• Drawing Year
• Four Year Core Program
The Grand Central Atelier is dedicated to the rigorous study of the arts of drawing, painting and sculpture in the classical tradition. Founded by Jacob Collins, the GCA is built upon the pillars of working from life, intense observation and analysis, and dedication to craft.
The Grand Central Atelier is dedicated to the rigorous study of the arts of drawing, painting and sculpture in the classical tradition. Founded by Jacob Collins, the GCA is built upon the pillars of working from life, intense observation and analysis, and dedication to craft.
• Online Studies
• Drawing Year
• Summer Workshops
• Four Year Core Program
• Online Studies
• Summer Workshops
The word is parenting—and as an intransitive verb, it was first coined in 1959. Until the 1960s, you might be the parent of someone, but you did not “parent” them.
One of the first blogs about “parenting” began in April 2002 when a single mom, Melinda Roberts, launched TheMommyBlog.com. Author Ayelet Waldman soon took mommy-blogs to the next level with a controversial blog (launched in 2004 and deleted in 2005) called “Bad Mother” which used the lens of parenthood (and her excellent writing skills) to boldly discuss everything from gay rights to abortion. The first popular dad-blog, “Modern Day Dad,” was launched by Chris Ford in February 2005, and by the time my second child was born in October 2006, there were more than 50 million blogs on the internet. Once that child was two, mommy bloggers had crested six figures. In 2009, the New York Times launched Motherlode and The Today Show began to publish Today Moms.
Is it any wonder that people pressured me, a woman with an MFA from Columbia in creative writing, to start to write a blog?
But I was a private person and wanted to give my kids privacy too—I had no desire to put my personal choices about parenting up for public debate on the internet. I felt that there had to be people out there still writing novels as a career— who had kids—and only by connecting to those people could I break through the noise of the blogosphere. A good friend and I launched a reading series in the Wall Street area to do just that: we presented the diversity of successful writers who happened to have kids.
Pen Parentis was soon launched. Writers came together monthly in a convivial library bar in Lower Manhattan, where readings were followed by intimate Q&As, frequently on the subject of guilt, and finding time, energy, and privacy to be creative.
Our mission? To help each other stay on creative track after having kids. We already had awards or MFAs and/ or novels-in-progress and we just needed a little inspiration and guidance from other writers who had kids (and Pulitzer Prizes) to forge ahead and finish our projects. It turns out that writing after having kids isn’t impossible. It’s hard, yes, but not impossible. And things that are hard are frequently things that are very worthwhile in the long run.
Parenting and writing are not pitted against each other on a balance. None of us have scales of justice to measure any one part of our lives against another. The finite resources of our time, energy, and money must be divided amongst all the tasks and responsibilities, joys and needs of our lives—and if you picture the balance more like an art mobile, you’ll begin to see the true task of resource management. Each thing you want to do—whether writing, picking kids up from school, balancing your books, making a sandwich, designing a deck for a presentation, going to the gym—is a shape on your mobile. Some are small and fit easily into the day. Some are huge and when you add them it seems impossible that you can add anything else of any size. But to be sure: no matter what you add to the mobile of your day, it will disrupt everything else—of course it will!
At Pen Parentis we say that having kids is just adding another shape to the gorgeous mobile of your life. You don’t remove writing when you add a child (or four), you just have to shift things around to make sure there are still resources remaining to devote to your writing career.
Parenthood is an easy target, a low-hanging fruit, probably because it is so common for people to stop creative actions after they have kids. Who still plays the musical instrument
they learned in middle school? Many people think of creative writing as a pleasant, idle activity, a dream.
The writers who join Pen Parentis value their writing more than just a hobby. They are aiming for publication, or at the very least, for a professional level of written work.
If you lose your literary circle because you’ve just had a third child and moved to the suburbs, that is not parenthood affecting your career: it is real estate, economics, the lack of affordable child care… Many larger issues—economics, inequality, gender roles, racial and religious discrimination—frequently get lumped into “having kids” because once you are responsible for an entire family, these issues bubble to the surface, while a solo traveler can sometimes evade them by simply pulling up roots and moving elsewhere.
