The Monthly Theme Essays are a collection of essays written each month on a predetermined theme. These essays are always published during the last week of the month. To submit a Monthly Theme Essay check out our upcoming themes.
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Know your muses. At the bar, pretend to browse the booze-streaked binder like it’s a doctor’s office People, like you might as well look at it since you’re here, even though you know better and you’ve spent weeks covertly planning this shebang.
Read MoreOne Monday morning in late fall, my back and neck ached as I sat at my desk at the community college where I had recently started teaching. I tilted my head in a painful stretch as I waited to meet with the students in my writing class for office hours. I wondered if the garden I’d been toiling over was worth it.
Read MoreHe made his way around the seminar table to stand at the podium and present the paper reflecting his semester-long wrestling match with challenges to everything he had been raised to accept without questioning. “He” is a young white man – a law student – who looked as if plucked from Hollywood Central Casting for a crowd scene of stereotypic “Bubbas” attending a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.
Read MoreThe new English teacher—the fourth one in less than three years—looked like a punky Tinkerbell.
She wore her starlight blonde hair pulled into a bun, big oversized glasses perched on her upturned nose (the kind of cute nose I always wished I had) with a dainty twinkling stud. Despite her scarf, a tattooed comet of Fall Out Boy lyrics flowed across her shoulder with a spray of falling stars.
Read MoreOne of my students, a poet, works at a gas station by night. I picture her under the fluorescent lights, composing sonnets and slam poems (her favorite), reading them aloud to the empty store in rural New Mexico, where only a few cars pass by. When the door chime rings, she stows her notebook under the counter and straightens the array of potato chips next to the cash register.
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