Bubba (center) surrounded by her children and extended family (c. 1904-5) I am moved when people invoke their ancestors as fonts of wisdom and strength. I know so little about mine. My ancestral line comes to a halt three generations back in...
Essays
COFFEE AND CATASTROPHE
“I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.” – Hillary Clinton One of those mornings, portentous, dread-full. A sickly sky, as happens in September in LA, when the wind singes, and the light is yellow-weird more...
Winner, Editors’ Choice in Essay: Outside King Soopers
In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s third anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our third annual Editors’ Choice Awards, selected from among the works we published in 2019. Elizabeth Robinson’s “Outside King Soopers:...
Wanted: An End to Austerity — A New UK Citizen Canvasses for the Labour Party
We were just leafletting. Even that felt good. It was cold but bright as we stepped into the first day of December, with Christmas wreaths adorning thresholds, doors wrapped like presents. A man on a ladder was hanging a Santa formed out of lights...
Outside King Soopers: Homelessness and Awkward Intimacies
“Elizabeth, if I tell you something, will you please not be offended?” I raise an eyebrow. “If you were nineteen, I’d totally be hitting on you.” I notice that he’s got a careful margin past the age of consent there. “Well, I guess we’re...
Seasonal Elegies
My mother is sick, my best friend was dying; I had to travel quite a bit this winter—Vermont, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Massachusetts. And yet the way chain stores nudge a landscape into a kind of global uniformity, there was a...
The Color Cure
The Color Cure, installation by Lee Crouch Zero Prestige through June 21 by Joy Katz The Color Cure, an installation by artist Lee Crouch, is a room whose mood changes depending on a visitor’s skin color. It’s a little like one of those “mood rings”...
The Hot Hot
In Kristen’s driveway by the hoop she says you know global warming is real right and kicks the bottom of her metal scooter with the inside sole of her leopard Converses. I say yes. Yes. I remember this—had seen a plastic-covered book about it on the...
¿Where Is La Brecha Treinta? Racing Against Death in the South Texas Borderlands
Winner of the 2019 SLS Essay Contest On a 100-degree June morning, Eddie Canales was driving from Corpus Christi, Texas, to the town of Falfurrias. A call came in on the Bluetooth screen of his Prius. It was from a 720, or metropolitan Denver, area...
Funeral in Barcelona
In November, 1975, my ship, the USS El Paso, made a scheduled port call in Barcelona. I was excited. I’d never been there, and seeing such sights (along with escaping my Midwestern hometown) was a big part of why I’d enlisted. Almost immediately...
Stonewall at 50: Still Making Our Place
“We have to read this new book for book club,” my friend Michael told me during a fall afternoon call in 1994, back when people still telephoned each other without texting first. I was 32 and Michael was a role model for me at the time – in his...
Scrap and Pig: A Foundry Hand’s Education in Heat and Light
I was laboring in heavy industry when this country’s brief history of shared prosperity started to fail like a piece of fatigued metal, fracturing between the class to which I was born and the one to which I pretend. To this day, with every return...
An Interview with Xu Xi
Scoundrel Time’s Robert Anthony Siegel talks to Xu Xi about her new essay collection, This Fish is Fowl: Essays on Being Xu Xi’s new essay collection, This Fish is Fowl, is a wry, self-aware journey through a globalizing world where borders...
Forbidden Art: A Journey in Persian Dance
A hush fell over our class, as Mrs. Mofid, the principal, boomed, “What is the meaning of this?” Her voice petrified us, like the wave of the wand that turned the heroes of our beloved fairy-tales into stone. My hand, reaching for Mina’s braid...
Learning to Swim Again: Confronting a Legacy of Childhood Trauma
As a young child in Sweden, I was a bold, free-spirited girl; I was at home in my world. I roamed as I pleased in our small fishing village on the west coast, where I was raised by my grandmother, aunt, mother, and cousins. In the summer, I sprawled...
