Author Archives: Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“For me, the most evocative human sense involves what comes in at the ear. And one sound in particular has the power to conjure up my entire, sweet childhood, from my first moment of consciousness till the summer I left for Greece, closing behind me the door on Rain-Bird-drenched California. I hear a Rain Bird, […]

“I, however, had never seen anything like Theodore’s house, and I believe my first words were, ‘We have to get you out of here.’ There seemed no time to lose: I could not imagine sleeping one night in such a place, and was alarmed for our new friend, who had obviously been sleeping there, night […]

“The last time I saw Dr. James P. Derbin  (whom I knew as Phil), I was a child, and he was my best buddy. In the slides, there we are, clowning at Knossos: I am eleven; he is 27. My father (a lay analyst and Fulbright professor), one of Phil’s mentors-in-passing, shot the pictures of […]

“The year of work was intense and solitary. Helen, on her coast, set me tasks; I, on the other coast, took them on. One involved visualizing the mindful subtraction—element by element—of parts of my physical body, until . . . what, finally, was left? It would be inappropriate to document this meditation in full, here, […]

“Truly, my mother was a hard, hard act to follow. Her black chignon, her enormous hats, her flawless, Charles-of-the-Ritz make-up, her back-seamed stockings, their seams razor-straight, her high, high-heeled pumps, her three (never more) pieces of good jewelry . . . .  And then, there was her daughter, who would not sit still, and whose […]

“Repeat after me—with radical empathy: I am a poor, old, disabled, Queer (or Lesbian, or Trans), uneducated, neurodivergent, undocumented, Muslim (or Jewish), Black woman, living in America. Repeat after me, until your empathy is truly radical; until you inhabit each of these identities down to the marrow of your bones; until these women take up […]

“Maya Lin, we need you once again, it seems. But, this time, you will not be memorializing some 58,000 lost souls, but, rather, in America alone, by the time of Biden’s inauguration, over 300,0000. Ms. Lin, you’re going to need more granite. A lot more granite. And, if we are ever to heal from the […]

“In daylight, one person in the house—the straight, white male—regularly storms out to rage impotently at the squirrels. In the night, the insomniac (I) goes out to startle the raccoons on the largest feeder. Delicately, balancing like equilibrists, they lean out on ample haunches from the porch rails, gathering in seed with their sapient paws. […]

“At the beginning of ‘the curriculum that will be COVID,’ I read whatever I could find regarding the influenza pandemic of 1918, an experience that has all but vanished from contemporary memory with the deaths of the last of us who were affected by it. I wanted to educate myself about how viruses jump from […]

“A dear friend of mine, a Southern woman long expatriated to England, sent me the following letter, and I would like to share it, anonymously, with a larger readership . . . for its poignancy and precision. For its perfection in this time of woe. My friend would cast a wan eye on those alliterative […]