Archive 2026
Click on the name: Emma Bolden, Rachel Cline, Lynda Rushing, L.C. Killingsworth, James Cooke, Eliot Weinberger, Lydia Millet, Jill Christman. James Baldwin, Jamie Etheridge.
January 9, 2026
from “Admit the Gravity”
in River Teeth Fall 2025
by Emma Bolden
“Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer.”—THE
I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” to the fall 2025 edition of River Teeth journal, and for the month of January we will feature four essays from this issue.
I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. I agree with the poet William Stafford that voice is a gift that cannot be taught: “You already have a voice and don’t need to find one,” he once told a group of writers. But even if it cannot be taught, voice can be silenced, often through self-censorship. In “Admit the Gravity” Emma Bolden reclaims her voice by breaking a rule she learned in a writer’s workshop.
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You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
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The Paragraph of the Week
I fell to my knees on the kitchen tile. It didn’t seem possible. Nothing seemed possible, in the face of this. Less than an hour later we were standing, me and my aunts and uncles and my father and grandfather and the priest, around the bed in which her body lay, dead, one hand curled and claw-like. The priest blessed her body’s mouth and hands and feet. Last rites. Her final sacrament, received after her death. Later I sat on the front porch while an aunt walked into the front yard, yelled “goddamn” as loudly as she could, and told me I looked beautiful. She kissed me on the cheek. There were so many Honey Baked hams. It was my first real experience of familial grief and what I learned was what a shock it was, how strange it was, an ending, even when you think you know what’s coming.
—Emma Bolden
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Commentary
Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer. Following the “not-entirely-unspoken rule” of never writing about “dead pets or dead grandmothers,” Emma Bolden was discouraged in workshops from writing about her grandmother. “Instead, I wrote poems that were poor copies of poets who themselves had died – cummings, Eliot, Dickinson, Sexton,” she explains. “It was how you learned, I was told: by listening to the voices that came before, not the voice that came from you.” The lesson sank in as a stultifying rebuke: “And anyway what did I have to say?” Fortunately, she realized over time that the only way to understand the events in her life is to “language them” in her own voice. In “Admit the Gravity” she finally finds her own words for the forbidden subject of her grandmother whose death “ghosts” her and keeps her up at night.
—THE
January 16, 2026
from “Best Pals”
by Rachel Cline
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“I learned several new pleasures...the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.”
—Rachel Cline
Last fall, I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” of River Teeth magazine, and for the month of January we are featuring four essays from this issue. I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. Rachel Cline’s essay “Best Pals” shows how experiences in our youth shape our emerging voices.
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You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
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The Paragraph of the Week
The following summer, Nancy taught me a game she called “Body Comfort.” After lights out, she sat down on my butt and explained the rules: we each had a bank of 100 requests. For example, you might ask for ten shoulder rubs and when those were done, five arm tickles, and then fifteen karate chops. When you got to 100, it was the other person’s turn. You could ask for anything you wanted. I learned several new pleasures from her requests: the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump. Trading off meant that one gave generously in order to receive bounteously in return, and the countdown added an undercurrent of suspense. It was a game of never-ending interest.
—Rachel Cline
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Commentary
Reading no doubt influences our writerly voice, but the experience with language as we grow up largely shapes it because that is when we first see and feel the effect of words in action. We glimpse this process at work in “Best Pals” by Rachel Cline when she and her camping friends practice the art of being snarky after lights out by playing games such as “Body Comfort,” with silly names for ways to “pleasure each other” including “the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.” Such verbal play—and the snickers and cringes it induces—is the real-life laboratory in which we learn how words work. Unfortunately, the hidden reality behind such wordplay is not always benign, and over the course of Cline’s essay we learn that a seemingly innocent game of naming bodily pleasures is the symptom of an unspeakable evil suffered by her “best pal” who became the victim of it.