All I Needed for 2018 was a Knife and a Heart Emoji
January: The President taunts the other idiot with nuclear weapons. 🔪🔪🔪 🔪🔪🔪 🔪🔪🔪 I lose my wedding ring because I can’t stop taking it off and nervously playing with it due to the state of …well …everything. Husband doesn’t divorce me. Doesn’t get...
The Wild Blue Yonder Is Actually Gray
At the start of 2017, I was in this exact same position, returning from the same writing conference in Mexico, dressed in a black Empire Strikes Back sweatshirt, the evening after Inauguration Day. Nervous. Hands trembling, my left eyelid twitching...
The Trump in Me
A few nights ago, my husband and I had a reservation for 8:30 p.m. at a new restaurant in town. When we arrived, the young manager told us they didn’t have a table yet and asked us to wait at the bar. There wasn’t an especially comfortable spot to...
Winner, Editors’ Choice Award in Essay: Born & Raised: Learning to Leave Steel Country
In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s second anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our second annual Editors’ Choice Awards. David L. Engelhardt’s “Born & Raised: Learning to Leave Steel Country” is the award...
Empathic Receptivity: Two Photo-Collages by Nance Van Winckel
My text-based digital photo-collages draw from traditions of urban landscape photography, collage, erasure poetry, altered books, and graffiti/street art. I digitally alter and collage onto my own photographs of murals and graffiti. I add such...
Born and Raised: Learning to Leave Steel Country
Trump thanks God for the uneducated. I thank the uneducated for chasing me out of my dead end of Pennsylvania before it was too late, even if my exile made mockery of a Springsteen song: I had no hemi-powered drone screaming down the boulevard, but...
(Favor) in His Sight
(Homewood Cemetery) Before I moved to Pittsburgh seven years ago a friend sent me a recording of a comic Yiddish patter song from the 1920s or ’30s. It was like one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s rapid-fire recitatives, only in Yiddish. I...
Annie, Get Your Code On: How to Be a Woman Engineer
“Women have broken the glass ceiling, and we’ve achieved most of our goals.” When a female corporate vice president announced this at a leadership conference for women, before hundreds of female managers who worked for a Fortune 500 aerospace...
Reliving My Trauma in the Wake of the Kavanaugh Hearings
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford grew up near me in a Washington, D.C., suburb, during the 1980s. I went to an all-girls private school near Ford’s girls’ school. I was sexually assaulted, within a year or two of the assault Dr. Ford experienced, by a boy...
Grace Paley and the Art of Protest: Chicago, July 2018
A white-haired woman with a wise face who looked like the second coming of Grace Paley wished protestors good luck on a recent Saturday in Chicago. Thousands of us had come to the South Side to help activist Father Michael Pfleger and his...
Two Paintings by Kathryn Freeman: Lullaby for Lions & Mending the Tigers
On “Lullaby for Lions” The first kernel of an idea for this work happened on July 1, 2015, when I heard on the radio that Cecil the Lion had been shot after being lured from the sanctuary by an illegal party of big game hunters. I was in my car, and...
On Painting in These Times: Two Works
The visual arts and (instrumental) music to me, are expressions of pre-verbal content. And our reactions to works of art and music also occur on a pre-verbal level. As an art maker, much of my time is spent emptying my head of conscious thoughts and...
There Were Six of Us
There were six of us. And then, abruptly, there were five. It happened overnight, except the truth was that it was over dinner. It was late in the summer, an August evening; warm and sultry, which in San Francisco occurs maybe once or twice a...
Sweet Talk: Refugees and the Language of Community
“Hi sweetheart. I’m on my way. Can’t wait to see you.” The WhatsApp message appeared on my phone, just after my plane touched down in Athens, Greece. A moment later, I heard another ping and looked down to see “I’m here out of the door number four”...
