Click below to listen to me read Chapter 4: I Prefer Gay , from my book Care & Feeding . To be the first to receive exclusive content...

I was okay with getting rid of the chickens. My new goal was Savannah. We sold them to a guy in Eupora through the Tradewinds...

Mark and Elizabeth had degrees in Historic Preservation and were busy buying houses, fixing them up and renting them out. Their motto was...

I made new friends at Penland, too. Mark and Elizabeth. Initially over beer. It was a dry county, and I didn’t bring any and they had...

When there was a lull in Mama talking about Fucking Florida, she tossed the Penland School of Crafts catalogue to me. Said I should go. ...

Mama loved to plan a party and our wedding was her time to shine. I have the black notebook dedicated to its every detail with receipts....

Wayne and I had an Episcopal wedding in the church I grew up in on December 26th, 1992.  He was 21 and I was 22. We were married by...

I knew I needed help when I cried in the shower. It was a shock to feel my feelings. There were a lot of them. I went to see Father Craig...

Getting in that van was the first time I didn’t mind her, and it was weighing on me. Part of me was like, why didn’t we just come back a...

The process of a baby chick hatching out is called going from Pip to Zip. It begins with the hidden, Internal Pip. The baby chick uses...

We loved going to Fucking Florida. Couldn’t get enough. Sometimes we went to Florida twice a year. Picked up friends along the way. We...

Wayne got a pair of turkeys, the last birds we raised out on River Bend. He loved those turkeys a lot and they were really bad....

The chicks feathered out fast. It was time to make the move from the brooder to the big fenced in coop. Only two had a little...

We loved cats. Dogs were okay. Had Ulen, a free chocolate lab, Minna, an orange bobtail cat and Bob, a white cat with a green eye and a...

I was straight married to a man I went to Kindergarten with. When he asked me to marry him, I replied, “Can I have chickens?” He said...

Mama had a good eye for opportunities to get her students, and me, out of Mississippi. My freshman year of college, she tossed a Better...

Eighth grade. Mama got drunk and caught her hair on fire when a former student turned beautician, Anthony, came over. They were drinking...

As drunk as Mama was, she did a good job making sure I became a well-rounded person. She put me with people who exposed me to things she...

I loved Mama in the morning, especially on a Saturday morning in the Spring. Mama would have a cup of CDM coffee, black. She’d make me...

The first time I caught on people outside our family knew Mama drank too much was at a reception of  Man of LaMancha . The actors made...