Month: November 2024
CNF: No Regrets
by Alison Watson
I sometimes wondered if my mother regretted adopting me.
Over the years, I put her through so much: drug addiction, psych wards, suicide attempts. Bipolar Disorder, OCD. Despite all the trauma, she never gave up on me, even when other family members reached their breaking point.
Sometimes her attempts to help me were misguided, such as having my childhood piano shipped to me in New York, as if that was going to save me, or paying for me to move to rural New Mexico, thinking that New York was the problem.
But ultimately it was thanks to her support that I finally got the psychiatric help I needed. She paid for medications and psychiatrist appointments when I lost my insurance. She visited me in almost every psych ward I was incarcerated in. She believed I could get well, even when I didn’t believe it, myself.
“Please take care of Ali when I’m gone,” she asked my sister a few years before she died.
Then she succumbed to Alzheimer’s, and ultimately ALS. The little dynamo who had always been my best cheerleader faded away, leaving a corpse-like shell who seemed to have no idea what was going on around her.
In her final days, I sat by her bedside. By now, the ALS had rendered her paralyzed. She had a Do Not Resuscitate order, and had made it clear that she didn’t want a feeding tube. So, we watched her slowly dehydrate to death over a gut-wrenching two weeks.
Alone with her, unsure if she was still somewhere in there and could understand me, I spoke to my mother as I held her hand.
“You can pass without worrying about me,” I whispered. “I’m clean and sober a long time; I’m stable on meds. I’ll be okay.”
And even though she was paralyzed, somehow, she squeezed my hand.
Alison Watson is a memoirist who writes about overcoming mental illness, addiction, and being an adoptee. She is currently shopping her full-length manuscript, “A Psychotic’s Journey Through Eastern Seaboard Psych Wards,” with publishers. Alison’s work has been published in The Sun Magazine, Please See Me, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Writer’s Journal, and MoonPark Review (which nominated her essay to Best of the Net 2025). In addition to writing, Alison feeds her soul by working in an animal shelter. To read more of her writing, please visit her website, alisonmorriswatson.com.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “No Regrets”? A couple of years after my mother died, I began having comforting dreams about her. I believed she was visiting me in my subconscious, letting me know she was still with me. I was inspired to start writing about our love for each other, as part of my healing process. I was thrilled when the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts accepted my homage to my mother, “No Regrets.” But the editor wanted to cut my last line. At first, I had a hard time letting go of the ending. But I’m learning that sometimes writers can be too close to their own work, and it’s prudent to listen to editors who know what they are talking about. I do have a tendency to wrap up the endings of my stories in a nice bow. But I’m working on letting the reader draw their own conclusions. The most exciting aspect of being a writer is, there is always room to grow. by Diane Lefer I don’t have a cell phone, a car, A/C, a microwave, a blender, a dishwasher, cable, Wi-Fi, Netflix, a bathroom scale, children, a husband, regrets. Diane Lefer’s novels feature scientists who become terrorism suspects (Out of Place) and baboons with broken hearts (Confessions of a Carnivore). She is the author of three story collections, including California Transit which received the Mary McCarthy Prize. With Hector Aristizábal, she co-authored The Blessing Is Next to the Wound: A story of art, activism, and transformation, cited as recommended reading by Amnesty International. Diane has worked with asylum-seekers, men on parole, youth affected by the criminal in/justice system, and vulnerable kids in Bolivia and Colombia. She is delighted to have work appear here and was just as happy to be part of Healing Visions, the beautiful photography and prose anthology published by Matter Press. Diane lives in Los Angeles, relying on public transportation and her cat. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “People Just Assume You Do”? When I look for help in cleaning, cooking, preparing home remedies, this is the advice I find: It’s easy to do using ordinary household items you already have. Only I don’t have. Most of these so-called common items aren’t even included in my story because they are uncommon enough I couldn’t tell you what they look like. It’s like the day I was working with asylum seekers, recently arrived in the US, some destitute and some nearly so, and a volunteer offered to give them tips on making ends meet. Do you really need that morning latte? Why did you order that avocado toast? Don’t do all your shopping at Whole Foods. The migrants listened politely and attentively but once the session was over they surrounded me. What’s a latte? What does whole foods mean? Luckily, they didn’t ask me for specifics because I don’t actually know what makes a coffee drink qualify as a latte, and I’ve never tasted or even seen avocado toast. The piece started out with the words I don’t have repeated over and over. It went on to include what I do have… Then I hated that part and deleted it, except I didn’t realize the document had switched to Read Only. I submitted the story and after it was rejected, I opened the file because I wanted to check the word count – and discovered nothing had been deleted. Then JD Vance started blathering about childless cat ladies. All over the country, single women without kids stood up and declared themselves –which kind of ruined my story. People weren’t going to make the automatic assumption about husband and children anymore. I put the story aside. But damn! Yesterday I had to go in-person to the bank when they mistakenly froze my account so my rent check didn’t go through. I showed up with my bank statements and check book and several forms of ID, but they wanted to see the account on my cell phone. This caused a bit of consternation when I told them I don’t have one. Bank problem did get sorted, but I was still annoyed enough, I went back to the story because, really, why am I expected to have all this shit?!?! I just want what’s necessary. With that in mind, I got rid of excess words and compressed the piece further. Now I’ve taken a whole page to decompress a one-sentence story. So much for confining myself to what’s necessary.CNF: People Just Assume You Do
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD