Emily Brisse

Right now, my two children are entertaining themselves in the playroom. I've spent the past twenty minutes lying in bed, listening to them in the midst of the relationship they share outside of me or my husband. Someday I will write about this, about the way it makes me feel suspended between lake and sky on a perfectly calm day. But that is not the point of this post. I came here to craft a bit of a writing update: In the spring, I had a string of print publications, including essays in Grub Street, Lumina, Saw Palm, and December Magazine (I was a finalist in a contest for this one), plus a short story in New South . None of these are available online, unfortunately, but they were fun to receive, hold in my hands, and share with the people I can hold hands with. In the summer, I published an essay detailing my first experience with trapeze, called "Hup," in Tahoma Literary Review . You can hear me read it here (all my years of reading aloud to students hel

(Below, an oldie but a goodie, published first by Literary Mama in 2015. ) You were never much of a hunter. Pheasants, yes. Squirrels and chipmunks, I suppose, when you were younger. But you never came home from a weekend away with a buck in the bed of your truck, because you never had much interest in deer season and you owned a sedan. I imagine some people from other places can hardly conceive of a Midwestern man without a shotgun over his mantle, a closet full of blaze-orange jackets, a copy of  Field and Stream  next to the john. And yet when I think of you, I do see an outdoorsman. I see you paying attention to landscapes, to the shapes of clouds. I see you teaching me to love the world. The lessons looked like this: leaf piles in autumn, the way you would dive into them wildly. And this: two ends of a strong rope -- one tied to the front of my winter sled and the other around your waist -- with which you’d tug me behind you as you cross-country skied. And this: you, wal

There is something I want to say about you turning six. In some ways, it’s about how you look up sometimes, and in your eyes I see a knowledge that is more nuanced and vast than I was prepared to find. Yesterday I spent the morning of your birthday at your school, and while I sat with you at lunch—a room full of kindergartners and third graders and teachers and long tables and garbage cans designated for organics and recycling—I marveled at how you navigate it all without me. How you are doing so many hard things without thinking they are hard. How you are brave without knowing you are brave. How my instinct is to pulverize anything that would dare break your spirit, but I know I can’t, because now you are six, and turning at full tilt into the world. But in other ways, it’s about the way you look when we are reading in bed, about the way you nuzzle into my shoulder, the way you choose to hold my hand, even though it’s no longer a reflex. When you cry, you look young. When