Searching for Safety and Home: My Family’s Story of Migration
It is 1931. I picture my grandmother, Annie, standing on a wharf in Santiago de Cuba awaiting a ship. I see her with a hand beneath her pronounced belly. Her two older daughters, Inez and Pearlena; two young sons, Herman and Ragland; and husband...
One Year In: How Will It End?
Special to Scoundrel Time: Twenty-two writers imagine how the current administration will end. A Note From the Editor One year ago today, we launched Scoundrel Time in response to the devastating U.S. presidential election and clear...
How It Ends: Revolving Door
This image conveys both hope and fear. Hope that we can move past this tragic episode and fear that we may not. To the extent that the 2016 election reflects all that’s wrong with our country, moving forward should also be a struggle to learn...
How It Ends: The Message from Mississippi
It’s hard to imagine the end of the Trump presidency when you live in a place that supports him. Mississippi gave Donald Trump all six of its Electoral College votes as well as 57.9% of the state’s popular vote, which makes it hard to escape his...
How It Ends: Wonderland/Wasteland
I was raised by a father who self-described as a “realistic optimist” and a mother who oscillated between bracing for the apocalypse and buying outfits for the award ceremony. So it’s no surprise that my own predictive tendencies are tangled up in...
How It Ends: April Fools
On April 1, 1988, my college newspaper published an April Fools article about Donald Trump buying Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center and proclaiming himself its president. It was the last semester of my freshman year and by that point...
How It Ends: Follow the Money
A few years ago I read a biography of Al Capone. I learned a lot about him. He was a good dancer. He had tertiary syphilis that probably caused his erratic mood swings. He grew up a block away from me in Brooklyn. When he got to Chicago, his...
How It Ends – Or Doesn’t
How is the ongoing shitstorm that is Donald Trump’s administration going to end? Though everyone on earth has noted his unpredictability, his year in office may have established, paradoxically, that it’s not so hard to predict where Trump himself is...
How It Ends: Wanna Bet?
The election of Donald Trump was not a triumph of conservatism or any other set of political values. Like the upsurge of nativist and far-right movements in many other countries, and even the rise of Islamic extremism, it was a huge and...
An Amorality Tale: Fire and Fury, a Review
Now that the shockeroo revelations in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury have subsided into our latest weary Trump-era rearrangement of America’s much abused mental furniture, I’ve got a mildly rude question to ask. To whom, exactly, were they shocking...
Winner, Editors’ Choice Award in Creative Nonfiction: The Double Punch
In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s first anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Regan Good’s “The Double Punch: Trumpian Violence vs. NYPD Patriarchy” is...
The Hierarchy of Suffering
When I hesitated before posting #MeToo on social media several months ago, I noticed that I wasn’t the only woman wondering if my experiences of workplace sexual harassment fully qualified for this conversation about the ubiquity of...
Caligula: When the World Really DOES Revolve Around a Narcissist
An arrogant, narcissistic, blond serial rapist attains the highest office in the land, abuses his power, and offends everyone personally: this is the subject of my newest novel, Quid Pro Quo, a behind-the-scenes look at the assassination of...
THE PRAYER STONE: A Queer Muslim’s Story of Connection
I tell myself Allah—God—is watching and guiding my life. I used to talk to Him when I was teenager, before I had a name for Him. I talked to Him before I came out of the closet as a gay man in my early 20s. I talked to Him when I went back in the...
Dream House: Biography in Brick
At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson built a north octagonal room and dome. The elongated dome with rear windows half clear and half mirrored was Jefferson’s twist on the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum, even though all temples to Vesta are reportedly...
. . . remembering we are dying helps me do a better job.
Portfolio Interview with Jill McDonough, by Christine Mallon Scoundrel Time: The spirit of play in “Spelling ‘Prostitutes’” is tinged with darkness that breaks through the lines of the poem, just as the dark past breaks in upon small moments...