Which brings me to the subject of PLACE. Parenthood should not affect the way people see you, any more than discovering that your favorite author is also a sister, or a spouse. Being a parent is simply a family relationship with attendant responsibilities. It doesn’t affect your talent.
I hope this PLACE issue allows you to consider your own home situation in a new way—and connects you to a broader sense of community as you travel through each page, physically as well as in your imagination.
And finally, Pen Parentis sends deepest gratitude to all the writers who sent in work to shape this PLACE issue. We value the time and effort it takes to create something new when you have a busy family and hope that you will always find a home for your writing. We also thank Eric Akoto, the marvelous Editor-in-Chief of Litro, as well as the entire Litro team for all their hard work on this gorgeous issue.
Mario Loprete, based in Italy, has hundreds of international exhibitions to his credit and has been published in over 450 international journals, including the journal of Harvard University.
Editor-in-Chief & Art DirectorEric Akoto
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As early as July 2020, Forbes magazine had noted that the pandemic was causing a massive urban exodus across the United States. So where did everybody go? Clearly, the claustrophobia of apartmentdwelling (exacerbated by COVID-19 quarantines and the mysteries of contagion) had hit a tipping point that had led artists of all stripes to migrate out of the cities. But where did they end up next and what are they doing now? Did poets with freshly made country addresses rediscover the pleasures of pastoral verse? Were novelists— freed from the scrutiny of the corporate panopticon—suddenly emboldened to pen workplace romans à clef? Did essayists suddenly find themselves waxing philosophical about homelife, suburbia or—somewhat unexpectedly— parenthood? What are the collective reactions of these relocated lives and their rebooted careers even as the virus rages on?
Eric Akoto
For our PLACE issue, we at Litro were very much interested in hearing from those among you who made the jump from New York to New Hampshire, from San Francisco to St. Helena, and from Houston to the hinterlands. How had your recent relocation reoriented your writerly practice? What did creatives with children or parents to take care of envision or obsess about at their iMacs and PCs? When did the whereabouts—be it urban, suburban or (especially) rural—come into play when you put pen to paper. Whether your current abode was a remodel project or a prefab inheritance, a tiny home or a tony townhouse, we wanted to hear from you—particularly as it regards your
immediate surroundings. Mind you, we were also interested in stories from those who stayed behind in the city as it’s a new world for all of us. You showed us what life looked like after lockdown.
Litro’s PLACE issue promises to put new names on the map, alongside famous authors and emerging writers. In support of our friends at Pen Parentis, we particularly encouraged writers who are raising or caring for kids to submit their experiences of place. We have our city dwellers: Brooklyn-based Vanessa Walters, New Yorker Ann Brashares, and San Franciscan Bunny McFadden. For our rural artists, we have Jennifer Probst in the picturesque Hudson Valley and Sarah E N Kohrs in scenic Shenandoah Valley. We also went global with Italian native Mario Loprete and Calcutta-born Ami Rao Khanna who has lived just about everywhere. All of them parents, guardians, or nannies, finding place for their creativity. Each story, artwork and essay gives voice and eyes to place in all its meanings: global, cerebral, domestic. Enjoy.
BUNNY MCFADDEN
(she/they) is a Chicana mother who tinkers with words for a living. Bunny’s work has been published by Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fodor’s, and others.
VANESSA WALTERS is the debut author of THE NIGERWIFE: A NOVEL, published by Atria Books (Simon & Schuster), May 2023. She is originally from the UK and lives in New York.
ANN BRASHARES is the #1 NYT bestselling author of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, The Here and Now, and My Name Is Memory. She lives in New York with her family.
JENNIFER PROBST
is a NYT, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over 50 books in contemporary romance fiction. She loves hearing from readers.
MARIO LOPRETE, based in Italy, has hundreds of international exhibitions to his credit and has been published in over 450 international journals, including the journal of Harvard University.
SHELBEY LECO is a mixed media collage artist & fiction writer who studied at the University of New Orleans to acquire her bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in Urban Society.
HAROLD TAW’s debut novel was Adventures of the Karaoke King. His writing has been featured on NPR, in a New York Times bestselling anthology, and in The Seattle Times.
DAN SPENCER lives by the sea with his wife and daughters. His writing appears in places like Popshot, Stand, The Scotsman, Gutter and The Letter’s Page.
