The ocean takes us all. Takes us out of our regular spots in our regular days. Takes us away from home. Takes us into a rhythm that deserves the word, "rhythm," filling our ears and remaking our lives. When I say, "we're beach people," I mean something different than perhaps you know. I mean, "we're people of the tides, of

Before there were cameras; if you were walking and looked up, on the first day of spring, to see in the sky, clouds piling their pigment in swaths of steel grey and white-grey and the grey of sand on the beaches in the evening, behind the weaving cragging moss-covered branches of a lordlike oak, and a single crow lofted int

The magazine came in a white envelope, not part of my subscription; I'd received my subscribed-to copy a week earlier. "This is the kind of magazine we send to our writers or our reviewers," I thought, but there was no letter and I was in a hurry. I put the magazine in the pocket of my bike, meaning to page through it in so

Everett has been reading. I set him to read for an hour and he picks up a book and is lost to me, he will not look up from the page or move or say anything, even when I ask him a direct question. Then he will shoot out into interaction. "Mom! Listen to this!" he will say, and read about a dodecahedron or a synonym bun or a

You wanted advice. All the unwanted advice that comes to you as the parent of a child who is struggling with emotional outbursts, with explosive behavior, with anxiety or Asperger's or some unnamed something that shatters the world you thought you might lead, all of that has been absorbed and now you need something new. I

There are poems that come to me when I am looking for words, poems that do not require forethought. They're automatic, like prayers might be, or Bible verses. "I speak not -- I trace not -- I breathe not your name," is one. "High there! How he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing," is another. It is time for new poems. Not

I have felt too much, I have mourned too much, I have asked too much and I have been given too much. It crashes in on one so. When the news hit -- hit Twitter, and Facebook, and the radio and the TV and everything, crushed over us like a wave of terrifying size and secret strength -- when the news hit I was riding in a car

Last year I had, better than an advent calendar: an advent chain. Little presents for every day before Christmas for each boy. Last year I told them the Christmas story, read it out of the Bible, made them listen before I would let them open gifts. This year I have been thinking. It was my son, the skeptic, the non-beli

I was putting away food, at my ex-boyfriend's many-roomed apartment, because I am always the one to put away food. We had eaten, but not nearly enough; someone would, well, someone should eat leftovers tomorrow. Nothing should go to waste. I doubted he would eat it; he, or his soft-skinned, smooth-skinned, soft-thighed wife

Spectacular spectacular, I said, of the marshmallows burnt on the sweet potatoes. Past burnt! Charred! Charcoal! "What is Thanksgiving without at least a few burnt things?" I'd asked. There are always burnt things, literal and figurative, and after each I try to come back, center on the story. This is good, I've told mysel

It comes to me, some days not at all and sometimes with a force as if someone shoved me, as if my own five-year-old ran into me at full explosive tilt. Some days over and over again. Some days a glance, is all. I think to myself, "breastfeeding," or "baby talk," and I wonder if I will ever do this again. Feed a baby, stay

I go past your old house all the time. I found you on Facebook, finally. I've wondered what has happened to you, and whether you're doing well. Are you married? Who are your friends? What is your life like? We spent two years in one another's near-constant presence; you were fifteen, I was seventeen; I take my boys downtow

"I just want tongue," said the woman. "I was very clear on that." She was so lovely, with bright skin and long blonde hair, wrapped in a dark-grey hat. She was standing in a parking lot of a Home Depot, hands open, pleading. Her partner in complaint was more beautiful, with a generous smile and eyes that danced, wrapped in

his post is my first post in the Fortnight of Flash, a guilt-free celebration of brief memoir, fiction, and whatever else you can flash. No length too short, less than 750 words, and prizes! "Insubordination." That's what the letter said, this time. I don't know. Is that better than "Battery"? Yeah, by a lot, but worse t

You're the one, you know. You're the one we want as a reader. You're the one to spread the word. You're the one to share our story. You are the one to review Stealing Time magazine -- the luminous literary magazine to bring you fiction, non-fiction and poetry from the heart of parenting -- to write about it on your blog o

