus, I sat in the center of a trinity; in front of me two men were arguing and behind me sat a man nodding with drool running down his face, struggling to keep his head upright. I witnessed one of the trinity flash a large combat knife to threaten the other. I feared for my life and very desperately wanted to run away but felt any movement from me would agitate him, so I sat still, my heart screaming as it attempted to escape my chest.

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On Monday, a second grader I work with called me a monkey because I’d done something to upset her. I don’t think she knew what that word did to me. Her intent was to hurt, but I don’t think it was to hurt in the way that I ended up feeling hurt. I didn’t know how to explain to her why you don’t call black people monkeys. A third-grade student of mine, upon seeing a picture of my mother, exploded into clamorous laughter, screaming, “Why are her lips so big!?” I acted unoffended and attempted to explain anti-blackness and society’s skewed beauty standards to him; my words fell to the ground, swatted by his laughter; I was very sad and ashamed. A little girl, upon finding out I was African, proceeded to tell me how her mother had taught her Africa is where poor people come from and that she was better than them because she was black and not African. I tried to add nuance to the perspective, but she didn’t seem interested in my words; I felt foolish.

Lately I’ve been angry, exhausted, and agitated. I didn’t realize this until my mother called me yesterday while I was at work; she was asking me to help her with something involving technology. I became irritated and impatient at her being unable to follow my directions after one explanation. I waited a few minutes, then I lied and said something urgent came up and I hung up due to frustration. I felt disappointed in myself soon after; I’m usually more patient than that. I called later to apologize to my mother; fortunately, she didn’t take my behavior personally. I took note of what I felt that led me to act the way I did and, later during the day, after work, sat and wrote the mess above. Putting these interactions on paper, I’m realizing that lately I’ve been sitting with a profound sense of humiliation about my identity. I have felt, and continue to feel, extraordinarily repressed and lacking in self-determination. To put it more bluntly, these days I’ve been made to feel like a Nigger.

Half a year ago I wrote a journal entry prompted by similar circumstances and emotions. I expressed in it how I felt like a Nigger because in many ways (as I’ve highlighted with the words above) this is all society had been telling me and continues to tell me. I don’t actually know the definition of the word Nigger; I doubt many of us truly know. Yet when I ruminate on my experiences as of late, and attempt to make vivid this feeling of ontological insignificance that I am faced with daily, Nigger is the only word that succinctly captures what I feel in my navigation of this society. I’ve found myself, for example, ruminating on the strangeness of this screen recording I now have of my mother; blue and red lights flashing in her face as she awaits the officer to return with her license. I have yet to go back and watch the video; there is an indescribable sense of humiliation at witnessing my mother in that position — helpless and at the mercy of someone she doesn’t know — that’s keeping me from doing so. I feel humiliation and rage at the fact that typically, it is my mother who tries to reassure me that I’m overreacting when I go on my tangents about my distrust of police officers. There’s a strangeness at experiencing my mother, of all people, feeling afraid enough to call me at midnight so I can be witness if anything tragic were to occur. I am disillusioned; my perception of reality feels tampered with; I never imagined to ever see my mother this vulnerable.

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It is strange to suddenly realize that she too is afraid and feels somewhere within herself this same sense that I do. This sense that my life is at the mercy of strangers who do not know me, and do not care to know me. It is demoralizing to come to this place of perceiving reality, only to be presented with an even more cruel realization that there is nothing profound in anything I’ve shared thus far. This is simply what it is to exist with black skin. To have happenings that would otherwise make for a well-written ending to a tragedy be our daily bread.

I’m noticing this disillusionment very often these days — this notion that reality isn’t what I imagined it to be. It is laughable in a way, how I am only now coming to these realizations about the world. I feel exposed, standing in front of reality in this way, because I don’t have anything to say. I am now seeing what many have known, and I don’t have an answer. I am only left to laugh at myself as I think back to moments when I’ve spoken with such passion about somehow bringing about change to the world. I feel a bit embarrassed by the fact that I still think about the world as though there is some ultimate answer that we, as humans, have not found. That if someone were to find this answer, the world would be a gentler place.

Confronted with this realization, I am left with the question: Where to now? A question — if I am being honest — I am not sure how to answer. I do suppose, however, if there is anything to be gained from this arrangement of words, it is the very rudimentary understanding that people, past and present, when faced with tragedy, have continued venturing on.

Heshima is a Zimbabwean-born artist currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work navigates the intersection of the African experience with Western culture and attempts to create meaning in the contradiction created as the two cultures converse with one another.

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More HOW I LEARNED:

Current location: In a big chair in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn

Eight-word memoir: Generally very Kermit-y both in voice and attitude

What's your favorite dad joke?

What kind of pants do ghost hunters wear? Just a paranormal jeans.

What is magic?

Everything quiet is magic. Iced tea in the sunlight. Biking on Governor's Island.

What’s your secret talent?

