First of the Month by Courtney Gillette
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March 2021: The Last Anniversary
March 1, 2021
The last time I was gathered with my whole family was February 29, 2020. Leap Day. It was a bridal shower tea party at a fancy hotel in Philadelphia. When my...
February 2021: Snow Day
February 1, 2021
My favorite thing about a snow day is the quiet. When we went to bed last night, the world was still, but there wasn’t any snow. I woke up in the very early...
January 2021: Otherwise
January 1, 2021
In the second grade, we learned about ones and tens and hundreds. Our school had just received bright yellow plastic cubes and rods to show us how these...
December 2020: A Very Special Christmas Volume 3
December 1, 2020
As a teenager I insisted upon having my own Christmas tree. This meant that I took a pair of scissors out to our backyard and used them to gnaw at the sappy...
November 2020: Reading Logs
November 1, 2020
In elementary school I kept a reading log. It was always for class, and looked different every year. In the fourth grade there was a paper we filled out each...
October 2020: The Privilege of Surprise
October 1, 2020
In June of 2017 I was attending a writers workshop in Aspen, CO. One night we all gathered in a fancy bar for a reading and panel discussion with some of the...
September 2020: Coincidence
September 1, 2020
The first time I meditated was in Ms. Klinger’s English class. She lowered the shades and lit a candle at the front of the room and looked seriously nervous...
August 2020: Five Years
August 1, 2020
Five years ago I quit my job. It was the first time I had ever left one job without having another one lined up, and it still defines how I think about that...
July 2020: Where We Live Now
July 1, 2020
On Saturday we moved to an apartment in Beacon, NY. It’s a 3 bedroom apartment in an old house with an upstairs and downstairs. My favorite place in the...
June 2020: Defund The Police
June 1, 2020
What else is there to write about right now? I want to offer up some actions that people can take, specifically white people. I also want to make myself...
May 2020: It Was Going To Look Like This
May 1, 2020
In November 2018 I called the events coordinator at Housing Work Bookstore Cafe and asked about booking a wedding date. Planning was second nature to me;...
April 2020: Indelible
April 1, 2020
I moved to New York City on August 26, 2001. My mother and father drove me to Manhattan so I could move into the dorms before classes started. There was a...
March 2020: Rabbit Rabbit
March 1, 2020
In our very early twenties there was a time that M. and I both lived in Spain. I was doing a semester abroad in Madrid. She had dropped out of college for a...
February 2020: This Is What It Looks Like
February 2, 2020
This is a story I heard a few years ago, the kind of story that gets passed around. As I remember it, a woman (who I think is named Gemma) told the story to...
January 2020: Checklist for Today
January 1, 2020
Wake up. Drink coffee, even if it is the warmed up coffee left over from last night’s dinner party. It’s still good, especially on the couch in the sunshine...
December 2019: The Decade In Review
December 1, 2019
Ten years ago you were twenty seven. You lived on Pacific Street with two roommates and your bedroom window had ivy crawling up the sides. It was the summer...
November 2019: Days by Philip Larkin
November 1, 2019
On the first day of class this semester, my co-teacher shared the poem Days by Philip Larkin with our students. It’s very short, and it goes like this: I...
October 2019: Narrative Distance
October 1, 2019
Last week I taught a class about creative nonfiction, and we talked about narrative distance. Narrative distance, to me, is that perspective within an essay,...
September 2019: Notes from the future
September 2, 2019
When I started this project four years ago, I liked the intention of meditating on the passage of time. Anniversaries and milestones are something I often...
August 2019: Girls On Film
August 1, 2019
On my laptop I keep a folder marked “old photos.” The strange thing about coming of age before the advent of social media is how different the archiving...
July 2019: Summer Camp
July 1, 2019
When I was a kid we went to a summer camp at our elementary school. There was a weird thrill to being inside our school in the summer. The bulletin boards...
June 2019: Gay Book Buff
June 1, 2019
When this photo was printed in the Philadelphia Gay News, I was negative three months old. Which is to say that there is a realm of possibility that my...
May 2019: Run, Hide, Fight
May 1, 2019
Last night was my last class of the semester. I brought cookies. The students brought more snacks and we had a feast of cupcakes and Belgian chocolates and...
April 2019: Perspective
April 1, 2019
Last month Emily and I went to Paris. It had been twenty years since Emily had left the country, and neither of us had ever been. The steady drumbeat of...
March 2019: French Lessons
March 1, 2019
The summer before the seventh grade, I got a letter in the mail. Because of my good grades, the junior high school said I was recommended to take a foreign...
