Abby Frucht

Jane Ciabattari at Book Marks asks me to name five books that influenced my work on MAIDS.

And here, reader and writer Curtis Smith at JMWW brings a really smart eye to Maids, and asks me to look at the work I brought to it in new and different ways.

Here, author Ben Woodard and I parse out some of the technical, personal, and artistic decisions I made while writing Maids.

This little essay about the day my son's draft registration papers came in the mail won a Best of the Web award from Dzanc after it was published on Brevity Magazine.

Past Ten is an ongoing compilation of writers musing on what they were doing ten years ago. I was asked to write mine about the day ten years prior to March 11, 2021.  It opens with the monsters that climbed onto a bus in once of my dreams in order to let me know I had cancer.

This, about my sisters and I and our childhood encounter with Big Foot in a potato field.

Why did I hate reading, that year? Why did I stack all books unread behind me and try to watch tv instead?

I wrote this little essay, The Goodbye, about what I think about when I think about dying, for Raw Data from the Coronavirus blogspot. In addition to posting it here, I tweeted it...which makes for my first ever (i think) tweet.

True story?  Really?  Did I really try to find my boyfriend when he was lying right next to me in bed?

What's always amazed me about this piece, which has to do with an injury I got from surgery is the vitriol to be found in many of the readers' comments 

FOR HER BIRTHDAY her sister sends her a ring, a prim opal girded in diamonds on prongs, the sort of girlish jewel a wallflower might press against her teeth when called upon to answer embarrassing questions posed by nurse practitioners, the sort of gem their mom once wore when, blushing, she lowered her finger to the lip of her wineglass to trace discomfited circles around the rim as if to lasso those words—bosom, buttock, any bodily function—she couldn't bring herself, at forty, to speak aloud at the dinner table. Mom was a prude. Or so you would think....

My parents lost their life savings to Bernie Madoff. They will never get it back. Read my response to HBO's Wizard of Lies

Letterhead stationary, laundry folding, dinner table conversation, cracks in the linen closet. all play a part in my experience.

Here's my latest short story, Peeping Tom, which I wrote for Solstice. I write very slowly, and sometimes I have three or four pieces going (or not going, as the case may be) at once. Had Solstice not asked me to send them a story, this one would still be a cache of notes, a few lines going not nowhere exactly but someplace I couldn't name. It's my first ME TOO story, and like many of my stories, it belongs to a child.

I set this story in Oberlin, Ohio, where I lived in the 1980's and 90's, had my kids, and worked in The Mainstreet Mercantile Store and Tearoom. Is the tearoom still there?