Jeff Dingler is a writer, journalist,
actor and entertainer
featured writing
Tripping With My Mom
NEW YORK MAGAZINE (personal essay)
An unspoken, impenetrable chill kept my mom and I apart for years. ’Shrooms brought us back together. My first psychedelic trip happened when I was 22. It started with half an eighth of psilocybin mushrooms, a microdose, really. The few strawlike stems and single shriveled Cheerio-size cap looked too pitiful an amount to actually do anything. I was wrong.
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Discovering Dad’s Past Secrets In An Old Filing Cabinet
HUFFPOST PERSONAL (personal essay)
In my memory, there are two dads: the Richard before mental illness — and the one after. The Richard before never seemed very rock ‘n’ roll. He was just another workaholic father, keeping his brick of an early mobile phone close, even on vacations, and coming home late from the family business, the Great American Tent Company.
The one after … well, I try not to dwell on him as much. But there was a third Richard I knew nothing about until after he was gone.
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Keeping Her Shot Glass Collection Alive
THE NEW YORK TIMES – TINY LOVE STORIES (flash)
A note from the author: On Easter Sunday, 2024, I lost my cousin Toney Schliskey, who was by all means an older sister to me and my other siblings and one of the people I trusted and cared for the most. Absence is its own presence and it’s been difficult moving on. I wrote this short 99-word piece for Toney and was amazed and grateful that Tiny Love Stories at The New York Times picked it up and even featured it in their Sunday paper.
Read the Tiny Love Story at NYT
Why We Witness
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS ART MOVEMENT (IHRAM) PUBLISHES
(short story)
*A standalone chapter from Dingler’s unpublished novel Mother of Exiles.
Red cardboard hearts. That’s what turned me into a Witness. That’s what turned a lot of people actually, and no I’m not talking about a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates.
It was Luna who first told me what was going down an hour south of Miami in Homestead. She was like, “Blake, you’re so smart—how do you not know about this?”
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Outraged by family separations, this man has held a solitary vigil in the desert for two months
WASHINGTON POST (reported news)
Joshua Rubin, a lifelong New Yorker, was outraged about children being separated from their parents at the Mexican border. The final straw was the massive tent city of detained migrant teenagers in a tiny Texas town straddling the desert and the Rio Grande. So he climbed into his camper, kissed his wife and adult son, and made the 2,200-mile drive from New York to Tornillo.
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Machine Hearts
Strange Horizons (science fiction)
A sentient Redbox vending machine versus a former Blockbuster employee out on his luck and in the streets in the ultimate man versus machine match that no one saw coming. Here is the opening paragraph from the perspective of the vending machine:
It is while a man is shaking me, trying to loosen his copy of The Love You Take, that it happens—like being squeezed through a rectangular tube of binary light into this box—I am alive! I do not know where I was before or how it happened. I can only recall the input of H-17, which means dispense a copy of the 2022 American rom-com The Love You Take starring Ben Damon and Jen Lorner to paying customer. The customer shakes me until his disc drops into the bin below. Please take your receipt, sir. He kicks me in the side and says, “Thanks for nothing, you piece of shit vending machine!”
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I Went to School in Alabama. We Desperately Needed Critical Race Theory
NEWSWEEK (opinion)
I heard about the Ku Klux Klan for the first time when I was 14, in school. The way I remember it, my eight grade teacher informed us during an English class that the KKK wasn’t so bad at first, that it started out as a vigilante force for defenseless Southerners who were being preyed upon by Yankees and free Black Americans during Reconstruction. Of course, this isn’t true; the Klan was always about racial oppression and white terrorism. That’s not how we learned it in my rural Alabama public school.
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The Beltline: How regular Atlantans created one of America’s biggest art projects
Atlanta Journal-Constitution & ArtsATL (reported news)
With more than 100 sculptures, art installations and murals, the Atlanta Beltline is the largest outdoor public art collection in the Southeast. It’s one of the largest in the country, the closest comparisons being New York City’s Highline and Madison Square Park Conservancy. But how did this multimodal walking path go from overgrown weeds and old railroad ties to one of the country’s premier public artwork projects — and in just two short decades?
I lost my father when I was 14. I had to create my own masculinity.
INSIDER (personal essay)
One bright February day, I came home from school, sensed something was off, and asked, “Where’s Dad?” My mom told me that she and my older cousin took him to the hospital, that he tried to jump out of the car on the way, that he was now admitted to a psychiatric ward. I was 14 years old.
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Yaddo, With Words
An exclusive sit-down interview with the famed artists’ retreat’s president, Elaina Richardson. After nearly two decades at the helm of Yaddo, Saratoga’s legendary artists’ colony, Richardson speaks up about, well…everything!
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Jeff Dingler 