MEDICINE WINGS
My road trip essay, “Medicine Wings”, appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Boulevard literary magazine and was named to the “Notables” list in the 2017 edition of America’s Best Essays. It chronicles a pilgrimage to the 2014 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
The essay received mention in the esteemed The Review Review, whose reviewer wrote: "What will stay with me the longest, however, is Sarah Grigg’s 'Medicine Wings' this issue’s opener (before Joyce Carol Oates) whose epigraph is from Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, and sets the tone for this eccentric essay set [at a] South Dakota biker rally. Not only is this piece equal parts curiosity-driven immersion and below-boiling point chaos, [Grigg] shares in the same panicked observation skills and mad scientist journalistic tone as Thompson, and I will say in confidence (as a fan looking to fill the void he left) a true successor has been found (albeit ((I’m assuming)) a sober version)."
He assumed correct. A sober Hunter S. . . . I’ll take it.
Read the essay here.
PEACE WITH HONOR
“When I was 25 years old and he, 82, my grandfather called me to his desk. He opened a file drawer, pulled out a large manila envelope and handed it to me. It was labeled ‘Saigon—April 1975.’ ’You hang onto that, Sarah Harrison,’ he ordered me, closed the drawer and turned away. This was the norm with him.”
About a third of my grandfather’s life was more or less classified and he took most of his secrets to the grave, leaving more questions than answers. I collected pieces of his story like the tiniest of shells that could never fill an entire jar. He never told his entire tale start to finish because he endlessly questioned himself and all he was asked to do. He was haunted by many things, but namely, by the never-ending howl of that crowd pressed against the Embassy wall. Their cries found him across the oceans, across the decades, in every moment of silence. Read the essay in storySouth: http://storysouth.com/stories/peace-with-honor/
ELK LIMP
“The blueprint of country spread before him, encrypted interstate conduits enmeshed in a transcontinental snarl of pavement—how to select a single paved strand without wanting to see the rest was beyond him.”
My short story “Elk Limp” featured in print and online editions of Big Sky Journal: https://bigskyjournal.com/?s=Elk+Limp
