writing
Yesterday (Excerpts)
Paperbark Literary Magazine (Winter 2022)
“We lived in a land that melted. Melted, evaporated—it seemed as though there were two layers to the world: the sea of mud beneath us, with stones and bones and rabbits and snakes swimming through it, and then everything above, we who could wave our arms without restraint and go tumbling wildly among the air. Everything living or dead was drawn to the barrier. Pebbles rose by night in rough colonies. I wasn’t a clumsy child but I ran everywhere I went, and I often tripped flat against the distinguishing plane between sky and earth. I’d end each day with the ground streaked on my palms and knees to remind me where I belonged.”
The Unraveling of Absence
The Massachusetts Review (Summer 2020)
“Rumor and reputation claim that New Englanders are standoffish, insular, puritanical. A New Englander by choice though not by birth, I defend myself as introverted, and wouldn’t you have to be, to survive a winter where snow mounts up outside your door?
But the illusion of isolation comes both from the darkness of winter and the lushness of summer. Only autumn breaks the spell, when falling leaves reveal birds’ nests perched in trees and houses that were always just beyond that stand of oaks. These resting places emerge warily from hiding, the houses pretending to be as empty as the abandoned nests, emptier than the graveyards even.
In the darkest of winter, lights refute this emptiness, visible for miles in the four o’clock dusk: here we are, they say. These trees that seem dead are not, and their gift of bareness allows us to gleam. No more hiding. We’re calling you home one by one. ”
We Need Stories of Dystopia Without Apocalypse:Climate Change and the Human Imagination
Electric Literature (Summer 2017)
“At this moment, we need stories that make the realities of climate change concrete and pervasive and of human origin, as well as viscerally emotional when it comes to the struggles of our descendants. We need stories of dystopia, but not apocalypse.”
25 Questions to Ask Students at the MFA Program that Just Accepted You
McSweeney's Internet Tendency (Spring 2017)
“If your writing practice called for only writing while drinking single-origin coffee and casting your sad eyes over a waterfall that no longer powers a mill, could you make that work in your town?”
A Lamentation of Swans
Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal (Summer 2016)
Nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers
“‘What is lamentation?’ they ask her, and then, ‘What are swans?’
‘Lamentation means crying,’ she tells them. ‘Swans—swans were white and had long necks and orange beaks. No, they didn’t cry, they didn’t sing much except supposedly right when they—please just copy down the letters. Remember with cursive to go back and cross the ts.’”
A Head Start That Lasts a Lifetime
Exchange Magazine (2012-2016)
Emmalie contributed articles on Head Start and early childhood education to Exchange Magazine for more than four years. Search by author to find her work.