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—THE
January 23, 2026
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from “Harvey”
by Lynda Rushing
in River Teeth Fall 2025
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“The interior voices we rarely reveal in public burn like fire inside the internal combustion engine of the personal essay.”—THE
Here is a section from another essay in the Fall 2025 Issue of River Teeth magazine that we have been featuring this month. In it Lynda Rushing, a schoolgirl with a crush on a mysterious fellow student, learns that he has clearly been taken by another. The story is an old one, but her recreation of her youthful thoughts, chastened by her adult voice, is fresh and winning.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.​
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The Paragraph of the Week
But what I’m sure of is this. The air I was breathing became very heavy, like air saturated with seawater on a planet with too much gravity. And it was suddenly very still. A length of time equal to a thousand racing heartbeats went by. The music kept playing, not missing a beat, but it had lost its rich timbre, sounding tinny and far away. The table was still there, solid and glittering with candles, but I felt as though I had somehow risen several inches above my chair. I had become untethered from the earth, floating like a piece of dust, twirling in the candlelight.
—Lynda Rushing
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Commentary
The interior voices we rarely reveal in public burn like fire inside the internal combustion engine of the personal essay. I hear the interior voice hidden subtly in the irony of Lynda Rushing writing about her childhood crush, her announcement of adolescent joy mildly rebuked in the retelling by the knowing tone, the hidden voice, of the writer as an adult: “It was finally going to happen—I would make myself talk to him and get to know him better. I would draw him out in my quiet way,” the teenager thinks coyly. “Maybe I could even dazzle him with my wit and surprise him with my profound understanding of life, years ahead of my chronological age.” “Quiet,” “dazzle,” “profound”—the author hears these words differently than does the girl she was, a girl clearly being set up for a fall. When she discovers the truth about her impossible love, the “air I was breathing became very heavy, like air saturated with seawater on a planet with too much gravity.”
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—THE
January 30, 2026
from “Who Are We Missing”
by L.C. Killingsworth
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“...the precise opposite of loneliness.”—L. C. Killingsworth
Our final feature from the Fall 2025 issue of River Teeth magazine is from “Who Are We Missing” by L. C. Killingsworth. It carefully describes an overwhelming emotion which the author experienced at a funeral after a long stretch of feeling bereft.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.​
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The Paragraph of the Week
I can only describe the feeling as the precise opposite of loneliness. Though I suppose the evangelicals surrounding me would label it more simply: the presence of God. The feeling that we are all grabbing onto the same bare wire, letting a high-voltage current of humanity rip through us. There is a fullness, a charge to the feeling that cracks me open. It makes me forget that Harper is watching me cry—or, rather, replaces my embarrassment with a joy. Joy that we are crying together, about the same thing.
—L. C. Killingsworth
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Commentary
The moment of recognition—that is what the personal essayist creates while looking within, generously sharing the hard-won discovery with us. Arriving at the funeral of a much-loved student from her past, L. C. Killingsworth hides the anger and sadness of her life behind a guarded persona. When asked what she has been up to by a former colleague before the service begins, she wonders what to say. “Most of my last decade has been spent expelling bodily fluids—vomit, milk, blood, my eternal soul—into a variety of receptacles, including human ones. Should I tell her about that?” Instead she says she has been doing nothing, “just, you know, working. Remotely.” When the service begins, though, emotion overwhelms her and she realizes in an epiphany that what she is feeling is what she has been missing. She recognizes it instantly, “the way a starving person knows the smell of food,” and suddenly understands why she has been furious and lost. As she and everyone else in the room focuses together on the young person who has died, “all feeling the shape of the same hole in the world,” she experiences “the precise opposite of loneliness,” an emotion that “cracks her open.” Any embarrassment about crying uncontrollably in public is replaced with joy. “Joy that we are crying together, about the same thing.” It is a privilege as a reader to listen in as a an essayist makes such an intimate, life-changing discovery.
—THE
February 6, 2026
from The Dawn of Mind
by James Cooke
“I sat bolt upright. Was that it? Was that the moment consciousness came into existence.”
—James Cooke
The Dawn of Mind is not a collection of personal essays, but a scientific and philosophical enquiry into the nature of life’s greatest wonder: consciousness. It is clear and well-written, challenging, yes, but completely accessible to the nonscientific mind, and James Cooke supports his most important insights with brief personal accounts of his discovery process in clarifying descriptions of how his theories formed that read like personal essays.
