When Lawrence Ferlinghetti died this week at age 101, nearly one month shy of his 102nd birthday, many of my friends, even writer friends, expressed surprise on social media. I didn’t even know he was still alive! Indeed, Ferlinghetti outlived all the younger Beat writers he once published, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Greg Corso.
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The Wall Street Journal: An Upside of Quarantine: How Beloved Heirloom Chairs Came Home
The author had been waiting over two years for an inherited set of midcentury Hans Wegner Wishbone seats to return from re-caning. Then things took a different turn.
Read MoreCurbed: An accessible neighborhood needs parks
For many families like mine—with members who are on the spectrum or have other sensory or mental disorders—parks and playgrounds are vitally important
Read MoreThe Boston Globe: Why independent bookstores are thriving in spite of Amazon
From ukulele lessons to speed-dating events, local shops are attracting loyal customers seeking a social hub in an online world. And they’re buying books, too.
Read MoreThe Boston Globe: In a digital era, live storytelling is bringing people closer together
From our living rooms to public stages, we can’t seem to get enough of one of our oldest art forms.
Read MoreThe Boston Globe: Women without men (are doing just fine, thank you)
If you watched the Academy Awards last month, you might have noticed a different kind of pairing on the red carpet. Where nominees typically bring romantic partners or family members, Manchester by the Sea star Michelle Williams was accompanied by her best friend, Busy Philipps. Philipps, who has two children with her screenwriter husband, has said she and her female friends talk about forming a commune and raising their kids together, without men. And they may be onto something. Today, fewer American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since at least the 1950s. The US marriage rate overall hit a record low in 2015, seeming to confirm an earlier study that found 55 percent of singles are not looking to get married. With women increasingly marrying later or not at all, the supporting companionship once provided by husbands is now often being provided by friends.
Read MoreThe New York Times: Questioning Gender Amid a Chaotic East Village Childhood
Those of us who were raised the only child of a single parent know how intense the relationship can be. Different days you may play the role of child, parent, sibling or emotional crutch — some days all at once. As you get through it, you try to find space for yourself, to become someone outside the all-enveloping world that your parent has provided. This is the main struggle driving iO Tillett Wright’s debut memoir, “Darling Days.”
Read MorePsychology Today: Love Beyond Gender
It's a universal truth that relationships take work, but there's little precedent for what that work may involve when one's partner comes out as transgender. For couples who remain together through a gender transition, it can provoke a complicated reckoning with just how much—and who—has to change.
Read More“Keep the Change” is a Revolutionary Love Story
Rachel Israel has done something I’ve never seen before on film. In her award-winning short, “Keep the Change”, she’s made a feature centering on the romance between two people on the autism spectrum, starring actors on the spectrum.
Read MoreSalon: All special-needs parents know
A mother is suing after she and her daughter are kicked off their flight home. It could have just as easily been me.
Read MoreThe Boston Globe: ‘New Life, No Instructions’ by Gail Caldwell
In her third and latest memoir, “New Life, No Instructions,” Gail Caldwell offers the kind of wisdom and grace you’d wish a friend, sister, or mother might deliver when you’re circling the drain. “Any change that matters, or takes,” she explains, “begins as immeasurably small. Then it accumulates, moss on stone, and after a few thousand years of not interfering, you have a glen, or a waterfall, or a field of hope where sorrow used to be.”
Read MoreThe New York Times: A Life in Pieces
Which feels more true: a memoir told in fits and starts, stutters and sighs, a blend of sensual details and analytic asides? Or one that hews to the conventions of narrative with a beginning, middle and end? All memoirists know order is a contrivance, but readers also rely on the writer to create art by organizing the mess of life...
Read MoreThe Atlantic: Interview with "Fun Home" author, Alison Bechdel
When cartoonist Alison Bechdel published Fun Home in 2006, it made nearly every best-of-the-year list. Her story of growing up lesbian in small-town Pennsylvania with a closeted gay father forever restoring his Victorian funeral home (a.k.a. the “Fun Home”) was praised for its ability to push the boundaries of both memoir and graphic novel.
Read MoreSlate: My Dad Dreamed of This Day
I was raised by a single, gay father in the 1970s. I wish he had lived to see the Supreme Court's decision.
Read MoreThe Atlantic: TV's Disappointing Gay Dads
The 2012 fall TV season may be remembered as the season the gay fathers stormed primetime. According to The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation there are a record 111 openly LGBT characters on TV and a number of these are fathers. In ABC's Emmy-winning Modern Family, now in its fourth season, ensemble cast members Mitch and Cam are the same-sex parents of an adopted daughter. And this fall, NBC introduced The New Normal about a gay couple, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha), who decide to start a family with the help of a surrogate mother...
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