I make very good scrambled eggs, and I don’t want that to be a secret. Please tell everyone. The trick is that you separate the eggs and scramble just the whites slow and low until the curds and liquid separate and then come back together to look like a cloud or maybe grits. Then, you fold in the yolks and just give them a kiss of heat. So, you get these creamy, umami-forward scrambled eggs that are still cooked through all the way.

Who was your first crush?

There was a girl named Tessa in third grade. I made her cry when I told her I was going to grow up to be a werewolf and she was going to grow up to become a witch. She’s a somatic therapist now, so...

Who's your latest crush?

I showed my kids the Josie and the Pussycats movie. I think Tara Reid got a bad shake. She was delightful in that movie. Why did Natasha Lyonne’s partying get a pass but Tara Reid’s didn’t?

What question do you wish I'd ask you?

I wish you'd ask my top 100 dirty limericks I've ever written.1

Andy Ross is a humor writer and designer based in Brooklyn. He has performed with The Moth, written for The Onion, and contributed comedy scripts to variety shows around Chicago and New York. His long-running humor reading series Real Characters at McNally Jackson Books featured TV writers, storytellers, and comedians like Kate McKinnon, Rachel Dratch, Simon Rich, and Cole Escola. Andy is a former Art Director at Condé Nast and currently illustrates mystery book covers. You can see him host bingo in Bryant Park every summer.

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Previously on My Next Ghost

Everyone said the same thing: turn yourself in on Monday. It’s the best day. The magistrate is there. The judge is there. Things move faster. You’ll be released on your own recognizance. I listened. What they didn’t say: sometimes the magistrate decides to deny bail, and when that happens, it can take days before you see a bond hearing.

The sheriff who put the handcuffs on me looked stunned. He studied me like something in the paperwork didn’t quite match the person standing in front of him. A 6’7” clean-shaven white guy with no prior offenses who had just pulled up in a new BMW X5, apparently wasn’t what he expected that morning.

Then he did something that took me a long time to understand.

The magistrate had just informed him I was being held. Instead of quietly processing me into the general population, he leaned over to the county jail clerk and said I knew someone inside and should be placed in isolation.

I didn’t know anyone in the jail system. Period. It wasn’t true.

Eventually they gave me my first phone call.

Three minutes. That’s all you get.

Three minutes to call the person who might help get you out, three minutes to explain things to a lawyer, three minutes to tell the people you love you’re okay, three minutes to somehow tell your job that you won’t be coming in. Pick one.

Except you can’t. You don’t know a single number by heart anymore. And what they don’t tell you: they take everything. No phone. No paper. No electronics. Memory becomes the only tool you have. I sat there trying to force numbers out of my head like they were buried somewhere behind my eyes. You realize quickly how much of your life lives inside a device in your pocket.

I spent four days in isolation.

Twenty-three hours a day inside a cell by yourself. One hour in the day, though they don’t tell you when, they let you walk the bay. That hour had to cover everything: shower, phone calls, stretching your legs, reminding your body you still existed outside a concrete box.

They don’t tell you about the sounds you hear inside.

Someone screaming for twenty hours straight. I still don’t know how that’s physically possible. Another inmate banging on every surface of his cell like he was trying to break the building down with rhythm alone.

The guy who had my cell before me had apparently decided, during his hour out of isolation, to punch the television mounted on the lower floor. My next door neighbor filled me in on that detail. The only way I could see the TV was by squinting and leaning as far right as possible, trying to catch a glimpse through the three-inch-by-fifteen-inch metal-mesh window in the door.

And there are the conversations you overhear.

One voice calls down the row of cells.

“Did you say Paula? Paula that lives on the corner of Palm Street?”

A pause.

“Yeah, Paula that lives on the corner.”

“I know Paula. She watched my kids last month.”

The world outside suddenly feels very small.

After a while you stop trying to understand everything happening around you. The noise, the shouting, the stories passed from cell to cell. Your world shrinks to what you can see through that narrow strip of window and what arrives on the tray three times a day.

I had felt something similar before in military training. Basic training and officer training both have a way of masking time. Days stop feeling like days and start becoming routines. Wake up. Formation. Meal. Training. Meal. Training. Meal. Sleep. Repeat. You learn to measure progress by what comes next, not by what the clock says. Jail felt similar on the surface, but the difference mattered. In the military, there was a purpose attached to the structure. A mission. A graduation date. A reason you had agreed to be there.

In jail, the routine did not feel like discipline. It felt like suspension. Meals were the only reliable marker of time. And time was not moving you toward something. It was simply passing over you. Each tray was mostly the same: some bread, a piece of meat you vaguely recognized, a canned vegetable you wouldn’t serve to a beloved pet, and a plastic bag of juice or milk, depending on the day. No salt. No pepper. No seasoning. Just food that technically qualifies as food. But when you’re hungry, you eat it.

Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.

Time isn’t measured in minutes or hours. It’s measured in meals.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, mashed potatoes.

Not the instant kind that slides around like applesauce, pretending to be food. These had structure. Thick, creamy, but not perfectly smooth. Small chunks breaking through the mash like little reminders that this once lived in the ground.