What I wanted was the beautiful, and the beautiful is what I received. "Ask," as they say. "And you shall." I asked. God, hope, the winged deliverers of what's right, flew along with me to New York City. They knew to wake me up for the sunrise. They knew to sit me down on the southeast end of Central Park, painting my toes

Because I could not stop to listen to your appeals to feminism, to ideals, to economics, I canned tomatoes. I stood over the sink on a Saturday night, fingernails layered with tomato skins, sharpened paring knife in hand, recovering what I could from the 20-pound box I'd heedlessly requested from my CSA farmer. These weren

I have a story for you. The named She was a namer from birth. She was charged to call things out of their shells and from their primeval wombs, but the shells and wombs primeval were hidden to her. So because she lived in a world without visible magic, she named small companies and products and web sites; she named her ch

In every birthday, there is a letting-go. Everett, my oldest -- as I call him with great love in an essay I wrote that inspired so much, the mother-maker, present through all my 30s up to this one, time-waster, life thrower-away-upon -- is 10, today, the number that (says AP style) means you may now use numerals instead of

You are riding down the hill and it is like it always is when you are riding down the hill, as evening changes to almost-night, as the warmish June air cools further and you can feel the possibility of the world, as breaths. These are not the breaths you take in, deeply, into your belly -- these are the breaths that are unc

I love a crazy idea. I love to take on more than I can possibly handle. So why not? When I heard that Brain, Child magazine was closing, I had an immediate range of mixed emotions that began with "well, why not now!" and ended with "I'm going to do it!" In between there was sadness; I've loved this magazine and even hosted

We hope for something different; a Golden Age of blogging. In this Golden Age, there will be no Gertrude Stein, but if there is such a figure, it is Neil Kramer. Like Gertrude and her satellites, I visit Neil when I should be caring for the children, or sleeping. (At least I'm not leaving my boys with the cat.) We have ph

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamor cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives." Adrienne Rich said that, not I, but I say that too, and more. ...trying to sightread what our

That it comes every month, again, is a cheat; possibility and opportunity and all! Missed! Messy! It is burning, pulling, ripping into my insides, yanking handfuls out, stripping that home away while he is away from home. Perhaps this is too -- you know how they say it -- "visceral." It is indeed. The very stuff of veins

Tonight, I wanted to run. I ran -- with my shopping tote, and my denim skirt, and my gold yard-sale Nikes, to Trader Joe's, for Easter candy and bread. It is three blocks away and I ran fast to make it back before dark and everywhere I smelled the jasmine and the lilac and the beautiful sweet warmth of spring and not-quite-

Dear Cleveland High School, I hope you all agree, The best choice for president, is Sarah Gilbert, that's me. read the rest here I didn't win this election; I did, however, win the next election and was president the spring term of my senior year at Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon.

I stop Monroe after he throws the first punch at his six-year-old brother. It was then -- in the next few moments as I sought to contain the struggling, furious boy -- that I learned so much. I had heard it all in the background as I was writing a post about saving money. I was writing about the emotional barriers we need

This is a letter to my friend, Poe Ballantine. You are a writer. I know because you have written about it so beautifully -- strike that, so fully and deeply and in such a real way -- that you do not always say to yourself when you walk into the world, "I am a writer," but you are a writer and your writing proves that and y

If I love Valentine's Day, it is the Valentine's Day of my youth; it is the Valentine's Day of these boys' youth. It is the Valentine's Day in which the sweet-heart saying is all that matters; it is the Valentine's Day in which a treat in miniature makes the heart grow fond, and two of them, fonder. Most of all, the Valent

I open my Pinterest page and I see the day's dreams unfold before me. On some days the dreams are of kale and pulled pork and sausages; on other days the dreams are of cakes frosted to look like impossibly purple, hundred-petaled flowers and architectural white lace; on still others the dreams are of neat color-soaked outf