Michaela Carter's Blog

It's difficult to pinpoint just what makes The Glass Hotel so compulsive a read. It's not exactly the Ponzi scheme and the ghosts, nor is it the ease with which Mandel moves between the points of view of her riveting characters and effortlessly leaps between timelines. Studded with flashes of poetry, of crystalline observations that drill to the core of life, The Glass Hotel has a rhythm and a pace that makes it impossible to put down. A bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a remote five-star...

This week is Arts In Education Week, when we celebrate the Arts being an integral, inseparable part of education. This is my story about why the Arts in schools matters.At seven years old I was a shy and quiet girl. I was in the second grade, and I had a teacher who encouraged me to write. There was a statewide contest for children’s stories and she thought I should enter something. So I stayed inside at recess and I wrote my story about a girl and a magic pumpkin. I was a big Charlie Brown f...

In order to write, one must kill the angel of the house, claimed the great Virginia Woolf. This angel “was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily.” Woolf’s main point in her essay “Professions for Women” is that a woman, as a writer, cannot be sweet on the page if her gut tells her otherwise. She has to be honest.While this advice remains essential for today’s women writers,...

A riot is the language of the unheard.--Martin Luther King Jr.On the first of May twenty-five years ago, I woke up in Tijuana, having driven down from Los Angeles the day before to escape the chaos of the Rodney King riots, to escape the National Guard and the enforced curfews, to escape the fires and the smoke, the rage and the fear.I was on the brink of motherhood but I didn’t know it yet. All I knew was that I was on the edge of something. I had reached a precipice from which I could not t...

The night of the election, my partner and I didn’t watch the news. After eight or so, we didn’t check our phones for updates. We watched a Wes Anderson movie we’ve seen countless times instead. Whatever would happen would happen, so why cling to each state’s results, why let dread or false hope rule our evening?The next morning my partner looked up the news on his phone. “Trump won,” he said. I thought he was joking.But no. Overnight, the world had changed.I found I no longer felt safe in thi...

Wise, inquisitive, and heart-breakingly tender, Brinkley-Rogers' memoir moves seamlessly between the man he is now and the boy he was in 1959 when he was a sailor aboard the USS Shangri-La stationed off Japan. As much about the nature of memory and love as it is about life lived and reflected upon, Please Enjoy Your Happiness weaves poetry and effortless prose into a captivating tale of the beautiful, tragic woman he met in Yokosuka, Kaji Yukiko, who introduced him to Japanese poetry, to the...

It’s 1969, and fourteen year old Evie, who lives in the small town of Petaluma, is so good at not making waves she is practically invisible. But then she meets the older, free-spirited Suzanne, who lives outside of society’s rules.Inspired by Charles Manson and the infamous murders, Emma Cline’s beautifully rendered novel The Girls plunges below the circumstances, telling a story that haunts the reader—not just with its lurid details, but with the complex yearnings of its characters. No one i...

It is hot today. Mad Max kind of hot. I’ve heard it will be 120 in Phoenix, and as I drove through Sedona it was 113. On the deck of our house it is 105 and it’s 95 degrees on the bank of the river. In the river I’d guess it is 70. As you can imagine, I’m in the river every 20 minutes or so.Just now I swam the eddy upstream where I met the riffling current head on under water, wondering if it would be better to go around it, around the big boulder into the still pool, wondering which route th...

for my daughterBetween tides.  The lagoon indrawn,waiting to exhale.Baja.  San Ignacio.  Namesthat leave the mouthhalf open:a sigh in the night, windand the Milky Way, the dawn fog.On such a morning as this,at the endof the old century, you were bornto the songs of gray whales.Across water the silver of old mirrors,we motor toward the mouth,where the lagoon opens to the Pacific,where our small boatfloats & we wait.Eschrichtius robustus.A hush, a wish, a secret whisperedfrom one girl to the ne...