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Articles by Audrey Stimson
What Song Will You Sing?
International Women’s Day Dedicated to those girls who will and Billie Holiday What song will you sing? will it rhyme or chime and help us waste time? or could it curve and swerve when you get the nerve? will it smack and crack then take us right back? will it toke and smoke or make us more woke? will it rattle the cages and fight for better wages? will it listen to the crone and we put down the stone? will it open your heart with a feeling you’re doing your part?
Is Santa Really My Dad?
Is Santa Really My Dad? “You’re dumb. All girls are dumb,” my brother Robin said. I remember those words. They echoed inside my body for many years and came to me like a loud, insistent whisper I heard every night in my dreams. The details of that day were vague and yet so very vivid. Childhood memories are like a snow globe. As soon as you shake them up, they fog the scene with bits and pieces of the moment flying about like emotions you can’t control.
This Is Not a Story About Writing
This Is Not a Story About Writing I was talking a walk the other day, trying to get somewhere. But then I stopped. I froze in my tracks. Couldn’t move. My little feet were nailed to the ground. I looked up. There he was. It was time to consult the Oracle. The little gnome in the sky who had all the answers. “How did this happen? You know…life?” “Well as soon as they cut the embilical cord, you are no longer in that cozy little womb. You are all one your own.
How A City Restored My Love for America
How A City Restored My Love for America The young girl in the pink puff jacket was sitting on a small four-wheeled plastic car low to the ground. Her bright white teeth were expressing something big, an enthusiasm only matched by her shuffling feet kicking her body into motion. She spun and spun in circles around her parents sitting on the curb of Martin Luther King Boulevard in Los Angeles.
How Being A Witch Taught Me How Not To Hate
I often think of what really scares me. Is it death? Or ghosts? A loud sound in the night? Monsters? Or dark forests? No, I think the scariest thing in life is being hated. I remember one Halloween a long time ago. It was once upon a time in a faraway country that didn’t celebrate Halloween. But we lived near a compound of American expats who all were eager to trick-or-treat even if the world around them didn’t know what the heck we were doing. I was small but not too small. I was nine years old.
What Does It Feel Like to Be a Journalist?
TRAUMA | HEALING Trigger - this story contains passages about details imagined and true about a school mass shooting. It was when the golden retriever comfort dog came to lick my hand that I knew something was wrong. I was in Rosberg, Oregon, covering the aftermath of a mass shooting for a television network. I had gotten to town a day earlier than the rest of my crew.
Sorry I Ate You Little Fish
STRANGE FOOD We had ridden our bicycles 15 miles down the coast to have lunch at a fish market in Redondo Beach last weekend. While enjoying our fish and chips and a cold beer I remembered a story about the strangest fish meal I ever had. It must have been about 35 years ago now. I was in Jamaica. We were staying in Negril and wanted to see another part of the island to get away from the crowds. So we rented motor scooters and drove to Little Bay about 45 minutes south.
What Can I Say About War in Israel?
WAR The lawn mower hums next door. The cut grass smells of summer though it's October. Off in the distance, the familiar sound of an ambulance siren whirls across the Los Angeles streets. There is an emergency somewhere here at home. A slight breeze pushes my small rainbow-colored umbrella back and forth like a metronome. My world is soft with no hard edges, predictable and easy.
I Won't Be Silenced Any Longer
WRITING All of our voices matter. I look at the desk where I write, and a crowd of inanimate objects stares back at me. Go on, tell them. Tell them the truth! I hear them saying something. I lean in to hear them better. GO ON TELL THE EVERYTHING. YOU GO GIRL, WRITE! The jar of rainbow-colored markers, the plastic tub of paintbrushes, the paper beads, magic markers, and a plastic dog toy squeaker, all agree and shout in unison. Writing wasn't given to me at birth.
How I Cured Myself of Perfectionism
I am having a problem with my garden. The spot where my tomatoes once flourished, just along the side of the green stucco wall of my garage, is now producing substandard tomatoes. The plants that used to produced plump red and orange cherry tomatoes now give me fruit no bigger than a pea. I water and caress the vines and beg them to grow. I do whatever I can to help. I let the sunshine and soil do the rest. But nothing helps.
Are You Sick and Tired of Waiting?
To Be Human I am tired of waiting. But waiting is what I do best. I wait for the alarm clock to go off in the morning so I can get out of bed. If I wake up before the chime jars me out of my dream world, I don't leave my bed. I don't dare. I wait until the device says it's time, because I don't trust my body clock, it could be off, so I just wait. I wait for the shampoo I ordered from a discount beauty supply shop in Kentucky to be delivered. I tracked the package.
Jack and Jill Went up the Hill and I Came Tumbling Down
What I remember is that Jack was a boy and Jill was a girl. They both went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. They were together, at least at the beginning of the story. A story sounds better when it rhymes, when the words link together, and when the characters hold hands and find harmony. And everyone falls and stumbles a bit, you know when Jack broke his crown and Jill came tumbling down.
