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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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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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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Jeremiah in the Desert
BIG BEND LITERARY MAGAZINE (short story)
*A standalone chapter from Dingler’s first novel Mother of Exiles.
There was a word burning in the old darkness behind my eyelids. Witness, it said. All the way out to the desert I followed it, whispering it to myself. I rented a camper, gave my wife a kiss, and drove the 2,100 miles from Brooklyn to West Texas and then looked at myself in the rearview mirror. My dark glasses and gray beard turning grayer. “Now what, old man?” I asked myself. Now what?
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I Was Taught Not To Tell Anyone I Was Jewish. Here’s What Happened When I Finally Did.
HUFFPOST PERSONAL (personal essay)
I already knew the litany. “Don’t go to synagogue. Don’t put your names on any lists. Don’t tell anyone you’re Jewish.” Growing up, we were the only Jewish family in the community. Although only a half-hour north of Birmingham, where there are three synagogues, we grew up isolated from the small Hebrew community there because my parents worked so much to provide for my siblings and me.
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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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Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Frank Bidart’s ‘Ellen West’ Becomes an Opera
SALMAGUNDI (reported news)
A struggle with an eating disorder and gender identity may seem an unusual subject for an opera, but that’s what occupies the center of a new adaptation of Frank Bidart’s poem “Ellen West.” Ricky Gordon, the composer of this soon to be premiered opera, first discovered Bidart’s long, narrative poem during a period of personal tragedy. On August 1, 1996, he lost his partner, Jeffrey Grossi, from complications of AIDS. In the aftermath of this loss, Gordon was completely broken and turned to books and poems to help him through a period of grief. One of the works he found during this time was “Ellen West.”
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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 