They’d sit in your mouth longer than most jail food deserved. Not because you were savoring them exactly, but because swallowing meant the moment was over. And once the moment was over, the quiet sinking feeling in your stomach would return. So you held them there a second longer than necessary, trying to freeze time before the tray was empty again.

I had them twice.

Both times, I gave them five stars.

Was it the chef? Or was it the hunger? Hard to say. Or at least that’s the positive spin I’ve learned to put on a chaotic stretch of time. A way to help people laugh through the hard parts of the story. Not at me, but with me, at how quickly a life can turn sideways.

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The spork you ate with was issued to you. If you left it on the tray when you slid the meal slot closed, you didn’t get another one. It was yours for as long as you were there. Not to be lost. Not to be misplaced. Unless you planned on using your hands in its place. Small rules like that reminded you where you were. They were tiny, unbreakable anchors keeping you tethered to the reality of the cell.

I was there because of allegations tied to a marriage that had already collapsed in almost every way, except legally. The charges would eventually be dropped, but I didn’t know that when I turned myself in. I only knew what I had been told: show up on Monday, let the process work, trust the system.

That part matters because I had spent most of my life believing the system worked.

I grew up around the criminal justice system, but always from the visiting side of the glass. My sister and both of my brothers had criminal histories. As a teenager, I sat in visitation rooms and watched them navigate something I didn’t understand. In their cases, they had committed the crimes they were charged with, so from where I stood, the system appeared to be working as intended. Justice felt simple then. You did something, the system responded. That belief was easier to hold when I had never been the one in the cell.

My brother told me before I turned myself in, “Maybe it’ll teach you a lesson.”

I hated hearing that. But he was right, just not in the way he meant.

Somewhere between counting breakfast trays and guarding that plastic spork, I found out what “innocent until proven guilty” actually feels like. It feels like waiting. Waiting for the clock you can’t see. Waiting for the call you can’t make. Waiting for someone outside to remember your name.

It taught me that a system I believed was fair is much harder to trust once you’ve been the one in the cell.

Inside, the machinery is mostly invisible. You don’t see justice moving. You feel hunger. You feel the walls. You feel lonely. You feel the distance between who you are and what the system has decided to call you for the moment.

Inmate.

That word comes fast. Faster than answers. Faster than court. Faster than anyone explaining what happens next.

Four days. That’s all it took.

The sheriff didn’t have to invent a reason to keep me separate, but he did. As a 6’7” clean-shaven white guy with no prior offenses who had just pulled up in a new BMW X5, I was lucky.

The thing I remember most clearly is the mashed potatoes. In a place designed to strip away normal life, they were a fleeting taste of it.

Warm. Familiar. Temporary.

Sean Covington is a writer and cybersecurity professional based in Texas. A military veteran with a background in cyber operations, he now works in security engineering and writes personal narratives about memory, identity, and the moments when life abruptly shifts direction.

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Previously on How I Learned:

I know how to write about rain. I know how to write about fire. I can spin you a poem about how it smells at the end of the world. I can write five thousand words right now about deep secrets and dark notions, but I don’t know how to write about desire.

I was never meant to feel it.

In the church where I was a child, desire was not a thing allowed a girl. An appetite was only meant for men and for whores and I was groomed to be a virgin until someone walked me down an aisle. In that church, wanting could light a girl up like an emergency flare. That kind of attention is dangerous; the same kind of heat that got witches burned on pyres, so I learned to keep my head down and cool my heels in the ashes.

My mother was a nurse who believed in using the proper terms for body things. It wasn’t pee, it was urine. Not poop, but a bowel movement. A stomach, not a belly. A head, not a noggin. A mouth, not a trap. Rectum, not butthole. Penis and scrotum, not cock and balls. Genitals, not private parts. But then the wheels fell off her lexicon when she got to my girl-body bits. The whole of my genitals was vagina, said quickly and without eye contact. There was no discussion of clitoris, vulva or labia, no differentiation between inner and outer, between majora and minor, or even that I housed three holes between my legs.

These facts I learned later from textbooks and the Catholic school girls who worked at the Dairy Queen. I’m ashamed to say how old I was when I finally met my own cunt in a mirror.

I was never meant to wonder. Never meant to touch. Never meant to do more than lie pliant on my back and think of Jesus while a man pushed himself into me and then a baby pushed itself out. I was never meant to want.

So when puberty hit and my mother heard the squeaking springs as I rode my fist to oblivion in the dark of my twin bed, she had no language for the voltage that shot through me. All she could say when she opened my door and turned on the lights was that I should pray more. Should dress modestly. Should purify my thoughts. Should surrender all to Jesus.

And I did. And I did. And I did. All the time. But the public library had a romance section, and on Saturdays I’d hide in the stacks with a pile of smut in my lap, scanning the text for any mention of lips and memorizing the way the words fired a violet trail from the back of my throat to the cleft of my legs. Feeling the way my face would blaze when I took my favorite selection to the lending counter. My entire body a pyrotechnic emergency flare.