February 2019: The Ones That Astonish Me
February 1, 2019
On Saturday nights some time we get dinner before 6:00pm when the restaurants are mostly empty. It feels like heaven and we won’t live here forever. A...
January 2019: Time Capsule
January 1, 2019
When I was in the sixth grade I was confirmed. Sixth grade was a rough age for any ritual, but especially one in church. As part of our confirmation, we had...
December 2018: Santa Claus
December 1, 2018
When I was a child I believed in Santa, and I believed in Santa until I was in the sixth grade. I was a very gullible child. The word teachers used to...
November 2018: Try To Praise The Mutilated World
November 1, 2018
In the fall of 2003, I studied abroad in Madrid. One of my classes was on Caribbean literature. On the first day of class, the twelve or thirteen students...
October 2018: You Will Need All Your Anger Now
October 1, 2018
Once, years ago, my roommate ordered a pizza. It was 2004 or so, back when ordering a pizza meant calling the pizzeria and waiting by the door with cash....
September 2018: End of Summer
September 1, 2018
A few weeks ago Emily and I were cleaning out some things in our apartment and I found a poem. It was ripped from the New Yorker in that tell tale font, the...
August 2018: Air Conditioning
August 1, 2018
When I was little we lived in a brick row house, and in the summer months we opened all the windows to try and make it cool. There was an industrial fan my...
July 2018: Time To Be Alive
July 1, 2018
When I was in the sixth grade, I read a book called The Girl Who Owned A City. It was about a dystopian future in which children woke up and all the grown...
June 2018: Everyday Pride
June 1, 2018
I first heard the word lesbian when I was in the fourth grade. I was at recess and innocently holding hands with my friend Angela Santos when Monroe Jones...
May 2018: The Creek
May 1, 2018
I grew up with a creek behind where I lived. We lived in a row house on a block of row houses, and across the street, behind the houses, was a wide field...
April 2018: Maps
April 1, 2018
I’ve been thinking of drawing a map. It would be a map of all the landmarks of my youth, all the moments where my former self stands in the shadows of my...
Coming soon...
March 13, 2018
In 2015, I started First of the Month, one new essay every month on the topic of time, youth, spiritual growth and the mistakes we make. (I’m like the...
March 2018: The Opposite of Guilt
March 1, 2018
The first prayer I ever memorized was the act of contrition. It’s opening line is, “O my God, I am heartily sorry, for having offended thee.” I was eight....
Waldenbooks
February 1, 2018
I used to steal books. It wasn't my idea. In high school I worked at the Waldenbooks in the Exton Square Mall. I had my interview for the job in the food...
January 2018: feast on your life
January 1, 2018
On new year’s day in 2006, I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine. There was a woman who was older than me and I’d gone home with her. I woke up with one of my...
December 2017: On Endings
December 1, 2017
A few years ago a friend posted an interview with Jo Ann Beard. It was about her novel In Zanesville, and had a question about the last sentence in the book....
November 2017: Time Sickness
November 1, 2017
This morning I listened to a meditation about time sickness and then promptly fell back asleep. Time sickness, as it was described, is the feeling that comes...
September 2017: Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist
September 2, 2017
A few weeks ago I was told I needed an echo. It was a new doctor who saw my blood pressure and my EKG and said I would have to come back in a few hours for...
August 2017: Simple Peach Compote
August 1, 2017
In college I had a professor who prompted us to write about our refrigerators. I was 19 and lived in an apartment in Spanish Harlem with two recent college...
July 2017: Blueberry Pecan Galette
July 1, 2017
The tree behind our apartment is overgrown. It's always been the best tree, a surprise that we didn't fully realize when we moved in in the early spring....
April 2017: Elvis' Favorite Pound Cake
April 2, 2017
One of my favorite things about working at the nursery school was that there were always snacks. From the day of my interview, I noticed that the office...
March 2017: Kale + Pasta
March 1, 2017
I met David Johnson in 2007 or 2008, in that way that I can't precisely remember meeting so many good New Yorkers in my life. David was a gentle giant, as...
February 2017: Turkey Ricotta Meatballs
February 1, 2017
When I was twenty, I read the Marjane Satrapti memoir Persepolis. I remember finishing the first volume when I was on a bus to Boston, curled up against the...
January 2017: Flourless Chocolate Cake
January 1, 2017
There are some recipes that I’ve used a dozen times but can never remember how I found them. What was the original occasion that lead me to this massive...
December: Butternut Squash Galette
December 1, 2016
On election night, I baked a galette. It's a hearty fall recipe filled with cheese and bright colors that can feed two people for days on end. Both Emily and...
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