SARAH E N KOHRS an artist and writer, with over 100 journal publications of her poetry and photography, is the 2022 Kingdoms in the Wild poetry award recipient for her chapbook, Chameleon Sky.
SUSANNA HORNG
(she/her) is a Clinical Professor at New York University in Liberal Studies. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Bennington Review, Global City Review, La Libreta, and Minerva Rising.
AMI RAO KHANNA is an award-winning British-American writer who was born in Calcutta. She is the co-writer of a Sunday Times bestselling memoir and the author of three novels.
EMILY SUZANNE FLAKE is an American cartoonist and illustrator. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time and many other publications.
“Who would you say is the most eternally beautiful woman in the world?” Shayla asked Dom over Angie’s reheated crepes.
“You obviously,” Dom said with a sly look at Adam, who just frowned and focussed on pouring chocolate sauce on his crepe.
Shayla giggled. “Not me. Come on, this is for a piece I’m writing for Style Sister.”
Dom wiped his brow in mock relief. “Oh, okay, I’d say Shailene Woodley,”
“Too young, her looks will probably fade.”
“Kim Kardashian then.”
“Please, let’s be more original.” Kim was perfect, but that was too easy.
“Halle Berry?” He checked his watch. “I don’t really have time for this!”
“Salma Hayek?” Shayla suggested. Dom considered it and nod-shrugged. He stood up from the table, put his phone and wallet in
his pant pockets. “Good choice. She always has been and will be stunning. Even if she was a hundred, I still would.”
Shayla reached out to slap him. Dom sprinted out of the way and laughed. Then he returned and grabbed Shayla in a bear hug as she jokingly tried to hit him.
“Come on, you know no one’s more beautiful to me than you. My perfect wife. Mother to my perfect son. Queen of our perfect house.” Finally, Shayla succumbed to his kisses. They were as hot and urgent as they had always been, able to transport her to another place, making her weak and grateful, so grateful for this life. Dom gagged afterward, though, and wiped his mouth with his hand.
“Yeuch! Lipgloss before breakfast?”
Shayla smiled sheepishly. She wore it all the time now, to keep her lips moist and plump.
“I’m sure you’ll knock it out of the park. You always do. Adam, have a great day.” He patted his son’s
shoulder. “Do good at school.”
“Bye, Daddy,” said Adam, not looking up.
Dom crossed the open plan kitchen and parlor to the entryway, pulling on his blazer and stepping into his loafers. The vestibule door clanged shut after him. Shayla heard him call out to one of the neighbors. She fancied she heard his strident footsteps along the pavement heading to the subway.
She gathered the breakfast things and stacked them around the sink. It was Angie’s day off. Today they had to fend for themselves.
“Are we ready to go?”
“Yeah.” Adam slid off the chair. Shayla brushed the crumbs off his sweater and wiped his mouth with a napkin. No child of hers would go to school covered in crumbs.
He put his blazer on and slipped into his shoes as his father had done. As Shayla clipped on her fanny pack, popped her lipgloss in it, and found her phone, Adam presented her with a sheet of paper.
“I need you to sign my homework?” he said.
Shayla took the paper. It looked like math. Fractions. Fifthgrade stuff, but it might as well be astrophysics to her now. Adam’s handwriting was neat for his age, almost elegant. The calligraphy practice had been good for him. Nothing outside of the lines, with the working out in tidy rows.
The grade wasn’t good. It was a 2. A 2, she dimly remembered, meant “could be better.” Adam’s grades were usually all 4s. He worked hard and had always been clever like his daddy.
She glanced at Adam. He looked crestfallen. About to cry.
“Don’t feel bad. A 2 is fine,” she said, not really sure.
“No, it’s not,” Adam retorted.
Shayla only now registered how morose he’d been all morning. “You’ll get a better grade in the next assignment,” she said.
“Can you just sign it?” he pleaded, presenting the pen.
She signed the math sheet to show his teacher she had seen it and followed him to the front door. Why was it such a big deal. It was just one assignment. 1, 2, 3—who cared? But she knew Dom might not see it that way.
Shayla in hers. Turning things over, she now recalled that Adam had been fussy over his grades for a while, stressed about his homework, upset over any fair criticism from keeping his room tidy, to turning down the television.
