In this hybrid essay, Susan Niemi writes with specificity, clarity, and the clear eye of a survivor who knows how much work it takes to forge a path forward again and again. Studded with lines of her own poetry, this essay is a meditation on using creativity...

I sat cross-legged on a curb in the middle of New Jersey in the middle of the 1970s and wrote a poem about despair. I was fourteen, it was humid and windless, and I was waiting outside my father’s girlfriend’s apartment to go home where my father and I had barricaded...

Usually, I am one to find the thread of dark humor even in the worst of circumstances. But I found myself at a loss. I had been increasingly depressed and anxious since a confluence of world and family events descended, including family deaths and friends’ severe...