Dr. Cooke has three degrees in experimental psychology and neuroscience from Oxford University and has taught at Oxford, Berkeley, and the University College of London. The paragraph of the week describes thoughts he had lying on a narrow sofa in his houseboat moored along the canals of London’s Little Venice. For a decade he had been studying the brain as a neuroscientist in the hope of unravelling the “hard problem” of how consciousness could emerge from matter. Closing his eyes he imagined himself to be “the evolving universe, developing from its origins to us.”
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Paragraph of the Week
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I started with the bits with which we are all familiar: the big bang, planets forming, and the occurrence of the first life-forms on earth. My imagination struggled at first, trying to grasp what it would feel like to be the expanding lifeless cosmos. Then I got to the origin of life. I felt the web of matter that makes up the universe fold in on itself to create a little, enclosed bubble: the first single-celled organism. I felt how, in order to keep itself together, this organism needed to consistently interface with the world around it in a way that reached beyond its boundaries to anticipate what was going on outside itself to successfully navigate in the world. I sat bolt upright. Was that it? Was that the moment consciousness came into existence, when orderly living things attempted to separate from the disorderly world around them? Could the focus on the human brain have been a distraction created by our own hubris?
—James Cooke
Commentary
Before this moment of insight, James Cooke devoted his life to studying the brain as the seat of all conscious awareness. He was not alone. “The mainstream of consciousness science generally takes it as a given that the brain, or at least the nervous system, is responsible for bringing experience into existence.” After the epiphany on his houseboat, though, Cooke began to see that consciousness originated with the first living creatures as a way to “interface with the world” outside themselves and successfully navigate their environments. It came about long before any brain made the scene. Consciousness is a simulation of the outside world, a “living mirror,” that allows organisms to anticipate threats and create scenarios to avoid them. Unlike other matter that is subject to entropy, the law of thermodynamics that all things dissolve into disorder and randomness, living matter uses consciousness as a way to fight back and maintain its integrity for a lifetime. Born of the world, the light of awareness which is the seat of consciousness serves as a reminder that unlike, say, computers, we are embedded in experience: “that we are not truly separate from the world around us and that we are in fact deeply at home in existence.”
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—THE
from “Where the Kaluli Live”
in An Elemental Thing
by Eliot Weinberger
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“A Kaluli lives in two worlds,” writes Eliot Weinberger, the world of people and the world of birds.
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The poet Forrest Gander calls An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger the “best book by our best living essayist.” Gander particularly admires the way Weinberger “heaps our plate with the facts of life as they are perceived by non-Western cultures, and he does so without patronizing qualifications—'they believe,’ etc.—so often used to distinguish non-scientific modes of experience and explanation.” In the paragraph of the week Weinberger describes a singing ceremony of the Kaluli, an indigenous group living in the rainforests around Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea.
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Paragraph of the Week
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Each village lived in a single longhouse, and the long-houses were hours apart. Once or twice a year, a village would invite another to come sing. As night fell, the visitors arrived in a double line, carrying torches, and climbed the stairs into the suddenly silent longhouse of their hosts. Stretching the entire length of the interior, the two rows, after long moments of expectation, hissed loudly ssssss, like a tire deflating, and abruptly sat down, revealing four singers, each identically and splendidly arrayed as birds, face and body painted red, eyes outlined in a black and white painted mask, Bird of Paradise feathers sprouting from armbands, head in an aureole of black Cassowary feathers with a single weighted and bobbing white feather in the middle, and a cascade of yellow palm leaf streamers arching from the waist up to the shoulders and down to the floor.
—Eliot Weinberger
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Commentary
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“A Kaluli lives in two worlds,” writes Eliot Weinberger, the world of people and the world birds. “The passage of life is from infant to bird.” Human songs are bird songs and “they describe a journey, each place-name bringing up nostalgic associations, for a tree is a home, a garden is food, a bird is a person, and life is a map and a song a path through it.” When separate villages met in a longhouse, designated singers were dressed in feathered gowns, “splendidly arrayed as birds.” Each singer sang until someone in the group moved to tears stabbed him with a burning torch. “Deep in the isolation of his song, the singer continued, unresponsive as he was burned again and again, until his song ended and another singer began, building the crescendos that would lead to his own burning.” Before the Kaluli ended these rites in 1984, the word for “tomorrow” and “yesterday” in their language were the same. Even though that is no longer true, “the same birds who were once Kaluli” singing
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“ee-yehhhh-u
ee-yehhh-u
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susulubee susulubee susulubee
are still in the trees.”