In the last Parent Teacher Conference, his grade teacher, Paul, said that Adam was a perfectionist and needed to relax more over his grades. She and Dom had laughed about it. “We are a kind of perfect family, though,” Dom had joked with Paul. “They’re always telling the black kids to slow down when they know damn well black kids need to be twice as good,” Dom had complained afterward. “It’s a type of racism I’ve had to deal with all my life.” She’d had to talk him down from shooting off a terse email to the principal educating her about the history of low academic expectations of black boys in schools and colleges.
Between his father and the world, there was nothing the Pauls of this world could tell Dom. He’d gone into banking from Wharton, and the rest was bougie black history. They had met on a yacht at an afterparty for some rapper. Even though they were very different people, they had seen the same things in each other, a taste for nice things, bon-vivants with high standards for themselves who followed the rules of life—dressed up and showed out. She became a sought-after influencer—with his financial backing, of course. Not quite Kim Kardashian, but her followers were in the hundreds of thousands. Dom was a trading superstar at a hedge fund. They had made it with surprising ease in a country where statistically at least, their prospects were limited.
They walked the four blocks to the school in silence, Adam in his head,
Dom was an over-achiever who had made his way to the Ivy League from the worst school in East New York. His father had kept him up late at night doing extra homework from a young age, often beating him with a leather belt if he came home with poor grades or reports. His father had grown up in a time during the crack epidemic, watching drugs and violent crime devastate his black neighborhood, black men flushed into the prison system and their ambitions thwarted at every level of society. He’d worked as porter most of his life, opening the door for rich white folks, and he’d wanted his son to avoid a similar fate.
Adam went to an excellent private school. He seemed popular judging by the number of playdates he was invited to. He was happy. The teachers loved him—didn’t they? Except for Paul—saying he needed to relax. Honestly, some people couldn’t let you be great. They were always—always looking for the flaw.
Shayla’s nose wrinkled as she reentered the house. She usually loved coming home, but more so on the days Angie visited when everything was polished and dusted and back in its rightful place when it was perfect. She was so used to having a housekeeper. It made life so much easier. Now, her stomach lurched at the faint trash scent, and she sighed
For me, writing has been a process of migrating, reluctantly, from one place to another, from a place at my desk to a place in my mind.
Life is never more vivid than at the beginning of a new book. I don’t mean the book, I mean everything else. My mild-mannered desk is suddenly full of traps and riches. A few piles of bills. A few piles of books. The internet, of course. The calendar is riveting. I want to go on all the school field trips, find fancy recipes for dinner and cook them, read books, watch TV shows. I want to travel! To so many places! I read all the travel articles in a magazine I’ve never heard of. Even boring things, riders to insurance contracts, are less boring than my book. Even frustrating things, updating my website, are less frustrating than my book. Pairing all the random numbers to names in my phone? That’s a job for now.
I stare at my computer screen. The problem is not that my screen is blank, which it is, but that it’s a wall. Not a canvas, a wall. It takes all my might not to click the browser icon and open the escape hatch. I make more coffee. I clean my desk. I berate
myself. Why can’t I work? Because I should call my mom. Because I only have two hours until school pick up. It’s really noisy on my street. The UPS guy just dropped off a package. I forgot to order vacuum bags. I need time. I need quiet. I need boredom. I need no temptations. I need the sofa to look less soft. All I can think of are the wonderful things I’ll do once this deadline is met and this book is behind me.
So there, getting rejected a hundred times a day, lowlier even than the Con Ed bill, is my poor book. The wall where my book needs to be. At the beginning the book just hasn’t got anything going for it. It’s a defenseless idea, a few abstract strangers, and some kind of plot I don’t yet believe in. It offers no place to climb into, no comforts or seductions to make me want to. It’s a flat and colorless wall of a computer screen.
Which is why I resist it so much at the beginning. My book can’t compete with the place I live, my home, with the people I love who need me. To have any hope of progress, I need external restrictions. I need to lessen the joys of the outer
world—to even things up a bit. No food, no phone, no internet, no noise, no rushing. I will be distracted by the tiniest thing. I need silence, I need boredom, I need a stretch of at least three hours. It’s no mystery why I’ve written the first half of nearly every one of my books in the quietest, most restrictive room of a library. Only total sensory deprivation will make the outside world more boring than my book. If reality is dismal enough, I may start building an alternative.
