Sister
“Hey, ain’t you Jesse’s sister?” Jesse’s sister, that name should have been on my birth certificate. Not one of my brother’s friends ever called me by my first name. Did they know it? Even Kevin, who always found his way into my room when my brother was in the bathroom. Slobbering all over my face, in what I guess was his attempt at kissing. I was 10 or 11, I didn’t know how to kiss, and if I did, I didn’t want to kiss him. Only one of his friends knew my name and always used it. He wouldn’t try to kiss me then—later though—but when you’re married…
“Hey weren’t you Jesse’s sister?” This is what they called me after. Subtle name change. It was changed without my approval. I wanted to say, “I still am.” After all, he’s the one in the past tense. But I didn’t, instead, I put on a somber face and said, “Yeah.”
What was worse? The people I hadn’t seen in years. The ones who gave me that “Long time no see, how’s Jesse?” hug.
“He died 4, 5, 6 years ago,” I would say.
A shocked stream of oh shits and damns followed. I then gave them the sympathetic shoulder rub and perfunctory head tilt and said, “That’s OK.”
I used to get a lot of social media messages from his childhood friends, the ones who had memories. “I remember when Jesse did….” “I remember when Jesse said….” I remember when Jesse did and said too. Over twenty years of doing and saying.
I think everyone has gotten the memo. The grape-vine has been climbing.
The night before my mother’s funeral, I assured my niece I wouldn’t cry. “I’ve shed all my tears,” I told her. “I’ve practiced what I’m going to say until I’m dry.” She nodded, clearly skeptical.
There was a corner in my house that I came to dread nearing, where our daughter’s diaper changing table was set up. It was at the opposite end in our bedroom, where on the other side was the big window facing the endless mountains and winding roads, which got us sold on this house as a newly married couple.
I.
It wasn’t cool to like the Backstreet Boys while attending high school in the late 1990s, and this may still be true today.
But I wasn’t cool. I didn’t care to get jiggy with it or weep to “Candle in the Wind.” The odes to drugs from Third Eye Blind and Marcy Playground were boring. I didn’t give any real shits about Lilith Fair’s tepid lineup, though I still went, quietly rolling my eyes through “Adia” by Sarah McLaughlin.
Recently, scrolling through my news feed on Facebook, I came across a post by a girl from work. It was a picture of her and her mother side-by-side, same cute smile, same long, blonde hair, same eyes crinkled by their grins. She tagged it "#TWINS.” “Vote for me and my mom!" the caption said, with a link to a local radio station hosting a mother-daughter lookalike contest for Mother's Day.
When I was five, I got a pair of Wonder Woman Underoos, stars on blue bottoms, a golden eagle on the camisole, which my dad called a wife-beater. I blasted around the yard, kicking Nazis, saving drippy Steve Trevor. The world had clean edges. I was a goddess, a force. Wham! Pow! Look out bad guys. My mom called me inside; I was just in my underwear, and what would the neighbors think.
When I was a child, each summer, my mother took my sisters and me on a journey westward from our home in New Jersey to Minnesota, where my grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles lived. Although my sisters and I delighted in the prospects of seeing our relatives once again, what pleased us most was the train ride that lay ahead.
There is a place
with waxing armpits on video in the kitchen
a room where a man plays computer games
and liked brunettes over blondes
I lived in Pico Rivera when I was eight. I was among hundreds of Latinos that made up the majority of the population. We lived with my Mexican grandmother who grew weed in her garden for her arsenal of homemade medicines. Everything she had was homemade: her bras and underwear to her skirts, hand stitched with pockets added to them so she could carry her money and medicines around. Her brother lived in the shack besides ours, badly built by Mexicans with muddy pants and dirty work boots, placed in my grandmother’s back yard. We didn’t have a home of our own. I spent most of my childhood running around my grandmother’s garden and eating the dumpster dived food my great uncle would fish out of bins while my parents worked.
“Hey, ain’t you Jesse’s sister?” Jesse’s sister, that name should have been on my birth certificate. Not one of my brother’s friends ever called me by my first name. Did they know it? Even Kevin, who always found his way into my room when my brother was in the bathroom.
Today, people know my name, though I no longer have real life experiences. Somber faces and head tilts are emojified. Most of my communication is six degrees, and only after one of our childhood acquaintances die.
It is mystifying to watch what people do when they learn someone from their past dies. It doesn’t matter how superficial the relationship, he or she will remember all the things that the departed had ever said or done. But, one day before they wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a crowd of two.
Guilty! When I’m in the thick of social media death talk, I think back to the last time I spoke to that person. The last time I thought about the person. The last time I realized that person was not already dead. Then I remember that one-minute we talked in 9th grade about...
-Liz Kelso
Some of the most compelling creative nonfiction begins with the feelings we are tempted to avoid: anger, resentment, shame, fear, or the sense that we have an axe to grind. In this six-week workshop, writers will explore how to follow that emotional heat toward deeper, more honest work—without sacrificing compassion, complexity, or craft. Through close readings, writing exercises, discussion, and constructive feedback, we’ll consider how to transform strong feelings into writing that reaches beyond catharsis and connects with readers.
IT’S NO SECRET THAT FEEDBACK IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE WRITING PROCESS.
In fact, we argue that it might be the most important part of the process.
But it’s hard to find a writing community. It’s hard to find the people who are willing to take the time and the effort to read your work and give the feedback you really, truly deserves.
That’s where HerStry Critique Groups come in!
HerStry Critique Groups are small groups of 6 women who gather online for 6 weeks to share their writing, give constructive feedback and gain skills as writers.