In previous lives, LaDonna Witmer was a newspaper journalist, advertising copywriter, brand voice expert, editorial director, public speaker, and poetry slammer. She now tends her dogs, dahlias, and daughter on a small quinta in rural Portugal while writing essays, poems, and memoir. LaDonna has work published or forthcoming in KHÔRA, Literary Mama, Zero Readers, and Take the Fruit: An Anthology of Religious Trauma. She is writing a book about fundamentalism and fire. You can find her on BlueSky and Instagram — @wordsbyladonna — and on Substack at The Long Scrawl.

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More Good Things:

I have to file tonight. That’s it. Last chance. It’s a gift to have been invited to contribute and the editor IS A SAINT. Today, she reminded me of Tom Hulce in his final scene of Amadeus, and she told me not to die. I heard her and loved the reference (the trailer alone is miraculous), but also I was like, wait is she expecting fucking Mozart?

I think I know why this assignment has been murder for me, despite it being a humor piece(!). But that is another essay (optimistic) for another time (optimistic), about knowing what kind of writer you are (derogatory).

ALL TO SAY: Jill Talbot, though. Jill Talbot has been key to my survival for keeping this damn thing pushing. Her piece “All Or Nothing, Self-Portrait at Twenty-Seven”* has been my inspiration.

It’s holding fast. It’s all keeping on.

xo Blaise

*You can also read it on Brevity.

Previously on How I Learned

If you’re alive long enough, memories become like a burlap bag of rocks you lug around, with some hunks of silver and gold occasionally glinting through the rubble. Over time, as the bag increases in weight, the fibers fray and give way and some rocks fall out, along with the occasional chunk of precious metal.

Case in point: My memory sucks so badly that I recently PM’ed a close friend from junior high, desperate for details about spending my 13th birthday at The Go-Go’s and A Flock Of Seagulls concert at the Boston Garden to write what could’ve been a moving essay about my budding adolescence, only for her to politely reply that she wasn’t invited.

What Belinda Carlisle or Charlotte Caffey wore onstage that night, the particulars of the setlist, or how the band sounded, are details that have long tumbled out of my burlap sack. I also don’t remember what I could’ve possibly said to my parents to convince them to buy me and a few of my friends tickets to this show. I clearly don’t recall who went with me, or what happened when we got there, but what did make an indelible impression on me is the rapturous joy I felt when watching the music I love so much performed live, because it’s a joy I pursue as often as humanly possible to this day.

When The Go-Go’s first got national attention in the very early ‘80s, they made jangly pop music that appealed to teen girls and young women without sanded edges and a lacquered sheen. Natives of the L.A. late ‘70s punk scene, their first album, Beauty and The Beat, was chock full of catchy, scratchy tunes about self-preservation, lust, longing, and a no-tolerance policy for bullshit held together with jangly guitars and, of course, the beat.

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To wit: The single “We Got The Beat” was a poppy anthem about the joy of music, but the album’s other major hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” was about a clandestine hook-up between guitarist Jane Wiedlin and Terry Hall, Brit singer of the Fun Boy Three and The Specials. A listen to the lyrics could lead one to speculate that one darker track, “This Town,” was about the underbelly of the Los Angeles punk scene; “Lust to Love” was about being dickmatized; and “Automatic,” the darkest, most hypnotic song on the record, is about mechanical, loveless sex. Vacation, subsequent to Beauty and The Beat, would be a markedly glossier effort, all punk predilections and day-glo aggression made smooth and palatable for mass and major label consumption. But, as poppy as it could be, Beauty and The Beat preserved elements of the darker, feminist edge of their grittier punk roots.

The Go-Go’s were something of an anomaly at the time — an all-female band — and despite the frothy femme image they were reluctantly shoved into by the media, they had preserved a rebellious edge and a firm resistance to patriarchal mores, ways, and means that resonated deeply with my misfit teenage spirit. That night, they showed me that women could (literally) band together and make art without giving a shit what guys thought. Being in that crowd that night felt more like being in a movement than just taking in a concert.

Meanwhile, their openers, A Flock Of Seagulls, were a British band that looked and sounded like the future. With his awesome blond skyward coif, singer Mike Score made rhythmic pop set to shimmering synths that inspired thoughts of what our lives might look and sound like as we moved toward an existence akin to an episode of The Jetsons. It felt passionate and deliberate, yet rife with possibility. This made clear that, though Led Zeppelin and other Boomer relics were intent on dominating radio, the path forward for me would be as femme-y and futuristic as a Thierry Mugler bustier.

