A Year in Review

A Year in Review

It would be easy to write a list of all the things that were unexpected about 2020. All the things that went wrong. We were shuttered in our homes for months. Some of us lost incomes, others dug themselves into debt. Our friends and family got sick. We missed them and the places we hoped to travel to and experience with the ones we love.

It’s been a hard year, and I admit I’ve had it much easier than many of my neighbors. I have a job and was fortunate to be promoted. In my new role, I serve as both a strategic storyteller for my university’s central communications office and support campuswide diversity communications. My daughter, Alba, was born, and my wife and I have enjoyed watching her grow into a curious, spirited, and fearless little girl over the past 10 months.

That’s why, out of gratitude for the ways 2020 has been good to me, I’m writing this list to acknowledge the year’s many bright spots.

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Can My 9-Month Old American Daughter Love Everton?

Originally published for Toffeeweb

Alba in her Everton sweater
Alba proudly representing her colors during a stroll at a local park

It wasn’t quite déjà vu or nostalgia, but as we sat there watching as Everton Ladies defeated Liverpool 1–0 in the Merseyside Derby this past November—Alba in her high chair beside the TV tossing Cheerios casually to the floor for the dog, me nearby working from the couch on my laptop—I remembered a similar afternoon more than a decade ago. 

I was in New Jersey at the kitchen table in my parent’s second-floor apartment watching as Everton lost 3–0 to Sporting Lisbon to tumble out of the 2009–10 Europa League. Like a boy newly in love, I was in my first full season as an Everton supporter. The optimism of youth had not yet been trampled by the cruelty of the world. Naively, I wished that God might indulge the virtuosity of my decision to support the Toffees with a championship trophy I could shove in the faces of my friends who had raised disbelieving eyebrows when I swore allegiance to a Premier League side not named Manchester United, Chelsea, or Arsenal.

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Inheriting a Love for the Outdoors

Inheriting a Love for the Outdoors

Originally published for Latino Outdoors

I was 7 years old the first time I watched my dad clean a catfish. We were in the kitchen of the old ranch house in the Pocono Mountains where we’d go every summer to escape the city. He cut off its head. Even separated from its body, the fish’s lips smacked together like it was still breathing. I was terrified. And strangely fascinated. The same feeling I had had a few years earlier at my grandparent’s house on the dirt road side of Capitan Bermudez in Argentina, where my grandfather slaughtered a chicken and let it run headless through the yard.

For men like them, when it came to blood and guts, there was never any blushing or hesitation. As for me, I could not have turned out more different.

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Feature Writing Award for “Into the Light”

Feature Writing Award for “Into the Light”

In August, I won the Tennessee College Public Relations Association’s silver award in feature writing for my profile of Maddy Banic, a mental health advocate and former University of Tennessee Lady Vols swimmer who earned a national title in her last NCAA championships.

The story was first published as the cover story for Accolades Magazine, an annual print publication of the University of Tennessee’s College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. It was reprinted in the spring/summer edition of Torchbearer, the university’s official alumni magazine.

Here’s an excerpt from the story. You may read more at the hyperlinks above:

Banic had fought too hard for it to end like this. The depression diagnosis her freshman year; the panic attack at the 2017 NCAA finals that saw her scratched from two events and hospitalized; the near suicide attempt months later in her apartment; the three-month NCAA-enforced separation from a team that wasn’t sure it wanted her back anyway. This was Banic’s final national championship as a collegiate swimmer, her last chance to leave with a medal—not for herself but for the teammates who took her back and voted her their captain in the fall of 2018, entrusting her to lead them.

With an evening final in the team 200-yard medley relay remaining, [head coach Matt] Kredich issued Banic a challenge: collect yourself and lead your teammates, he told her.

“She looked at me and took a deep breath,” Kredich remembers. “And she said, ‘OK, I can do that.’”

Hours later, Banic, Meghan Small, Nikol Popov, and Erika Brown won gold. It was Tennessee’s fourth NCAA relay title and Banic’s first national title. It was a moment. But even as Banic stood beside her teammates on the podium wearing a coonskin cap and a wide-eyed grin—joy erupting from the parts of her that had hurt for so long—she knew it was not the finish.

