Lady Writer; creative nonfiction
The Brattle Book Shop is tucked into an innocuous side street that branches off of one of Boston’s busy retail corridors, Downtown Crossing. If you’re not looking for the Brattle, you’re not going to find it unless you randomly turn onto West St. and glance away from your phone long enough to catch the outsized […]
Read More
I’m not interested in church for the religion as much as I am for the variety. Visit a city or even a mid-size town and pop into a few of these institutions and you’ll see what I mean. Some resemble medieval castles with their lethal spirals and flying buttresses while others are modest boxy things […]
Read More
Every city has its kink, its pockets of oddball charm like the shag rug underneath the grand piano. Seattle has an entire second subterranean city sunk underneath its streets. New Orleans encourages graveyard tourism. Los Angeles is block after creepy block lifted from a David Lynch film. Boston has Graffiti Alley—funk central in the form […]
Read More
Laura Dwight started keeping a mental inventory of all the ways her once great neighborhood in Boston’s Back Bay was headed for the garbage chute– crumbling front stoops, broken gates, dirt and litter patches passing for gardens and flower beds. She lived in the Back Bay, the tidy track of streets surrounding Newbury St, Boston’s […]
Read More
After living here for more than a decade, I thought it was time to visit the Boston Public Library. I wasn’t avoiding the library. I don’t have any past traumatic library experiences like racking up enormous overdue fines or getting busted reading a copy of the Karma Sutra tucked behind A Brief History of Time. […]
Read More
In Boston, the dead are everywhere. They are immortalized as statues in the middle of courtyards and public walkways; they show up on plaques tacked onto the outside of historic buildings and screwed onto the backs of park benches. They lie in the ground across nineteen different cemeteries spread out across the commonwealth. The city […]
Read More
There are no shortage of cafés in Boston. Chains co-exist with indie spaces. People are loyal to their favorite spots, putting them in the same category as Jimmy Buffet fans. They are quick to defend the superior quality of everything from the coffee to the music to the unisex bathrooms (big, like, wicked, like room enough […]
Read More