[Written while overthinking my life. Per usual.] Rejection is difficult, even if you’re used to it. Especially if you’re used to it. Over the past two years, I’ve cut a monster of a manuscript—my first—by fifty-thousand words. Kill your darlings, so I’ve been told. I slaughtered a third of the language for the “greater good.” … More Lessons in Rejection
[Written on a whim, for fear of forgetting June… again.] Friends. It’s been a year—a wild and tragic year. Despite the supposed progression of humanity, we seem to be backsliding to the detriment of the LGBTQIA+ community, which makes emphasizing June more necessary because all people should have the right to (harmless) freedom of expression. … More These Uncertain Times | A Book Review
[Written as the war as yet to kill me.] My first brush with loss in the military was the F-16 student who g-LOC’d during training. G-force loss of consciousness occurs when a pilot endures sustained high gs, which drains blood from the brain and induces hypoxia. Without oxygen, the blackout followed. I was a new … More Dulce et Decorum
[Written while standing on my proverbial soapbox] An unsung talent of an effective writer is making anything accessible. Access may seem odd when applied to language since we think of it more in the context of doors or shelves—how it captures an ability or permission to attain what may be denied to another. Steep in … More [Lost in Translation]
[Written when I should have been doing my taxes] In Sapiens, Yuval Harari argues that the ability to conceive of imagined realities has permitted humans to thrive as a species. Supposedly, we are the only creatures that can communicate in the abstract. We have devised belief systems, supranational organizations, proverbial lines that define one nation … More Learning to Believe in Ghosts
[Written on my phone when I should have been sleeping] The world is crumbling, and I have never cared more or less than at this moment. Languishing? Yes, thank you, how are you? Don’t worry about me—I, like many of you, am feeling the walls caving in. (The air seems a bit thin.) We just … More How to Live Happily in a Dystopian Novel
[Written while waiting in line for coffee] I wrote my first story in kindergarten. It was a sentence long about a horse running away from a farm but eventually returning because the stories of my childhood were supposed to have happy endings. These stories were also supposed to have pictures, so I drew the horse, … More Loves and Expectations
[Written with a white-hot urgency] I grew up in rural Virginia—the sort of rural where the roads lacked lines until recently and the bridge we required to circumvent a twenty-minute drive took nearly ten years to be replaced. In winter, our backroads were lousy with ice and ushered in snow days for the county. And … More Song of the South | A Requiem
[Written with a heavy heart] Afghanistan was my honeymoon. My husband and I moved our wedding forward when orders dropped for me to deploy, so I arrived a day before the 2010 elections. I had deployed to Iraq the previous year and spent the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday in the prone position during an … More Afghanistan | A Grammar of Regret
[Written while trying to come up with the next plot twist in a manucript] It is 2020 and a Monday, the 2020iest of Mondays, and I find myself cross-eyed, sifting through pixels of data, wearing sodden socks of the most imposterish of thoughts. Like many of my fellow pandemic keyboard warriors, I was stuck in … More My Terrible Roommate
Sarah E. H. Lyons 