“This sport is something you do—it’s not who you are,” Banic says. “You can step aside and then come back. You don’t have to give up. You don’t have to hide that you’re struggling. You can seek help.”

Discovering Peace on the River

Discovering Peace on the River

Originally published for Tenkara Angler

My dad told the story again in late June in Jonathan’s workshop, with saltwater, spin, and fly rods hanging on hooks above his head and Jonathan, my fly fishing sensei, sitting with a fat cigar in mouth on a stool beside his tying table, listening.

“I would set Brian up, then I would tell him: don’t reel it in until you feel a bite,” Dad recounted. In this story, he turns to my brother, Victor, and sets his bobber and hooks on a small minnow we had caught in a stream feeding the small lake in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. Before Victor can cast I’m already reeling in my line. “Did you feel a bite?” Yeah, yeah, I say. On the other end the dying minnow, whole, flaps in the water.

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Fly Fishing Trip

Fly Fishing Trip

A short story dedicated to a friend, Jonathan

The fly was an olive green color, and in the grey cloudlight you could see the shimmer from the tinsel which wrapped around its fat inch-long body as it danced feet above the clear blue waters of the Watauga River. 

The fisherman stood waist deep in the ripples whipping the woolly bugger above him four, five, six times. With every forward motion he shot out a little more of the heavy orange line with his left hand. His right forearm moved in sync with his torso. He brought the line behind his body one final time, and when it laid out flat he cast it forward and released. The line shot through the guides of his rod and fell nearly 30 yards upstream, just above a deep pool.

After the fly settled to the bottom, the man stripped in line a few inches at a time until it was close enough that he could pick it up and go directly into a back cast. The dance continued every time he brought in the line.

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My Hero, Batistuta

Batistuta

I was in eighth grade at PS 14. In Mrs. Squittieri’s history class we had been reading excerpts from The Odyssey and talking about heroes. I remember where I sat and the cover of the book of Greek mythologies we read from, which would become one of my childhood favorites. One day, in the way of all great teachers, she had connected the heroes of literature to the real-life heroes in our 13-year-old lives. I knew exactly who she was talking about.

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The American Offensive

Franc-Earle Schoonover’s Belleau Wood. Art Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

I wrote a draft of this short story as a final project for an English elective my senior year of college in 2010. I had loved reading Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, a collection of short stories where he first introduces his iconic character, Nick Adams. I hoped to imitate Hemingway’s minimalist writing style, while also filling a gap I thought existed in the stories (I hadn’t yet read “Now I Lay Me,” a story from Hemingway’s Men Without Women collection, and wanted to make my own attempt at explaining why Adams returns from war so distraught and detached).

In Our Time is heavy. The stories are full of grief. They are told in an emotionless way (Hemingway was famous for his iceberg theory, where he kept the deeper meaning of a story under the surface). Thanks to two good friends and editors, I’ve made several improvements to the prelude and story, which I’ve titled “The American Offensive.” I hope you enjoy it.

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Elephant

Elephant

This short story is inspired by the song “Elephant” by Jason Isbell. 

Emily’s long porcelain legs shivered in the drafty cold of the sleepy Tennessee bar room. Above her, two dusty speakers rang out Clay Pigeons. She sat stoically in a short dark blue dress that clung tightly to her body. One of her hands tickled the chicken skin forming along her thigh.

“Take my sweater, Em,” Andy said to her. 

“It’s Emily, Andy,” she replied with a smile. 

Andy shook his head. For six months, they’d met at the same bar every Thursday night to watch singers with beards and sweat-stained hats play songs for middle-aged couples and a few yuppies, like Andy, who lived in the neighborhood and were bored with other bars where college kids hung out. 

The first Thursday, Andy noticed Emily, blonde and skinny, sitting by herself. She had big blue eyes and her arms were pale and muscled. He approached and stood beside her to order a beer. She did not turn to face him, even when he spoke to her.

“I didn’t know anyone else under the age of 30 came here,” he said. 

“I don’t come for conversation,” Emily replied, her eyes never moving from the bar top.

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