To the male music critic in attendance that fateful night, The Go-Go’s were relegated to the inside of a pink, transparent, Bubble Yum bubble. “Whoever thought the ragamuffin Go-Go’s, who started on a wing and a prayer four years ago, would become such trendsetters?” wrote Steve Morse, the Boston Globe music critic, in a review of the show I attended (again, thank you, Internet). After describing the show as a meeting place for “flocks of teenaged girls” who were “fashion conscious” but “too young to go to a disco” and intent on invoking “bedlam pure and simple” (well, true), their music and performance were relegated to deeper paragraphs. He did accurately compare aspects of their sound to an ‘80s version of The Beach Boys in terms of planting fantasies in their listeners’ minds, but that’s all the kudos they would get. “It’s light and fluffy stuff,” he wrote, reductively, “but thoroughly entertaining.” If someone wrote that about Taylor Swift today, a large army of Swifties would assemble and doxx them within an inch of their life.

Maybe Morse didn’t get The Go-Go’s because they had no intention of placating the male gaze, and this was right up my alley. At 13, I already knew deep down that I wanted to live my life that way. When you’re 10, 11, or 12, turning 13 feels like an initiation, a first foray into the soft shadows of who you’d grow into. It was of the utmost importance to me to stray as far as I could from the objectified, indentured version of womanhood I saw all around me, at home and in the media. The womanhood I wanted to experience was closer to what The Go-Go’s represented. By sheer virtue of being an all-female band, The Go-Go’s (along with predecessors Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders and Joan Jett) gave me evidence that it was possible to make the kind of art I wanted, in the company of supportive women, without having to drape myself seductively in a bikini across a GTO to sell it. After seeing that tour, countless budding teens, such as myself, were inspired to put down the hairbrushes they sang into and instead pick up a mic or an instrument. Even if just for myself, I’ve made music, written music, written about music, and been inspired by music ever since.

Decades later, as fate would have it, The Go-Go’s and their scrappy punk rock spirit would trickle down to my 8-year-old daughter. She was dedicated to learning the drums — a pursuit I was quick to endorse despite the confines of our minuscule Brooklyn apartment. In my daily travels, I stumbled across a copy of Tom Tom magazine, a now-defunct (in print) publication that celebrated the female drummer, featuring an interview with Gina Schock from The Go-Go’s. How could I not bring that home for my daughter to check out? With only a cursory glance at its contents, I handed it to her and she ran off to her room to crack it open.

“Hey Ma!” she called out — all of 8 years old back then. “Did you know that Gina Schock moved to L.A. in a pickup truck with $2000 and a bag of cocaine?” How did she know how to pronounce ‘cocaine’?!

I had to summon a tricky age-appropriate explanation, and I had to do it fast. So I did the opposite of what Morse did, and quickly addressed it head-on, without fanfare, before shifting the conversation to how special it is to be a female drummer, because there were all too few. Schock was a solid drummer, and my innocent child would go on to play for years as she grew into an inspirational, wildly creative young woman, preternaturally aware of the power of her own self-expression.

Vivian Manning-Schaffel is an experienced, voracious New York–based culture and entertainment writer and human Shazam. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, Cultured, and myriad other publications. Follow her at @vivtheemanningschaffel on Instagram and read her Substack, MUTHR, FCKD.

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Previously on How I Learned

I ran into my grandfather in the pool hall on Mott and Houston. I was just passing by and got the urge to play. My grandfather’s been dead over a decade now. He was by himself at one of the tables in the back.

He looked the same as I remembered and was smoking the same brand of cigars. I don’t know anything about cigars, but I recognized the smell immediately; that’s what made me look.

Funny thing: it was my other grandfather who liked pool. This one — well, I never saw him play a game of any kind, not even a card game. Aren’t grandfathers supposed to play card games? Basically all this man ever did was sit in a big black recliner and smoke cigars.

When I saw him back there, I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken about him being dead. It’s not as crazy as it seems, particularly since I don’t have much contact with that side of the family. Well, zero, I have zero contact. I guess it goes back to my dad, who calls me once a year and tells me he wants to have a relationship with me. Except he doesn’t quite say that exactly; instead he talks in this weird lingo he picked up from The Forum. Stuff like, “I want to acknowledge your willingness to put yourself out there and share your authentic truth.” I try to be nice about it, he’s a person with feelings like anyone else, but it’s hard to get around the fact that my authentic truth in this case is fuck off.

Anyway it’s my sister who keeps in touch with my dad, so it must have been through her that I learned that my grandfather had died. Oddly, though, I don’t exactly remember her telling me. Or I guess that’s not so odd, really. My memory’s not the greatest and I hardly knew this grandfather.

It was the other one I was close to. In fact he’s the one who taught me to play pool. We’d go to this place in Roosevelt Mall and play for a couple hours, but real slow and with him explaining what he was thinking on each shot. It was amazing. He’d have this whole elaborate plan in his head about where the cue ball needed to be four shots down the line.

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Given all this, it felt weird to see the other grandfather at the pool hall. Weird meaning confusing. And then on top of that, I had this awful feeling of wishing he was the other one. Because this one — well, I don’t know anything for sure, but my sister says he used to beat my father with a board or something. I don’t know how she claims to know this, but he certainly never hit me; in fact, he rarely even sat up in his recliner. Still, that’s what my sister says, and my sister usually knows what’s she talking about.

