I think I’ve been doing this writing thing all wrong from the beginning. When I started college back in 1984, I picked journalism for my major because it meant no math other than Theory of Statistics and a minimum number of required courses which allowed me to take the maximum…

Returning to the Bluegrass State after fifteen years in the desert For the first thirty five years of my life, my primary identity was as a Kentuckian, not an American. Other states shared some similarities but places like New York City were exotic foreign countries to me. …

The first image I saw when I turned on the T.V. to find out the details of the coup attempt in Washington D.C. January 6th was one of the rioters waving a Christian flag. And I was outraged! …

Seeing the reaction of some of the white people I grew up with to the Black Lives Matter movement has me thinking a lot about the beliefs I’ve left behind. It frustrates me that they can’t see how offensive some of their comments are while simultaneously claiming that they don’t…

You would assume someone would have let me know that the title of my prize-winning poem in the 1981 Lincoln Days Writing Contest should have been “If Lincoln were Running for President Today” before I stood up before the Women’s Club and read it. …

Not long after moving from Kentucky to Tucson in 2003, I went on a group camping trip to a few national parks. In a conversation with some of my fellow travelers I mentioned that I couldn’t understand why setting water out for immigrants who were dying by the hundreds in…

I’m a middle-aged white woman from the South but my first thought when I woke up the morning after Donald Trump was elected president was, “I fucking hate white people”. And it wasn’t long after that I decided to finally satisfy my lifelong curiosity about my genetic origins by ordering…

TAKING COUNTRY CULTURE BACK FROM THE TRUMP DISCIPLES Since the Republican primary was decided and the vast majority of people I grew up with in rural Kentucky fell in line behind Trump, I’ve been thinking a lot about the culture I grew up in. I left the state 14 years…