Category: LoveLetters

  • Wasteland

    This essay was sparked by several incidents. One was riding home after a dance jam and feeling like I’d never been happier in my entire life, two is visiting the Baumarkt built near the East Side Gallery, and three is an email from a friend of mine in which she said that she might be…

  • My Body Left the Academy – Feminist Theory from a Dropout

    Someone I once regarded as close to me recently told me I was difficult to get close to. Which is ironic because throughout my life I have been perpetually engaged with the act of stripping—emotionally, mentally, symbolically, and more recently, physically. I’ve want to expose myself. I yearn for “transparency.” When I look back on…

  • Ms. Soltayeva

    From the NYTimes … “In One Chechen’s Humiliation, Questions About Rule of Law” And questions about freedom of sexuality … We punks and freaks, those that would dye our hair green and paint a green cross on our foreheads and turn it upside down, shave our eyebrows and sleep around … we should stand in…

  • Life’s Different Now, Life’s Changed

    Happy Fourth of July and the headlines run … a 21 year old U.S. Army Private rapes and kills an Iraqi woman, along with three other members of her family. Two sons are at school when the murders happen. Several other young American soldiers are accomplices. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/us/04arrest.html This is truly, um, “f-ed up,” and when…

  • Flirting in Berlin/Teen Sex- Lets Talk about it!

    I’m curled in a comfortable armchair in a bar at four in the morning, fighting sleep. I have to wait for my husband to finish Deejaying before we can leave. I look up and, from across the room, a handsome dark haired man makes eye contact with me. In sign language he asks me if…

  • Some Women I Admire–Biking and Story Telling

    Carolyn Norr and Bridget Barsotti are two ambitious artists and educators that put their beliefs where their bodies are. Mid-September, they armed themselves with art supplies, cameras and the dedication to listen to people, and left Ann Arbor, MI on their bikes, pulling all their gear on trailers behind them. Carolyn and Bridget are the…

  • Tara DePorte’s Brazil journal 2005, excerpt

    June 2, 2005 Day 1 in brazil: Ponta Negra, Patrick’s I almost feel like I have to lie to myself because this is a printed page, which might be indicative of the fact that I want to write this down on something less permanent….But my heart feels broken. I think it was broken long ago,…

  • Katrina

    On some simplistic level, I don’t entirely understand why it is that when extremely rich, mainly white, people (and some, very few, colored people) have such a large percentage of the nation’s wealth, it is called affluence. And it has a positive connotation. And when the poorest of the poor in America begin to take…

  • jumbled thoughts on the rapes in katrina’s wake.

    every story i read about the situation in new orleans leaves me with another unanswered question. but what i struggle with most is the shockingly high incidence of reported rapes and sexual assaults… how to understand this, try to place it in context, how to wrap my mind around how chaos, starvation, and desperation can…

  • Asylum in Deutschland: A Second Battle for Survival

    For many immigrants and asylum seekers living and waiting for their asylum cases to be adjudicated in Germany, the third largest refugee-receiving country in the world, the battle and trauma experienced in their home country was just the first. They now face a second battle attempting to survive Germany’s discriminatory practices aimed right at them.…