So I have to admit that this board thing entered my mind when I saw him. Not that I was worried about him attacking me with a cue stick or something. I just felt a little uneasy about starting a conversation with this person who I knew had done certain things — things I had no interest in broaching at this late date. Because what was he going to say in response? “Yeah, yeah, so I beat your father, what of it?” What would be the point? Because here he was, ten or more years past his death, playing a game of pool. Most likely he had long since forgotten all that — assuming it even happened — or even if he did remember, I couldn’t imagine him admitting it all to me and wanting to have a conversation about it.

Then I remembered this other thing my sister told me. Actually, this was the first thing. My sister says that my father used to hit me as well. I mean, as well as his father hitting him. Just not with a board or anything. Actually, I don’t remember what he hit me with, I guess with his belt. Anyway, I don’t remember it and can’t even say for certain it happened, except that my sister is pretty insistent about it.

So when I saw my grandfather again, I thought about him hitting my dad and my dad hitting me, and the whole thing just put me in a shitty mood, when just a minute before I was feeling pretty great. So I don’t know, I guess I overreacted, but after that I just decided to move on and let him play his game in peace.

On the way out, though, I had this crazy thought. My thought was that I was going to walk outside and immediately see my other grandfather coming down the street. I guess it was because I’d just seen the first one that I thought I could see this one. Well, that plus being in a pool hall, which always makes me think of him. So in my mind I constructed this cornball fantasy where I run up to him and embrace him and tell him how much I’ve missed him, although he’s always been there with me, and then he says something funny like, “Yeah, there were a few times there I kinda wished I wasn’t there with you,” and I laugh and say something funny back like, “If you only knew what I would have done if you just left me alone for a sec.”

Anyway, it was all so vivid that I started crying (I mean, in the pool hall) and then the guy at the desk said, “Hey, you alright?” so I said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” and got the hell out of there.

Needless to say, my grandfather wasn’t coming down the street when I made it outside. I didn’t have to look to know this, there are certain things you already know without having to look, but I looked anyway. He wasn’t coming.

Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints select stories that appeared on Michael’s website, Oblivio, between 1999 and 2020. The about page read, “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

The entire Oblivio archive is available in book form on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher and David Isaacson for preserving Michael’s work.

NOTE: The stories are reprinted here the way Michael wrote them, though source links may be added and some pieces may be slightly edited for clarity.

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Open Call for Featured Essays

Got a good How I Learned story? Read the submission guidelines, then shoot your shot. Just do it.

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My Next Ghost is a growing collection of mini-interviews with people I like (small pool). Just a few scattered questions. Less “what’s your creative process?” and more, “have you ever seen a man slip on a banana peel?”

Alexander Chee

Current location: Seat 19A, on a Delta flight from Boston to Baltimore for AWP.

Eight-word memoir: This should be a novel, he said repeatedly.

What was your first concert and what did you wear?

Asia. Sunday, August 21st, 1983. I found a concert archive with all of the concerts at this one arena. I was with these two brothers I played D&D with. I don’t remember what we wore. If my mom had anything to say about it, I wore a maroon polo shirt. She was relentless about dressing me in that color.

Have you ever stolen anything?

Yes. In high school. I typically shoplifted gay pornography or the novels of Gordon Merrick with lavishly colored painted covers of their promiscuous gay male protagonists in bathing suits, sold often at Waldenbooks or in grocery stores in the 1970s and 1980s. They were popular with women as well as boys like me. They would be my introduction to a number of things.

Do you get tipsy or do you go from sober straight to drunk?

Tipsy, but people often don’t realize I’ve been drinking. I hold it pretty well.

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Will you copy and paste your most recent text here?

“I just read a scene where everyone was gathering at the home of a woman who’d died, very private art collector, no children so her god child inherited, and they’re all realizing she stole things from all of them, a klepto. It’s hilarious and sad and really shrewd.”

—sent to our mutual friend the photographer Michael Sharkey,* who wanted to know what I thought of the Alan Hollinghurst novel The Sparsholt Affair.

* Blaise here. Incidentally, I spent yesterday afternoon with Michael Sharkey and his husband Jeffrey. We talked about Alex, and our old collegemate Kiran Desai’s new book (they recommend it), “The Great Muppet Caper” (I recommend it), and what our kids’ poop looks like (our kids are dogs). We probably talked about you, too.

Roller skating or ice skating?

Roller blades. Back in the 1990s in Brooklyn, you most likely saw me on them in Prospect Park or in the East Village.

What’s your deserted island book?

I have novels I’ve reread so often but if I were to really just be alone for the rest of life with one book, or at least alone until rescued, it might be Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs, a biography of James Baldwin, or A Great Unrecorded History, by Wendy Moffatt, her biography of Forster. Or it might be this most recent O. Henry Prize anthology, edited by Edward P. Jones. I’ve loved every story so far, which never happens.

What was your favorite toy when you were a kid?

A Gumby doll, and when we lived in Guam when I was a small child, my father would throw it in the pool, saying “Gumby’s drowning!” and then my brother and I would race to save him from the bottom of the pool. Pokey was also thrown in, but I loved Gumby.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022.

