Being Latina/e/o/x Series

Snapshot: A Hyphenated Coexistence

My grandmother from Peru remarried at 81 to Don from Dayton, Ohio. She didn’t speak English and Don doesn’t speak Spanish, but they managed to find their own language. Together, they created a unique American love story, far from the life she left behind in Lima. […]

Being Mixed-Race Series

Foreword to ‘Mixed,’ a Journalism Book about Mixed-Race Families in the US

In this Foreword for Nicole Zelniker’s journalism book about mixed-race families, Julián Esteban Torres López centers Mixed as evidence of one of The Nasiona’s strongest pillars: the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some facts cannot discover. Mixed takes us on a journey and helps us glimpse into overlooked worlds and engage the spectrum of human experience. […]

Photograph by Nathan Walker on Unsplash.
Columns

Confronting Our Creative Fears

Our best work as writers often begins as fear and self-doubt. While it feels like failure, it is actually the call to collaborate with our inner creative forces. The challenge is not to avoid these insecurities but to embrace them and by doing so unlock our own potential. […]

Photograph by Joel Fulgencio on Unsplash.
Columns

Perspective

Perspective is more than just a specific view of things, it is the parallel lines that spread outward in all directions but are all sourced from a singular experience. Memoir doesn’t just ask for the what, but also the why, even if that why can never be answered. […]

Photograph of Heidi Harris, by Jendog Lonewolf.
Columns

The Tall, Tall Tales of Heidi Harris

Heidi Harris is a self-taught musician and vocalist whose creative practice is based on an exploration and intermingling of traditional and non-traditional sound sources. A child of New Weird America, New Hampshire-based Harris is known for coloring outside the margins. Let’s put our feet on the ground with them red heels on and let’s go and row … row into dreams, comforting haunts, and sensations of being young or of some psychedelic foreign place with Harris as our tour guide in this two-part series of interviews. […]

Photograph by Cristian Newman on Unsplash.
Columns

Authenticity in Memoir

What keeps us from being authentic in our writing? Fear, shame, and ego, to name a few reasons, but authenticity can create connection and help readers recognize themselves in even the strangest of stories. To elevate your memoir beyond reminiscing you must bring your most authentic self to the page. […]

Odilon Redon, "It Was a Hand, Seemingly as Much of Flesh and Blood as My Own, plate 4 of 6," lithograph in black on ivory China paper laid down on white wove paper, 1896, The Stickney Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago.
Columns

The Power of Story

Stories are the foundation of our civilizations and our societies. Our legends and myths, our scientific discoveries and our explorations, can inform and influence us both individually and collectively. But what separates us also holds […]