by Carla Seaquist | Jul 15, 2020 | Essay
“Exchange rate” does not mean much in our workaday lives. But we develop a functional understanding in short order when traveling abroad. There it hits home that “exchange rate” is “money,” a term so meaningful that it runs a close second to whatever is in first...
by Carla Seaquist | Mar 18, 2020 | Essay
The toughest job in the world isn’t being a mother, it’s being a stepmother. I’ve weathered a divorce, reinvented myself as a “new” woman, and even survived a fat childhood. But nothing compares with the rigors of my improvised role as stepmother to two teenage...
by Carla Seaquist | Mar 18, 2020 | Essay
Washington, D.C., writer Carla Seaquist wrote this essay after an evening spent in an emergency room waiting to be treated. So I say to the man seated next to me in the emergency room, “This isn’t so much Bedlam as ‘Bad-limb.’” By some strange symmetry, appropriate...
by Carla Seaquist | Mar 18, 2020 | Essay
Winning isn’t everything, football coaches likes to say. It’s the only thing. But music is supposed to be different. With music, if you don’t make it to Carnegie Hall, there’s a consolation prize—you can still play for your own enjoyment. Music, after all, has charms...
by Carla Seaquist | Mar 18, 2020 | Essay
What the madeleine conjured for Proust, Ohio conjures for me: memories of hot and happy summers on my grandparents’ farm where I, a “townie” from the West Coast, milked cows, gathered eggs, caught fireflies, made dolls from hollyhocks and nightly with Grandma whipped...
by Carla Seaquist | Mar 18, 2020 | Essay
Lacey, WA. Life, an improvised affair, rarely has the unity or clarity of Art. Our conflicts seldom resolve or even, as Drama prescribes, “stay in the moment.” And our prose: Instead of paragraphs cohering around a single idea, we speak in fragments, non sequiturs,...
