#personal-narrative

#personal-narrative

Joanne Briggs recalls her father, Michael, a former NASA scientist and big pharma research director, inspiring her with fantastic stories about his extraordinary life, including advising Stanley Kubrick and conducting experiments on Mars.

"I always thought going crazy would be more exciting-roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative."

I was still in my teens when I became a part of that statistic. My abuser was an adult with charisma, attention, and a disturbing knack for manipulating the naive.

Griffiths's inquiry sparked widespread responses from women reflecting on relationships with professors, exposing the often unacknowledged power dynamics in such interactions.

'I told Niamh what I had done as soon as I saw her. She seemed to think it was a good thing. She congratulated me and seemed happy about it, at least. 'Wow, Anne Marie,' she said, 'that's great. You are one of them now.'

"My father, Harrison Ngumbi, was different. He and my mom had five children one son and four daughters. As he would say to us, 'I choose to educate you, my girls.'"

In Sacred Sleep, a brick-coloured table with legs reminiscent of Escher's never-ending staircases sets the stage for a subtly autobiographical still-life scene.

Pazcoguin rode the waves of extreme passion and unrelenting abuse in the ballet industry, revealing both the joys and dark realities of stagecraft.

At the advice of my gynecologist, I'd tried daily self-directed Kegel exercises, tampon-like devices designed to prevent leaks...None of these options really worked.

"On the map, I kept to the blue highways. At night, I slept in a tent. I thought of myself as an apprentice Kerouac."

I turned to see an air-conditioner that had tumbled from a window several stories up on the sidewalk just on the other side of my building's front door.

As a kid, I learned to do handstands from my dad;... but also in perspective. This innate curiosity... remains evident throughout her book On Muscle.

"A burn layer puts a mark on a timeline. There is a before, and there is an after, and there is no mistaking the one for the other."

My breasts were real, and they were spectacular...a double mastectomy gives you license to say breast over and over again...without the usual consequences.

Troy and I got engaged one month before I received a terminal diagnosis. We had talked about marriage over the years but had our reasons for delay.

I was 15 years old when a friend and I got a job picking mushrooms at a mushroom farm. We were picked up at 6:00 a.m. from a local plaza and driven to the farm two hours away. Somehow, we were separated and put in different grow rooms (which felt more like horse stalls). There were no windows nor electricity for light. There were eight 'pickers' per room; only two wore headlamps. It was so dark I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. We were told we could take our first break in two hours, and then the door was shut tightly. I did my job quietly, feeling around the manure for mushrooms in complete darkness amongst six strange men. It felt like eight hours had passed when the door finally opened two hours later.

By the Time I Reach Him captures the painful reality of memory loss through personal audio, contemporary footage, and archival imagery, presented in a poignant black and white format.

"People-pleasing has a bad artistic reputation-it's more common to imagine serious artists driven by an uncompromising inner vision-but he made a poetics of it."

In a time of experiencing a profound loss of control in the form of the tumor that was blurring my vision, this felt like a consummate act of taking back my life, or at least my story.