He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

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Got a good HOW I LEARNED story? SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN

Previously on My Next Ghost

Of course I sent out an UNFINISHED DRAFT on the last-last day of 28 x 20.

The truth is, the buck stops with me. All the phone lines are lit up and all 26 of my perso…

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Today, we’ve got Samantha Irby, Ross Gay, Didion again, and more. This is a prompt that might inspire you to push back the timer and sit with the writing a little longer. Go for 20 minutes first, then check in, see where you’re at. If you only (“only”) write down one sentence, that’s more than the blank page you started with.

There will be a big wrap-up post tomorrow.

Let’s do it.

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Remember when I shared seven PUPS? That was 21 days ago. Today, you get nine new ones. Brief refresher if you need it:

There’s usually a day near the end of my in-person workshops when I gather a ton of short prompts, put them on strips of paper, and place them in a coffee cup in the center of the table. I used to call it “prompts in a cup,” until someone way sharper than me said we should call it PUPS.

PUPS are miniature. There’s no accompanying reading to serve as a way into the prompt; each one is a simple directive in one succinct sentence. The stories they yield might not be so simple. That part’s really up to you. The prompts are meant to jog a memory, give you an image, but what you come up with on the page is a matter of letting the creative mind take you where it wants to go. Staying open. Being curious. Not worrying about anything. Just for right now.

Don’t waste precious time trying to decide which one you like the most. Do the one that nudges you.

Let’s get it.

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As a little baby child I had such a severe case of buckteeth that when I entered a room, my incisors walked in first. By 7th grade, I had retainers, braces, more retainers. I didn’t do well with any of it, except for the love of the absolute greatest orthodontist named Morton Speck who had Archie comic books in the waiting area and a totally unique approach, cultivating for his patients (all kids) a kind of solidarity, like an afterschool community. But barring his compassion, the trouble I got into at home every time I accidentally left my retainer in a restaurant was too traumatizing to handle. I’m no longer Bucktooth, but my teeth are as crooked, messy, and foolish as our former mayor, Eric Adams. Truly. It’s like if you had arthritic bunions and a bunch of hammertoes, but in your mouth. Bad teeth are a family curse — mostly on my mother’s side — but I made it worse as a child with my thumb-sucking habit. My denticles never fully recovered. I loathe to think Dr. Speck might have rolled over in his grave.

I weaned myself off of sucking my thumb by the time I was in first or second grade. So it could have been worse, I guess? I imagine I accomplished this feat by tucking my thumb under whenever I felt the urge to suck on it, or whenever I was urged by my mother to get my thumb out of my mouth. I didn’t even realize my thumb tucks itself under/in until maybe a decade ago. I’m like 100 years old — how I never noticed it before is anybody’s guess.

The point of the story is I was a child with a thumb-sucking habit who became an adult with a thumb-tucking habit. And that is weird, and probably all my mother’s fault. To be clear and sure, I have zero impulse to suck my thumb. But muscle memory is real. Maybe even meant to soothe.

Let’s write, bitches.

*The thumb isn’t a finger and everybody knows it.

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It’s Day 24. I am feeling very emotional about Punch, all the news is terrible, we’re having a blizzard here, and everybody’s f***ing had it. It’s been 2026 for so long. Worst of all, I forgot to give you this prompt on Valiumtimes Day — probably because of all the gd valium.

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Today’s prompt is another one I return to often in my own work, though I’m not always conscious of it. It’s a great way into writing about a real person, vitally exploring who they are in the world, and who they are to us — and, harder still, translating that onto the page with clear imagery, and in a way that reveals as much about the other person as it does about you, the narrator. It’s great too, for when you know you need to write about someone, but you’re stuck on “figuring out how.”

Got it? Let’s go.

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Hey, are you collecting all of your 28 x 20 writing in one place? Do that. And don’t look at any of it until we get to the end.

Speaking of which, in On Writing Well, William Zinsser suggests this system for daily writing and building a long-form project. Something to think about come March 1st.

But your inspiration for Day 20 is a passage from an essay by playwright Marlina González, penned for How Dare We Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse.

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Anyway, today we’re thinking about surprise sweetness.

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A quarter was the price of quelling the what-ifs. Always a quarter or two zipped into the smaller pouch of our backpacks, jingling around with an extra house key and Rain-Blo wrappers. What if our bikes got flat tires? Or we lent our key to our little sister? What if we had to walk to the Superette to use the payphone, which smelled of four decades of cigarette smoke, to call our mom at work?

In 1989, we had a mind map of all the nearby pay phones in case we had to make an emergency call: the lobbies of the library and grocery store; outside the women’s changing room at the city pool; in the vestibule at church. We also knew whose answering machine picked up on the third ring, and how to make a collect call without paying for it (MOM.PICKMEUP.LIBRARY). We sometimes invented mnemonic devices for numbers that mattered. Even if we didn’t write them down, they would stay with us.