—THE
February 20, 2026
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from We Loved It All: A Memory of Life
by Lydia Millet
“To me it doesn’t seem like a stretch for us to see our parenting...as a duty of care that reaches beyond the present.”—Lydia Millet
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Lydia Millet writes books of fiction and her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, but her most recent book, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, is nonfiction. It collects three long-form personal essays into what Caitlin Gibson calls “a profoundly evocative ode to life itself.”
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We Loved It All is one of those beautiful, all-encompassing essay collections we admire at The Humble Essayist. Each essay wanders over a wide-range but the writing—intelligent, witty, and honest—pulls us forward, and in the end the many threads bear fruit in a theme about loving all life in a world threatened by mass extinction, loving bigger, loving better.
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Passage of the Week
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All that we really have to know is the need of all the young—the young beasts and the seedlings, along with the young we get to call our own.
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It's the young, these days, who ask us for mercy and wait for us to answer. Ask that we act in their names instead of our own. Ask that we tell ourselves a better story than the one about winning and losing, about conquering and subsuming. A story that embraces the past along with the future, the powerless and speechless along with the loud and the blustering.
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Even a story, say, that invites us not to want to be better than. But to want to be good.
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Commentary
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Lydia Millet’s cunningly designed collection begins with her family—our families—and the frustrating but ultimately fulfilling task of parenting. It expands over the course of three long essays to include loving the entire family of living things, even the hideously- faced anglerfish, to save life on the planet. To love bigger. To love better. She fears that such loving is not in our natures—mass extinction “is the ghost of the future”—and We Loved It All can be read as an elegy to all we love, but she doesn’t give up hope for “a better story.” She puts it this way: “To me it doesn’t seem like a stretch for us to see our parenting...as a duty of care that reaches beyond the present.” Let’s make a deal, she proposes. “What if we said our parenthood is not the lonely consecration of our own, of what emerged from us, but also of the many they depend on? What if we turned, in a dawning instant, and saw ourselves for what we are—the parents of the world to come?”
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--THE
March 6, 2026
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from The Heart Folds Early
by Jill Christman
“The pain was a fire, then a knife, a slaying, finally I will be killed, and then many knives. How could I not yet be dead?”
—Jill Christman
Jill Christman, a writer featured often at The Humble Essayist, has a new memoir called The Heart Folds Early. It is a story of abuse and loss, but also love and birth. Many have praised Christman’s new book for her ability to find humor amid agony—which is her gift—but I was moved by her message of healing from pain in order "to love more deeply" which is her superpower.
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The Paragraph of the Week
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Science still cannot point to one thing that brings it on, but from the inside, labor is fantastically elemental, a pull of the moon on the body's tides, pushing and receding. Labor crashed me and my boy against the packed sand and then lifted us up again, cradling our nested bodies in the soft, rocking waters. And there was pain, the deepest pain I have ever known—a fiery pain burning in what felt to me like the perfect center of my body, boiling lava pooling behind my pubic bone and flowing out through my limbs, down my arms and into my wrists and ankles, curling my fingers and stiffening my toes. The pain was a fire, then a knife, a slaying, finally I will be killed, and then many knives. How could I not yet be dead? Shouldn't I die now? And then, for two minutes, or near the end of a transition that lasted nearly five hours, just a few seconds, a respite: The pain stops, disappears. A stillness, complete. What other pain is like that?
—Jill Christman
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Commentary
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Jill Christman has endured much pain. She was sexually abused for years by an older, teenage pervert as a child, lost a fiancé, Colin, to a fireball in a car accident, barely survived bulimia, lost a son through miscarriage, and made the agonizing decision to abort a fetus with half a heart, a rare condition called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Now in labor again for the last time, she reenacts these pains: the “boiling lava pooling” within and flowing through her body, the stabbing pain like a knife and then many knives. Her “wails echoed off the walls” though she was “lucid enough” to say that the other women in delivery “are going to be glad when I have this baby and shut the fuck up.” So, yes, much pain, but she is “determined to hang onto what joy remains in the world” in order to heal and “love more deeply," and she has had much light in her life as well. Colin showed her how to love again despite so much sexual abuse. After his death she fell in love with her husband, the poet Mark Neely, who taught her how to laugh again and based on this memoir loves her dearly and is the most sensible person in her life. She gave birth to her “impossibly beautiful” daughter, Ella, and is about to have a son, Henry. Above all for us, she survived to create paragraphs like this one—works of art—that embody our pain and transcend it.
