Michael Simms: GUSHER by Christopher Soden
Learning to be oneself and to love oneself is the central narrative in Gusher, a remarkable book about a gay man growing up in Dallas, Texas in the 1980s.
Jennifer Harman: When parents turn children into weapons, everybody loses
Domestic abuse can involve one parent using a child as a weapon against the other parent, which harms the child in immense ways. My research has identified how these dynamics play out and examines the damage.
Myths and Facts About Male Sexual Abuse and Assault
Cultural myths surrounding the sexual abuse and assault of boys and men can be serious obstacles to understanding and healing, so it’s important to learn just how wrong they are.
Michael Simms: Writing Prompt #7 | Jumping into the Mud
Here’s an exercise which I call Jumping into the Mud although it’s sometimes called by the more prosaic name automatic writing. The exercise helps to loosen my imagination, and sometimes a decent poem results as well.
Video: Nadine Burke Harris | How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime
Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain.
Jennifer Johnson: A Haunting Novel of Childhood Trauma
The novel takes a hard look at how children who endure growing up in dysfunctional families, suffer dire consequences and are left to a lifetime of personal struggles.
Janette Schafer: On the day I testify for Homeland Security
Janette agreed to share these details publicly to help allay the stigma, shame, and secrecy inherent with being a sex abuse survivor.
Video: Spoon
In this visual poem, Markus Kempken explores specific objects — spoons, spatulas, flutes — and the way they trigger memories of his childhood abuse.
Arlene Weiner: Nobody’s coming to save the children
Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor.
Sydney Lea: Gradus ad Parnassum
On the other hand, the open handed
blows left scarce a mark, applied to your head or neck
Judith Alexander Brice: My Papa’s Music
We weren’t a talking family
especially when it came
to discussing why I locked myself
in the bathroom upstairs
Video: Buskers
Buskers is the story of Packo, a young Dubliner, and Milos, a Romanian immigrant, who battle to secure a space to beg at a Dublin train station. After a comical … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Foundling
You stood, small and mute,
on the stoop where she’d left you
with a tiny, plastic suitcase,
like a bad joke, beside you.
Vox Populi 