Kids had always carried pocket change just in case, but the disappearance of Amy from this quiet hamlet along Lake Erie yanked the curtains off our bedroom windows. Our young lives, buffered by suburban comforts: nets on every basketball hoop, wood chips under every jungle gym, bikes rarely locked. But underneath the manicured lawns rumbled something more insidious.

First, the man had called Amy’s home phone. Then, he had arranged to meet her after school at an ice cream parlor. Description: White male, medium build and height, wire rimmed glasses, moppy haircut. We believed the man in the police sketch took her in broad daylight under the guise of someone who wanted to help her buy a present to celebrate her mother’s new promotion.

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After Amy, parents said, “Here’s an extra quarter for your backpack.” They said, “Don’t go anywhere with someone you don’t know—even if they say it would make us happy.” Stranger Danger was the pernicious fear, the what-ifs, the who-coulds, the where-of- all-places, the unanswerable unfathomables that every parent and every child tried not to speak aloud as the newspaper splashed new leads and theories about Amy and the man on the front page. We came of age still fearing The Stranger, rather than the strange ways a familiar relationship could turn on us, or the way a night could turn strange, or how the person in the mirror could become a stranger even to our very self.

We all looked for Amy. We memorized the details of her face, as if the horse earrings dangling from her ears in her school photo would be the same ones we would recognize out in the world. A few days after she disappeared, we set out trick-or-treating under a deep, navy sky. We walked up to the homes of strangers and willingly took the candy. But it was Amy who haunted our thoughts. Where was she? Why wasn’t she able to call her parents? If she didn’t have a quarter, didn’t she know how to make a collect call?

We looked both ways when we crossed Wolf Road on our mountain bikes. Amy walked this same pavement from her school to the shopping plaza. Nothing will ever chill our spine like the thought of her bike parked in the rack, alone under that same deep, navy sky. All the rides it would not take home, and the little girl who would not outgrow it by next summer.

The news came sudden and certain, like a call we picked up on the first ring. Our parents did not keep us home from school. We hung our backpacks on the hooks of our lockers, and settled into our desks. The news felt heavy as it settled into our laps. Amy’s body had been found, discarded in a ditch. The particulars of how Amy had been assaulted would crystallize and snap into focus only as our minds matured over many years.

Decades passed. Police chiefs retired; FBI agents came out of retirement to squint their eyes a little longer at the case. Sometimes a new lead emerged, or the hope of a DNA link streaked across the sky like a fading comet. Soon enough the case would grow cold again. Our questions abided: How did this man’s sickness prevent a child from growing up? How did he steal a childhood—while everyone was watching? We wondered: did everyone have an Amy? A girl who sent us all out retracing our steps. We looked for the last place we remembered having our innocence. We struggled to remember, as our eyes scanned the streets, and the lights grew dim.

***

The case of Amy Renee Mihaljevic remains unsolved. The FBI is offering a reward up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) responsible for her death.

Kendra Stanton Lee is a writer and teacher in Boston. Her essays have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, JMWW, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit www.kendrastantonlee.com.

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SILENT WRITE-IN

Come through for blocked-out creative focus time. No prompts, no chatter. Everyone on mute. Dopamine hits in the chat encouraged. Work on whatever’s calling you. Drop in anytime, stay as long as you can.

Thursday, February 19th, 5:00-7:30pm ET

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From The Archive

Come through for blocked-out creative focus time. No prompts, no chatter. Everyone on mute. Dopamine hits in the chat encouraged. Work on whatever’s calling you. Drop in anytime, stay as long as you can. [ Get the link ]

WELCOME BACK and hello new subscribers. Good to have you all here.

Day 19 is Hermit Crab Essay Day. The hermit crab essay is a form of personal narrative that folds itself into another form. Think: a story wrapped in the protective shell of a recipe, a resume, a report card, medical records, a rejection letter, a menu, an insurance claim, prescription labels… I could go on. A dictionary. It’s a slippery slope once I start making lists of things. Instructions for a board game. The hermit crab essay intrinsically unfolds into something sort of fictional, making it a hybrid form of lyrical nonfiction. Train schedule. It’s often used as a way to approach challenging stories with humor. Mad Libs. That levity emerges in an organic relationship with the structure, as long as we’re not trying to shoehorn an idea into an ill-fitting shell. As you can see, dating profile, the possibilities are pretty endless. How-To. It’s creative nonfiction told through something familiar, but unexpected. Bingo.

Read some examples below, and then write your heart out.

But first, your daily practical guidance:

1. Put your phone out of reach and/or on Do Not Disturb.

2. The 20-minute timer is key. Keeps your head in the writing and mitigates overwriting. It’s “enough time to enter the cave and come back out relatively unscathed.”

3. Aim for 150 - 800 words, but don’t let the word count derail you.

4. Start anywhere. Start with your first thought.

5. Keep your hand moving.

6. If you get stuck. Relax your shoulders. Stretch. Take a breath.

7. If you feel like you can’t go any further, keep going.

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