My Brother’s Lung Transplant and the Myth of Individual Healthcare Coverage
So on we go His welfare is of my concern No burden is he to bear We’ll get there – He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother by The Hollies “It’s go time,” my niece Amy said, one misty night last May. “He’s on his way to the hospital for...
Taking a Knee at the Symphony
One Sunday evening last month, my husband and I sat in a side balcony in the Concert Hall at the Kennedy Center, waiting for the music to begin. We looked down at the stage, where National Symphony Orchestra musicians in tuxes and glittering...
Facing an Uncertain Future, a DACA Recipient Dreams of the Past
As an honors student at a prestigious East Coast University, Marisela Vasquez* felt forced to lie about why she did not study abroad. “That was the hardest conversation to have junior year–I would say that with my two majors and a minor...
Where You Belong: Reflections of a Naturalized Citizen, After Charlottesville
If you were a young woman newly arrived in America from India, you likely had no memory of persecution or war. You did not flee in fear of torture, dictators, or imprisonment. Perhaps you had a fear of gossiping neighbors, interfering aunts...
Street Smarts: On Confronting Poetry and Language in a Mississippi Classroom
After living in Washington, DC for more than thirty years, I like to think that I’ve acquired some street smarts. When in unfamiliar territory, I keep my guard up and sublimate the trusting Mississippi country boy side of me, a part of my...
Factory Men: Migrants in Patras, Greece
In Patras, Greece, I met Taimor, a 17-year-old Afghan migrant camped out in an abandoned furniture factory. The boy already had the beginnings of a beard and, as the mother of a 17-year-old myself, I must have looked surprised when I heard...
Sanctuary, City
A “new” Lotería card appears spray-painted on a viaduct in Chicago’s near Southwest Side. While reading Night with high school freshmen on Chicago’s largely Latino Southwest Side, I often had to explain new vocabulary like...
Before & After
7 November (the day before Election Day 2016) Hitler analogies have always disturbed me. As a daughter of two Holocaust survivors, I take this subject very personally. Usually the comparison is intentionally hyperbolic and over-simplistic, designed...
My Trip to Greece
Written by Mostafa Fadi, with an introduction by Dana Sachs I go to Greece regularly with a small aid team, Humanity Now, and on Lesvos Island I met Mostafa Fadi, a 26-year-old refugee from Syria. At the PIKPA Camp, which shelters 85 people, Mostafa...
London’s Calling
Preparing a lamb curry wrap, Borough Market, May 5 I walked around the Borough Market exactly a month ago, reveling in how the South Bank has become a favorite part of the city. The market is a great place to grab a bite to eat or just watch...
Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt
Say I tell you a story about a girl who’s afraid of money. From a young age, she learned that there didn’t seem to be much of it and that hard work didn’t mean one would ever have much of it. She knew this from her dad’s dark tan in the...
Dispatch from Mexico City: On the Relación of Cabeza De Vaca, from Coyoacán, 2017
Such is my axis in the Theater of Space-Time: On this mid-January day of 2017, Donald J. Trump has just been sworn in as the 45th President of United States, to the uneasy consternation of every Mexican I know, whether they consider themselves on...
Holding the Blue Line: Dispatches from a Swing State
Roanoke. Population approximately one hundred thousand. A small city nestled at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. An island of blue in an angry sea of red. The Democratic Party of Virginia’s headquarters here is a prime example of the...
The Trumpbox
The Trumpbox is 12 3/16 tall and 15 7/8 wide. It can hold quite a lot; according to the label, its “capacity gallon” is 14. It is made of Polyethylene, which I cannot say I really know much about, but I can promise you this, it’s strong. If...
“Like the Back of My Hand” (from the series)
My hands are not like most people’s. They are double-jointed, and, due to an autoimmune condition, they swell and contract, resulting in squishiness and more wrinkles than is fair for my age. For decades, I’ve been ashamed of my hands...
