Catherine Hervey
Social Distance, Then and Now
In those months, months of northern winter when my husband took the car to work and I existed alone with a baby in the American suburbs, the sheer brutality of our way of life rained down on me and showed me that I had not, before, understood.
Nature Lover
It is difficult for me, and I imagine for many of my generation, to step outside and engage with the natural world in any way without worry. Is this the end? Will we lose it, all of it?
Asian Dramas: On Displacement, Vulnerability, and New Perspectives
When I was growing up, the beautiful people with interesting lives were American or European, like me. Always. This reality remained unexamined for me, as did its implied negative—that it’s a little less desirable to be anything else.
Gender Inclusive Language: Confessions of a Latecomer
It had always seemed so simple and self-explanatory to me that “man” had two different meanings, depending on context. It could either mean “man” or “person,” and I didn’t see why I had to change the way I spoke and wrote because higher-up academics had decided this was no longer correct.
Vial: A Product Review
This vial is exactly the same sort of container that is used when people give out bubbles as wedding favors. Except there’s no bubble wand inside. Obviously there’s no reason for one, because it would be sacrilegious to make bubbles with holy oil.
Layering Place: In Ourselves, in Our Writing
When we write about people of our own creation, when we write fiction, there’s different work to do. We aren’t just noticing and deciding how to tell what we’ve noticed or experienced...We’re painting in those faint images and sensations ourselves, layering them onto more concrete descriptions of place and reality.
The Writing Impulse
I find I write a lot of stuff like this. Moments of humiliation, large and small. Attacks against which we are incapable of defending ourselves, for whatever reason. And here’s why: once they’re written down, they’re different. I’ve gotten addicted to the alchemy of writing, where those moments of pain and humiliation become beautiful and useful.
Chronic Illness: The Power of Silence
For the next several months I watched my own silence as though I had no power over it. I didn’t tell my boyfriend, though it might have been relevant to our conversations about getting married. I didn’t tell my mother back home, or anyone I worked with. I cut my foot fetching water, bled on the front steps, and said nothing to my sisters as they helped me clean it up.
On Failure
I’m pretty sure there are some of us whose lives don’t work that way ─ people for whom failure seems less a painful moment on a journey and more the destination itself, or sometimes, for me, like the place I’ve been living all my life, wandering in loose circles with my eyes squeezed shut so I can imagine I’m somewhere, anywhere else.
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The Waking is the online publication of Ruminate Magazine, a reader-supported magazine helping you slow down, read deeply, and live awake. The Waking is interested in reviews, interviews, and short form prose that, as Bernard Cooper says, "magnif[ies] some small aspect of what it means to be human."
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