—THE
March 13, 2026
from “Stranger in the Village”
in Notes of a Native Son
by James Baldwin
“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”—James Baldwin
Probably the most influential essayist of the twentieth century, James Baldwin moved to France to escape the racism of his home country, but the “American Negro problem” as he called it was never far from his thoughts as a trip to a small Swiss town revealed. ​​
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The Paragraph of the Week
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The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
—James Baldwin
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Commentary
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When Baldwin arrived at a tiny Swiss village where no one had ever seen a black man, he was “a sight.” Children ran up to him shouting “Neger! Neger!” with the “charm of genuine wonder” and “certainly no element of intentional unkindness” unaware of the “echoes” that word would have for him. What the people of this village had no way of knowing was the history of racism in America where the “burning question” of rights for black men and women “became one of those used to divide the nation.” The struggle changed both sides so that a return to the innocence of that Swiss town is impossible. In the process Blacks became “as American as the Americans who despise him,” but slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement not only “created a new black man,” it “created a new white man, too.” For Baldwin the “Negro problem” was both shameful and an achievement. It has taught us, despite the fantasies of racists in America today, that “the world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”
—THE
March 20, 2026
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from “Twelve Red Grapes”
in Short Reads
by Jamie Etheridge
“He should be here with us, I think, and touch the empty spot on the floor beside me.”
—Jamie Etheridge
This week we return to the writing of Jamie Etheridge whom we featured in July 2023. This piece, which appeared in Short Reads on December 31, 2025 describes the lengths that Etheridge and her daughters go to have good luck in the new year—and why they desperately believe they need it.
You can read the entire essay here.
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The Paragraph of the Week
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We squat under the dining table, blanket spread beneath us. The dogs whine, anxious at this odd late-night picnic. Three glass bowls sit at our feet, with twelve red grapes, glistening wet and ripe, in each. At the stroke of midnight, my daughters and I are to devour them—a New Year’s Eve tradition circulating on TikTok, the official fount of knowledge and wisdom for teen girls. Twelve grapes for twelve months, twelve wishes for good luck in the new year. There are other rituals, too. Dollar bills stuffed in our pockets. My younger daughter wears a polka-dot shirt with a polka-dot tie around her neck. Her sister rolls her eyes but tucks pennies into her socks. All our downstairs windows are open; the back door, too. There’s a pot of black-eyed peas on the stove, and on the counter a lemon studded with toothpicks, meant to look like a pig. We’re all wearing white undershirts and red panties. I’m not sure what specific luck these are meant to bring, but we all agree we need as much as we can get this year.
—Jamie Etheridge
Commentary
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“The clock tocks down,” writes Jamie Etheridge. “Ten minutes to midnight.” She keeps bumping her head on the underside of the table they have crouched under for good luck. “Ow,” she says. “Focus, Mom,” her daughter tells her, but she hits her head again. Her younger daughter wishes that they “all stay healthy and live a long life.” The older, dutiful daughter who often tells her mother what she wants to hear, promises to “work out every day, stay away from the drama, and finish the year with A’s and B’s.” The reason they need as much luck as they can get is that the girls’ father died the year before. “Suddenly. Unexpectedly.” They are “still devastated.” So they try every superstitious trick they know to make the next year go right, including eating twelve grapes, one for each month, an idea that the girls picked up from TikToc. When Etheridge opens her cell phone to the picture of the girls’ father his “smile warms us,” Etheridge writes, “and I imagine him here, sipping from a flute of champagne, kissing the girls’ flushed cheeks, and stroking my lips with his fingers. He should be here with us, I think, and touch the empty spot on the floor beside me.” When midnight comes they gobble down their red grapes merrily and Etheridge bumps her head again. “The girls laugh and hug the dogs, letting them lick grape juice from their fingers.”
—THE