Is The Arrival Fallacy Keeping You Down?
It's a disease with a symptom called "arrival fallacy." Arrival fallacy means that we think that if we have something, or get somewhere, we will be happy. Once we win the lottery, get that perfect apartment, find the perfect guy, have the perfect kids, or finish the perfect book we will have arrived. Then we will be forever wrapped inside this continuous state of bliss. But we all know that is not what really happens.
Why Do I Go to the Mountain?
What I learn when I become one with a mountain. Sometimes I want to touch the sky. I want my fingers to slip into the clouds and caress whatever is there. Sometimes I go to places that get me as close as I can get to those clouds. The higher I go the better I feel.
World Cup Starts
By Audrey Stimson And why am I watching? I turned on the television and looked at the long stretch of green grass with a small round object kicked around the field by young men in red and white jerseys. The hum of chants from the fans in the crowd bounces off the air-conditioned stadium walls like a unifying hymn of encouragement in a song the world sings every four years.
Writing About Wild Things Makes Me Sad
By Audrey Stimson Travels through a disappearing world. Photo by Crispin Jones on Unsplash Sometimes I get sad when I sit down to write about nature. Because my words may be describing something that vanishes. Will my words be the only thing that remains? I realize that I have to choose my words carefully.
When Does a Trip End?
By Audrey Stimson Alaska Travel A Yukon River Adventure in Alaska that will stay part of me forever. Photo by author, Audrey Stimson. I often ask myself, "when does a trip end?" Is it when you stop hearing the twirling water splash against the fiberglass canoe? Or when you no longer see the eroded river banks where spindly trees lean over the water like limp children's...
What Is America to Me?
The stories we tell ourselves define who we are but we can do better than that, come on! I walk through the front door of my house and look around. I live in America, in California, in Del Rey, on a street named Sanford. This is my neighborhood, where the lawns are parched and the dogs are plentiful. A place where people who drive electric cars have stopped watering the decorative patches of grass on their front lawns so that they can do the right thing when wasting water is the wrong thing.
I Spent the Last 50 Years Fighting My Own Battles With Hate
War and Hate But it didn’t win and never will Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash I don’t want to hate. I never wanted to hate. I spent the last five decades trying not to hate. Sometimes it’s been hard. Hate is a strong word. Saying it makes you snap your tongue against your teeth as if you were spitting it out like a bitter seed. When hate takes hold of you, it reaches down inside and brings out the most visceral primitive part of a person, the part that wants to lash out and kill. Hate blinds us.
What is War? Horrible!
And that’s why you shouldn’t change the channel Image by S. Bartels from Pixabay Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Ukraine, so do our tears. The Russians started their invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24, 2022. I woke up the next day crying, even though I hadn’t yet seen the pictures yet. No one had. I continued to cry every day for a week, then two weeks, then three. I cried harder once I saw the images. I am not in Ukraine; I am in Los Angeles.
Please Give Us Back Peace
I don't know war, but I know it very well. I grew up listening to the horrors of living through the bombing of Berlin at the end of WWII from my mother and grandmother.
How Covid Taught Me to Get off My Butt and Create
Creativity Is there a light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels I remember when it began. I remember hearing that something escaped. It was an invisible menace that crawled out of the blood of a butchered animal — zoonotic was the word. They said it happened at a market in Wuhan, China. Then one day it came closer. Someone in California got it. Then more people and more and more and more. Then Americans died. Then, in an instant, our lives changed forever.
Memorial to The Stolen People
Glass jars, each filled with a different color of dirt. hallowed ground, the dirt of the killing places beige, black, brown, grey, and red dirt. I stand. …I am not able to say anything. — I let myself imagine their ancestral homelands, the soils of fertile rich other places, of coffee, of cinnamon, of nutmeg, of ruby red peppers, and spice, — I look again, I see the shades of our past, the shades of our truth, I see the shades of America, And I see … my reflection in the glass.
War is Not a Machine, it’s People
Journalism and War I saw what happens to a person who goes to war, and it ain’t pretty Photo by Lance Corporal Samantha L. Jones, USMC Second Battle of Fallujah, Iraq Wikimedia Commons I woke up this morning with the words “The US sending troops…” across the top of my phone. The banner notification was a news flash. War? Troops? Are young men and women going into harm’s way? I have spent 30 years covering news for various television outlets. In America, news often means war.
Braiding Ribbons
How we remember our land: Hunkpati Sioux Ashly Hall with her daughter Amilliana July 2019— Photo by author Disclaimer — these are the observations of the writer who went to the area around New Town, North Dakota at the Bakken oil play and met Ashley Hall and her daughter Amilliana. This piece was written in their honor. The mother covered the long black braids with a weave of pink and green ribbons.
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