Erika Raskin's Blog

This is our neighborhood vulture rocking a meta birdhouse fascinator, looking very glamorous, as usual. Morticia is a trip. She arrived a year ago, rising from the ground like a sail being hoisted towards the sky, leaving my spouse and I wearing matching expressions of bafflement. What is that? Eventually she got up from the unkempt pasture, and pulled into a standing position, one wing at the ready, the other hanging loosely to the side. When I went to see if she was okay she hopped-flew...

I was listening to Falling by Alicia Keys this morning and remembered the time I played it for my dad. When we got to the end, he said, “Again.” I hit replay. I miss him. So I’m rerunning something I wrote after he died. With some addendums. Despite his general decline the idea that he might actually not be here didn’t really occur to any of us. And, in truth, probably not to him either. He used to talk about adhering to his Live Forever Diet (which mostly consisted of all things chocolate)...

I’ve been examining the background of people being interviewed on TV ever since Covid home studios sprang up around the country. Private lives sneaking through the frame is juicy and I am here for all of it. (I’m a writer, I can’t help it.) Scenery in impersonal TV studios is not revelatory—though if someone is being forced to sit at a glass table top in a group chat situation other information is available. Like footwear. Or nerves. A direct line onto a juddering leg is sadistic. (I’m...

I love words in general and names in particular. I collect them. And not to toot my own or anything, but I’m a pro at giving them out to other people, too. I’ve helped many with this momentous task. Not just relatives, acquaintances, too. Excluding my own off-spring, Taryn, Emma Lise, Hannah Grace, Mariah Sofia, Natalie, Hadley Ann, Tess, Charlotte, Michael and Daisy have me to thank. (Or their parents to blame. They had final say.) There were also a few more that I should have been consulted...

Photo by Ofspace LLC on Unsplash Trump’s recent acquisition of the Nobel Prize reminds me of the time I came upon this mysterious room in the basement of an esteemed American hospital. The door had been left ajar and I peered in. (Duh.) It was basically a mausoleum for old plaques pried off walls and entryways. The markers that had previously announced honor — and probably hung with some fanfare— were now stacked in piles of ephemera. Those awards, which had included naming rights for...

I was at a newish friend’s house for the first time and we were chatting when out of nowhere she asked if I was any good at art placement. ‘Not bad,’ I answered. (So long as you don’t look at the misguided holes in the dry wall behind the frames.) She explained that she’d just painted the den and wanted to mix things up. ‘How about furniture placement?’ she asked. I tried not to jump up. Rearranging rooms is my crack. Completely untrained in interior design, nothing makes me happier than...

This is Morticia. Over the summer she (he?) rehabbed a hurt wing between our house and the one next door, breaking bread with feral cats and deer while also being fed by her brethren and people alike. While I didn’t look for roadkill , I did sprinkle the yard with Purina. Which has got to be a step up in the culinary department. Our neighbors whose porch she claimed to actually convalesce on weren’t huge fans (think smaller birds and windshields) but they did tolerate her need for shelter....

So, pretty much every old saw about old age is 100% true. There’s crepitus (the medical onomatopoeia-ous description of creaky joints), and the inevitable geriatric bitch sessions where individualized assaults on the body are compared in groups of two or more, (except, of course for the unmentionable issues which are unmentionable for a reason); and the whole-scale disappearance of words from mental dictionaries (though, thankfully adjacent synonyms seem to hang on longer.) There also seems...

unsplash Erika Raskin Oct 02, 2025 This essay, called Tales of a Sub, originally aired on WVTF public radio . Years ago, before I decided to bite the bullet and embrace the soul crushing rejection that often goes with Being a Writer, I decided to try my hand at substitute teaching. I realized my mistake almost immediately. Part of the problem was Miss T., a school secretary who’d call before the sun rose to line-up her fill-ins. She scared the hell out of me. And not just because she carried...

Erika Raskin Sep 26, 2025 this (terrifying) actual poster photo was not included in the letter. My letter to the editor -- Richmond Times Dispatch What I’d like to say to those consider joining U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: The footage of masked authorities descending on other people reminds me of the Stanford prison experiment (which has freaked me out for half a century). Undertaken only a generation or so past the horrors of German war crimes, academic researchers wanted to...