Alice Driver considers what lessons to take from a late uncle’s life. “His whole life, my Uncle Lee harbored dreams of being a writer, and I had, in desperate fits and starts over the years, become one.”

Writer Shawn McClure remembers baby chicks: “In the basement of his old farmhouse, my grandfather had a brooder. It looked like a multi-storied apartment building for chicks. They would crowd around the light bulb for heat, like yellow electrons darting around a red nucleus.”

“I remember going for a walk in the woods behind my house instead, finding this tree and carving my initials into it, pressing the sadness and rejection into its innocent bark.” At Kindred, Kerstin Pless Grant recalls being 14 and rediscovers a tree she had hoped to return to someday.

John Sutherland reflects on 26 years with the Metropolitan Police Service in London, England: “That’s the painful privilege of this job – to venture repeatedly into the hurting places. To be there on the inside of the fluttering blue and white tape.”

Western philosophy clashes with Rebecca Schuman’s birth plan in her hilarious, harrowing Longreads essay.

On teenage rebellion, thwarted: “Nothing had changed. I was still the same person with the same stupid clothes and the same baby toys. The house was still library quiet and Richard Marx was still my favorite singer.”

“I became aware of this phenomenon—people believing fiction is true—some years before this mass delusion about a popular novel swept the nation.” At The Mendocino Humanist, Todd Walton recounts his experiences with audiences who assume his stories are autobiographical.

At Brevity, Jill Talbot, author of the memoir The Way We Weren’t, gives us a masterclass in revising our writing after rejection: “So many times, we have to get out of our essay’s way.”

On the accretion of stuff: “And so, without siblings in whose faces we might see our pasts, and without children who reflect back to us ourselves and our future, we cling to the representational, the inanimate, the stuff to which we attach memory and meaning.”

Dementia took the mind of Bruce Jenkins’ mother, but it could not erase their shared love of words. “Take a book, and read to her just as she read to you.”

Angie recalls her family’s beat-up truck, “Old Green,” which became a concert hall on wheels as she, her mom, and her brothers sang their way through good times and bad.

When there was nothing else for Kevin Richard White, there was writing: “I want them to know we’re given a voice at birth. We’re given a chance to use it. All you need is paper and time.”

“The summertime world is languid. It is the snick-snick-snick of sprinklers. It is Perry Ferrell crooning ‘Tag. You are the one.’” Jen writes a thank you note to a pivotal album for her 13-year-old self.

In preparation for a writing conference, writer and ex-nurse Lois Roelofs reads and shares what she’s learned from Phillip Lopate’s Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character.