Slowly, I do, I start. Usually because I have to: my deadline looms, and I can’t repay the advance money because I spent it. I can pretend to be as evolved as I like, but fear and poverty remain my strongest motivators. And so, grudgingly and abjectly, I begin to make a place behind the wall. I transfer the color and force of life into my story, from my outer world to my inner one. I make a space to move around, to meet people, to discover their frailties, to fall in love with them, to get them to fall in love with each other. And bit by bit, building with words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, I enlarge and enhance the space, and bit by bit I’m ready to make a home in it. I kick away from the wall. That’s
As a writer, I learned early on there was no one place to call home.
Creativity bubbled inside my veins and pushed out in a need to express endless words; words that needed to be captured on paper; words to make sense of my emotions; words to help envision how I viewed the world and fit in. These words drove me to search for a place to write.
At twelve years old, my place was the end of my family’s dining room table. I sat at a rich mahogany table covered in cheap plastic. My mother had learned this trick from my Italian grandmother, who swore it was the only way to protect the integrity of the wood. My grandmother did this with all of her furniture. I still remember my thighs sticking to the thick material, crinkling noisily each time I shifted position.
My chair was part of the matching set, with a curved, spindled back and a paisley cushion on the seat. The window was behind me. A centerpiece of dried flowers sat in front, scenting the air with eucalyptus. The floors were old and creaky; voices echoed endlessly from the attached kitchen, so I wore headphones and blasted an endless stream of music to protect my precious bubble of story. I wrote longhand, with a black Bic pen, in a spiral notebook, then graduated to a Brother typewriter. I wrote two books there.
In my mid-teens, I moved to my room and created a corner office space. This time, I faced the window. I watched cars pull in and out of our driveway
while my father sat in a metal folding chair, chain smoking cigarettes as he contemplated the small grassy lawn that was his domain. My desk was pine and wobbled when I pounded the keys too hard. The walls were pale yellow with random, splattered bug stains. I’d taped my first official rejection letter to the wall I faced daily, so when I looked up from my work, I’d be reminded that my story had been rejected. It was my proof that I was a real writer. I read it every day and tried harder. I wrote three books at that desk.
Home morphed into apartments shared with girlfriends; a fancy condo with a temporary fiancée, and finally with my husband in our first house—a small brick ranch. I converted the spare room into an office and spent seven years at my new desk—this one a giant Walmart special in blanched beige fake wood. I faced yet another wall— this one painted a bright, creative orange. The one window to my left leaked air. I was cold in the winters and hot in the summer. I bought a real chair that was well cushioned with back support and spun around when I got bored.
I spent hours in that room, first working on my Master’s degree in English literature, then writing short stories and mommy blogs in my quest to connect with readers and get published. I sensed home was a place I could write, and it was a moving target—from a busy coffee shop, a picnic table in the sun during my given lunch hour, or trapped in a laundry room while my toddler boys
screamed and played behind me.
But what I remember the most about that house was more than my work. Within those five rooms I spent my days with my husband, our two rescue dogs and two toddlers. There was nowhere else to go; nowhere to escape. So, we leaned in to the chaos of working full time jobs and changing endless diapers and hearing Barney and SpongeBob and Mickey Mouse on repeat and confronting the stress of bills with a totality of vision and commitment that made all the difference. We were immersed in our world—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
One afternoon, I attended a children’s birthday party. The house was an elegant black and white colonial with gently sloping hills and the mother was dressed in a bright yellow maxi dress that flowed over her willowy body. She exuded an effortless grace even with her three small kids, who were also perfectly dressed, while I could barely seem to get my teeth and hair brushed in the morning. Envy nipped, but the wise voice inside reminded me if I wanted that life, I’d have to take it all—including the hidden parts inside the glamour I knew nothing about; those fragments that no one talks about on social media or smart cocktail lunches, and I realized I wouldn’t trade for anything. I owned my broken parts. It was mine—in all its imperfections—and I left that afternoon with a lightness that told me I was learning how to navigate place in a different way. From the heart, rather than the head.
