Angela Doll Carlson
How to Be Divorced
Your sister who has gone through her own divorce not long ago and still was able to show up and walk alongside the whole time. You look at her struggle, her transformation, her healing. You study it, not wanting to miss anything.
Everyone Else's Emergency
I don’t know which lens to wear to handle the news that the world, as I know it, might be ending in my lifetime. It’s not real, I think, I hope, because it doesn’t seem to be happening to me.
A Time to be Born
We tear and mend and tear again. We speak and find quiet and speak again. We weep and laugh and weep and laugh again. This is a list of cycles, because seasons are like that.
On the Search for What Matters
For the last six months I have been navigating this wall of hurt and pain and sadness and existential crisis. What matters? What really matters? Each thing that crops up in a day I weigh against all the other stresses. There is too much of it.
God's Business
I’m proud of the work I’ve produced. I’m grateful to have had the books published. It’s soul writing. It feeds my spirit. Truth is, though, it does not always feed my family. That’s just the reality of it. And that, too, is the struggle.
Being Ready: The Myth of the Muse
I have eaten my weight in words. I have a book deadline, and I’m not at all close to finishing in time. For someone like me, who usually thrives on a deadline, it’s disconcerting. I have not been avoiding the task of writing this latest book, I promise.
You Must Change Your Life
I must change my life, I thought. Is this what Rilke meant? That I should “get healthy?” I should eat better, drink better? I jumped to this conclusion in the aisle at my grocery store.
Discovering Wilderness in the City
I make it a point on this walk to find nature, identify and tag it silently, like an urban anthropologist. It feels like progress. It feels, perhaps, like a down payment on the benefits I’d get from a day in the woods, a week in the mountains, or a night beside the ocean. It’s not the woods, but maybe it’s close enough, I think.
An Open Letter to George Saunders
Damn it, George. I’m tired of crying today. And it’s your fault I’m crying if you must know. I picked up Lincoln in the Bardo because I loved your short story collection, Tenth of December. Whether it was the dark commentary on human nature, the…
The Anatomy of Aging (or, The Best Year Ever!)
In about eight months, I’ll turn fifty. I didn’t think it bothered me all that much. Aging and the ascending number on the pull-down menus were just a nuisance more than anything else but this past year I’ve been noticing the ticking clock, the changing calendar.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.