Pushing Back: An Interview with College Student Grace Smith on Identity and Activism
I first met Grace Smith when she was six. I was an adult student in a renowned memoir class taught by Grace’s mother, Marion Roach. Grace was the little girl who sat at our table writing or coloring until her dad, Rex Smith, the editor of the Albany...
My Mother’s Pilgrimage
In September 2015—the year a crane collapse in Mecca killed 111 people, followed by the deaths of another 2000 in a stampede—my mother returned from the Hajj with flu and was immediately quarantined in a hospital in Indianapolis. It took her...
April 3, 2017: Two Tragedies Occurred in Russia
One was a shrapnel-bomb blast on a subway train in St. Petersburg: eleven people killed, as of this writing; dozens severely injured. This happened in the very heart of the city’s subway system: there is hardly a Petersburger who wouldn’t have...
Because They Could: How We Are Not Russia
On February 27, 2015, a stone’s throw away from the ominous fishbone of the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower, they killed the charismatic and universally beloved leader of the Russian political opposition, the former Russian First Deputy Prime...
A Prescriptive Identity? Not My Birthright.
Identity. I searched for it my entire life. When I thought I had it in my clutches, the slippery creature learned how to evade me; my identity changed directions, it multiplied, it forced me to look inwards and decide—is this who I want to be...
Artists Dying
The first time I saw an artist dying onstage, I was a kid. I went to see Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Village Gate. The great saxophonist, composer, and vocalist had recently suffered a stroke. His body was non-existent inside a rumpled tuxedo...
Listening in a Post-Brexit (Post-Election) World
John Berger died on January 2 at age 90. An art critic, novelist, and left-leaning thinker, he’s loved by me also for Photocopies, a book of short portraits that are like sketches in words: informal, partial, seemingly off-hand. In the...
Laughing at the Demagogues
It’s become predictable—though still, I hope, not normal—that a Saturday Night Live skit will be followed by an angry tweet from the new President, using words like “unwatchable” and “not funny.” If these silly overreactions at times seem like part...
Not Breathing Yet: In Response to the Election
I am eighteen years old, lying on my bed doing my homework, when my two-year-old nephew begins his seizure. He came into my room an hour before, fussy and red-faced, and fell asleep behind me, pressed tight against me for comfort. The heat emanating...
Note from a Mother
My middle child is fascinated by his ethnicity. He looks the most Ecuadorian with his dark almond eyes and wide nose. He stretches his arm next to mine to see the contrast of his brown skin against my white. He teaches his younger brother to say...
The Future Is a Ceiling of Impossible Water
I was driving in a rented yellow convertible through the desert, near the eastern border of California. A bright spring morning: overhead, the sky was brilliant and blue, like a ceiling of impossible water. My forehead was damp. My hair was wild. My...
Disappointment
Remember, remember, the eighth of November; of gunpowder, treason and plot.[1] Benjamin, do you recall sixteen years ago how we sat all night before the black-and-white Great Wall television set (with its hues of light green on a warped electronic...
Depending on How You Look at It
In the weeks before Donald Trump became president of the United States, I travelled to Greece to volunteer and distribute some $35,000 in donations that a group of us from North Carolina had collected for humanitarian relief for refugees. These...
We Need a New Story
A few years ago, a writer friend gave me a bracelet that had a charm on it that said “stories save our souls.” I loved that phrase so much that I began to use it—and a variation (“stories save our lives”) when I signed books. I knew it was true...
I Lift My Lamp
From the Oxford English Dictionary, digital edition. Asylum. < Latin asȳlum, < Greek ἄσῡλον refuge, sanctuary, neuter of adjective ἄσῡλος inviolable. 1. A sanctuary or inviolable place of refuge and protection for criminals and debtors...
Calm-Downers, Resisters, and Bags by the Door
“Jesus, what are we going to do now?” Out of the mouths of babes, or one babe in particular, comes the question du jour, and possibly du mois and de l’année, too. A day after the recent presidential election, what some grieving voters call...