After years of writing and rejection, my work was published. The book that garnered endless no’s suddenly rocketed to stardom and went viral. People read it on trains and subways, bookstores stocked it on shelves, and Target dedicated a display to shoppers. It hit the USA Today list. Then it sat on the New York Times bestseller list for twentysix weeks.
We built the house of our dreams. Tucked on a dead-end road, surrounded by acres of woods behind and to the side for dedicated privacy, my kids had neighborhood friends to ride bikes and gather at the bus stop with. The mighty Shawangunk mountains shimmered in the distance. Thickets of trees offered shade and breath. The outdoor deck seduced me into long hours with my Mac, the chatter of birds new music to my ears, the blue water from the inground pool shimmering in the sunlight. My office boasted double windows that looked onto acres of sloping green grass and colorful flowers bursting in bloom. My desk was a deep onyx, gleaming with high polish, the massive surface holding a giant screen, printer with scanner, endless knick-knacks, and fancy planners. Wall sized bookshelves were behind me, crammed with my foreign translations, paperbacks, and audios. A framed New York Times Bestseller list to my right reminded me of success. Place was suddenly one of my dreams from years ago, from that girl who wrote at her dining room table. Place was
I live in a world that I shape to my liking. I do this through virtual, pictorial, and sculptural movements, transferring my experiences and photographing reality through my mind’s filters. This new series of concrete sculptures has been giving me more personal and professional satisfaction recently. The reinforced cement, concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It tells a millennia-old story, one full of amphitheaters, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now, concrete is a synonym of modernity. Everywhere you go, you find a concrete wall: there’s the modern man in there. From Sydney to Vancouver, Oslo to Pretoria, this reinforced cement is present, and it is this presence which supports writers and enables them to express themselves .
untitled concrete sculpture
In Henry Miller’s great post-coital love letter to Anaïs Nin he said it all. Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Miller may not be a fashionable figure to cite these days—nor his famously bigamous lover—but in the 1940s he wrote with a sexual candour that would liberate writers to come, and one may choose to admire the undeniable life force flooding through his words, a current of trembling copulation and obsession and mutual satisfaction.
One may argue that the male gaze is paramount in Miller’s opus, as he was a ballsy North American given to descriptive c***-swinging, and his racial language reflected heavy prejudices of the day. And that Anaïs Nin’s diaries and fiction, insightful and voracious, depicting womanhood with its panoply of sensations and sensual will, have also been described as narcissistic and self-indulged.
So, what might we learn from these twin icons? And how might their work be viewed in the realm of expressing sensuality today?
Let’s talk about context. Does it matter? Does it matter that Miller was a penniless guy in Paris with an inflated view of his writing? Or that, at 30, Nin felt compelled to seduce the father who had abandoned her family, and at 60, believing she had not achieved the recognition she deserved, self-published reprints of her early books? Were their efforts any less arduous than our own? Both of these writers lived pre-computers, pre-information-overload, preMeToo. One might ask, are we even the same creatures in passion, in love, on the page?
In these of times of literary upheaval, of reassessing the texts of our literary elders and seeking out voices that have been overlooked, it can be complex to isolate what is rewarding and instructive in technique, material and story-telling. And yet, in their fiction Miller and Nin paved the way for a forensic and physical examination of sex, swinging doors wide and using language that
was intimately savage, dripping with allegory and erotica, boldly unharnessing words to describe passion. Products of their generation, they were not the first, but both gave English-language literature a jolt in the arm.
As a young Paris-obsessed writer I devoured texts from Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gertrude Stein, Miller and Nin, Edmund White, James Baldwin, Kathy Acker, fascinated by language and story, but also by love and sex, breaking traditional rules and living the full scope of the body. I very determinedly set out to Paris where I lived three heady years au pairing in the pretrendy 11th arrondisement, in a cul de sac of horny creatives, a magical bookfilled apartment where broken plates became mosaics on the kitchen walls, where I learnt to shoplift because my employers were all but squatters, where tiny mice sometimes ran over my feet. I joined in, feeling mild shock upon discovering one of my lovers was older than my father, though to this day I feel that story was a tender pathway into early womanhood, after which I felt stronger and more real to
