Graduate student Maggie Messitt published three essays recently.
Maggie Messitt
Messitt is a doctoral student in the Creative Writing non-fiction program in the English Department at Ohio University. An independent narrative and immersion journalist, she has spent the last decade reporting from inside under-served communities in southern Africa and middle America. Typically focused on complex issues through the lens of everyday life, her work is deeply invested in rural regions, social justice, and environmental sustainability. The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in April 2015, is her first book.
She wrote “North 20°54, West 15°614” in Bending Genre (November 2014).
1.
In 2009, my mother’s youngest sister went missing.
2.
Today, my writing room is wallpapered with maps. Brooklyn, The Rockaways, Greenwich Village, and Long Island City fill my western wall. Eugene, Olympia, and Yelm sit in the northeastern corner while Maui, New Orleans, Asheville, and Mineral fill the southeast. And a map of the country traces my aunt’s 51 years in string and colored paper, from southern Illinois to the Haiku bush of eastern Maui.
3.
I have become my own cartographer with my own language and my own terms. Read more.
Messitt published “On the Divide that Separates a Family” Essay Daily (December 2014).
My mother wanted eight babies. She gave birth to seven.
Despite this, I lived inside a household that pretended the process of making babies was magical, action-less, divine. And, yet, menstruation, menopause, hot flashes, cervical cancer, hysterectomies, and pregnancy were all a guaranteed dinner conversation. My father was an Ob/Gyn. The first in the county when he began practicing 50 years ago. In the back room of the house, my father’s den was lined with custom-made, floor-to-ceiling, oak shelving and filled with leather-bound books. That’s where he answered the baby line. The door was always closed, and you’d have to wind your way through the stacks of medical journals, a thin path, to reach his worn leather armchair and the heavy, cream-colored 2500 phone. Read more.
Messitt published “When Your Co-Author is Missing” in Creative Nonfiction (Winter 2015).
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