Literary prose, meditations, and reflective essays on embodiment, scripture, place, discipline, appetite, care, and the forms of attention adjacent to poetry.
Why can the death of a public figure whom one has never met feel like a disturbance in one’s own biography? An interdisciplinary essay on Dolly Parton, possible selves, autobiographical memory, identity integration, cultural permission, and revisionary integrity.
Barbie, prospective identification, consumer self-invention, and the contested authority to determine what adult womanhood can mean.
A theory of the anti-capture self: how self-reliance, indispensability, judgment, giving, and reversibility can converge around preserving self-jurisdiction—and what governed interdependence requires instead.
A dawn walk from LOVE Park to Logan Square: public water, civic beauty, homelessness, and the unequal freedom to remain in Philadelphia.
A theory of load-bearing freedom, tested against Philadelphia’s monuments, slavery archive, public memory, marriage law, transit, and homelessness.
Generative AI has made cognitive output abundant. The scarce resource is governed administrative capacity: context, verification, coordination, authority, and follow-through. Through feminist and Black critical theory, this essay asks who performs that labor, who bears its burdens, and what FORTH would have to prove to deserve the category of critical technology.
A scholarly essay on patient-held medical records, artificial intelligence, bodily difference, clinical uncertainty, and the dignity that precedes cure.
Friendship knows a person without completing them. An essay on attention, dignity, grace, opacity, and the limits of every record that claims to define a human life.
A biblical meditation on Psalm 84, where nest and altar share sacred grammar and blessing becomes water gathered for the next ascent.
A personal essay on bodily recovery, institutional extraction, visibility, and refusing to treat the body as evidence against itself.
A culinary essay on panzanella, tomato season, homemade bread, bought time, appetite, excess, and mercy.
A garden meditation on severity, softness, expectation, attention, and the discipline of preserving judgment from seizure.
Beneath the prairie’s burnable surface, roots ran deep enough to survive fire, reminding us that every brilliant new blade must be judged by what it cuts below the eye.
LITERARY ESSAY · REVISION 2026. Cultivation after damage: what remains possible when innocence is gone, usefulness is too poor a god, and sweetness arrives without absolution.
