I should be dead … and not in a, let’s make an ironic statement kind of way … I really should be dead … and if you think typing that statement on to paper hits home … saying it out loud is ten times more potent.
Categories: Josh Poirier, Story Club Boston
So, I have just completed 10 years as a public school teacher in Washington, D.C. Don’t clap, actually, because I just quit. It was a difficult decision. I hated leaving a lot of my students.I had a student when I was a very young teacher. Ryan, in the middle of my lessons, would conduct these very wild conversations between his thumbs — who spoke their own thumb language.
Categories: First Person Arts, Jason Pittman
I teach Improvisation at Columbia College in the Theatre Department. While it is a required course for many theatre students, it is one of the easiest classes ever. It is creative gym. You don’t even have to improvise well. If you show up, participate, and do the two writing assignments – short essays that include the favorite hyphenate of every college student, double-spaced – you will pass. The only way to fail is to not show up. The university policy […]
Categories: Joe Janes, Story Club South Side
“Oh, You Shouldn’t Have” comes to us from Johanna Stein’s new book How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane, on sale now on Amazon, B&N, andIndiebound. See more at jojostein.com It’s late December and I’ve just squeezed a nine-pound girl child through my hoo-ha. She’s being cleaned in the hospital nursery while her new, freaked-out father keeps watch. I am still in the delivery room, feeling exhausted, slightly throbbing, by mostly happy that it’s over and I no […]
Categories: Johanna Stein, Story Club North Side
The bathrooms at LaGuardia Airport remind me of the Taste of Chicago’s Port-a-Potties, but I have to drop a deuce before I head to Manhattan. Car service would be $50, a taxi $30, a shuttle $25, so I decide to walk to the M60 bus at the terminal stop because I’m in no hurry. I’ve traveled from Midway to LaGuardia via Spirit Airlines to see my daughter, Madison, who is three-years-old, and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. The M60 […]
Categories: Shannon Cason, Story Club North Side
Seven hundred and seventy-two years ago, December eleventh, at about dawn, a man on the other side of the world died after a night of heavy drinking. He was fifty-two. If he had lived to be fifty-four or fifty-five, chances are very good that no one in this room would exist.
Categories: Rob Norris, Story Club North Side
My mother was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2010, less than a month before my wedding. After that, weird things started happening to me. I began to dream about Jack White.
Categories: Jen Bosworth, Story Club North Side
The first time I ever masturbated, I buried my underwear in the backyard. Yes. You heard me correctly. I was eleven the first time “dirty love juice” had ever come out of my … no. No. I couldn’t even say it. Good Catholics did not do this. They did not masturbate. They did not say the word penis outside of a doctor’s office. That shit was vulgar. And at that very moment, as I lay in bed soaked in fluids, […]
Categories: Paul Canada, Story Club Minneapolis
There is nothing worse than leaving a party. I am the absolute worst at it. It’s not the leaving so much as having to say all of those dreadful goodbyes. The hugs, the handshakes, the air kisses—it all makes me anxious. I prefer a nice Irish goodbye.
Categories: Jeremy Owens, Story Club North Side