Weekly online sessions last approximately ninety minutes, with three women sharing their work each week. Writers of all genres and levels are welcome and you may share both works of fiction and nonfiction.
Sessions take place on Mondays 7PM CT, Tuesdays 11AM CT, Fridays 11AM CT
WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE HERSTRY CRITIQUE GROUPS?
Six 90 minute live workshop sessions
Three 20 minutes sessions in the “hot seat” to get you work critiqued
Written and verbal feedback from your fellow workshop participants
A weekly in depth edit and critique of your work from the group leader after each session
Weekly writing goals and accountability check ins
Full video recordings of each session to keep for your records
Say goodbye to the lonely, stuck in your head writing life!
LET’S WRITE!
From conception to submission. Let’s make summer sizzle with stories.
Writing a short story doesn’t happen in one session. It takes multiple drafts to get it exactly right, to create characters that come to life for the reader and a world they can’t stop thinking about. In this seven week course we will work on a single short story from conception to submission ready. The seven week session will include generative brainstorming sessions, short story craft talks, multiple workshops for feedback from fellow writers, and detailed line by line feedback and edits from your instructor. Plus, we’ll talk about submission venues, cover letters, and when to know if your story is ‘finished.’
IT’S NO SECRET THAT FEEDBACK IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE WRITING PROCESS.
In fact, we argue that it might be the most important part of the process.
But it’s hard to find a writing community. It’s hard to find the people who are willing to take the time and the effort to read your work and give the feedback you really, truly deserves.
That’s where HerStry Critique Groups come in!
HerStry Critique Groups are small groups of 6 women who gather online for 6 weeks to share their writing, give constructive feedback and gain skills as writers.
Weekly online sessions last approximately ninety minutes, with three women sharing their work each week. Writers of all genres and levels are welcome and you may share both works of fiction and nonfiction.
Sessions take place on Mondays 7PM CT, Tuesdays 11AM CT, Fridays 11AM CT
WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE HERSTRY CRITIQUE GROUPS?
Six 90 minute live workshop sessions
Three 20 minutes sessions in the “hot seat” to get you work critiqued
Written and verbal feedback from your fellow workshop participants
A weekly in depth edit and critique of your work from the group leader after each session
Weekly writing goals and accountability check ins
Full video recordings of each session to keep for your records
Say goodbye to the lonely, stuck in your head writing life!
October 7, 14, 21, 28, November 4 and 11 CT
WRITING THE SEX SCENE.
Writing a sex scene can be delirious fun, a harrowing challenge, a literary milestone—possibly the most important part of building your short story or book. In our six weeks together, you’ll experience just about every possible emotion as you explore the erotic in different modes: comic, tender, harrowing, soul-shattering … because it really is all about the characters’ feelings, not just the mechanics. So we’ll talk about tone. Vocabulary. Metaphor. Sensory detail. How to get big emotions on the page … and when to pull back and let the reader’s imagination go to work.
This is a course for writers who want to explore the intersection between the novel and short stories, and would like to weave their short stories into a story cycle (or collection of "linked stories" or "composite novel"). This is also a class about the interaction of form and content, and how one influences the other. We will read works of interlinked stories by writers from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, focusing on modern classics and contemporary practitioners of these hybrid forms. Weekly discussions will center on elements of craft, such as the expansion and compression of time, setting as an organizing and connecting principle, character development within and between stories, structure and plot for interconnected stories, and responding to literary influences in the same genre.
This six-week course guides writers through the literary submission process, offering insider insight and practical tools to help you get your work into the world. We’ll demystify everything from reading submission calls to writing cover letters and choosing the right journals. Along the way, we’ll workshop short bios, develop submission trackers, and build personalized plans that align with your voice and goals.
By the end of the course, you’ll walk away with a polished piece ready to send, a tailored submission list, and the confidence to navigate the lit mag world with clarity and purpose.
Ideal for writers of literary fiction, poetry, personal essay, memoir, and hybrid forms.
Tension feels tangible to a reader, an active experience. But from a craft perspective, tension is often a function of restraint, palpable from what is withheld, delayed or left unresolved. Why do some stories feel urgent even in stillness while others fall flat despite dramatic events? Our impulse to resolve tension often comes from a deeply human instinct to seek coherence and moral clarity, but resisting that instinct creates compelling narratives. When we let characters misbehave or allow ambiguity in their actions, we pull readers closer to them.
This course examines tension as a narrative force. We’ll consider how writers can counter the impulse to resolve too quickly, to justify wrongful acts or to redeem a character’s behavior. By looking at ways to sustain tension without escalation into spectacle, we’ll experiment with evoking it in the ordinary and the unspoken. The class will combine close reading, craft reflection and writing prompts to practice distinct approaches to writing tension. This course is designed for writers working in fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms who are interested in deepening the psychological and structural complexity of their work. Ultimately, tension is what compels the reader to turn the page.
In this generative writing workshop, ecologist and poet Anne Marie Wells will introduce participants to some of today's eco-poets and essayists and guide participants through a series of writing prompts that will use the outdoors and personal experience as inspiration for creative expression. No writing experience is necessary to participate.
Liz Kelso resides in New York City. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The College of New Rochelle. Her writing can be found in the Phoenix Literary & Arts Magazine. She is also an editor for The Canopy Review Literary Magazine.
The brick-arched doorway houses two twin wooden doors. It smells of early-summer piss. Under the marquee, a small blue and white sign reads, "Air Conditioned." But it's a lie: the club will be sweltering.