All posts tagged: Guest Editor’s Note

Rachel’s Note: What Embarrasses This Erotica Writer?

Our guest editor this week is erotica author and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel You might think someone who writes about sex for a living wouldn’t be prone to blushing, but I most certainly am. When I’m faced with situations where I don’t know how to respond, my extremely pale cheeks turn traitor. I feel heat sweep across my face before anyone else can confirm it. The source could be a compliment, a flirtation or a faux pas, but most often, I blush in a professional context, when I’ve taken my sexy words off the page and read them to a live audience, unfiltered. Merriam-Webster’s first definition for blush reads, “the red color that spreads over your face when you are ashamed, embarrassed, confused, etc.” But I think there’s more to it than that. I wouldn’t say I’m any of those qualities when I blush; rather, it’s my body speaking up for me in a way my mind can’t. Most of the time, I’m not blushing because I’m embarrassed; I’m embarrassed that I’m blushing. In my …

Ann’s Note: Honor Your Inner 25-Year-Old

By Ann Shoket

Once a month for the last year, I’ve hosted a series of dinners at my place with young women in their 20s. Dinner is overselling it; it’s fancy frozen pizza and many bottles of rosé. We talk about the itchy emotions you feel around being young, hungry and ambitious — it’s a continuation of the conversation I had with young women for more than a decade as editor-in-chief of Seventeen and, before that, as one of the founding editors of CosmoGIRL. The young women are from different parts of the country and work in different industries (but they all have the most amazing hair I’ve ever seen — truth!). Some are paying the bills with crappy by-the-hour jobs, hoping that their side-hustle start-ups will pay off. Some are forging new territory in digital jobs that didn’t exist five years ago. Some have finally found the gig that allows them to marry their passion with getting paid, and now they want to know when the relationship part of their lives will get sorted. The details of …

Adrianna’s Note: I’ll Be Seeing You

By Adrianna Dufay

Why are we competitive over our bad eyesight? People who are slightly nearsighted swap glasses, laughing, “Oh my god, I’m so blind!” Those of us with more serious numbers turn a gimlet eye toward the amateurs. We’re a different club, and our humor is grim. “Nice coke bottles, Johnson. Seven? Eight?” We recognize the natural selection implications behind the plastic frames: teasing, problems playing group sports (anything with a ball is potentially traumatic) and a likely dose of self-hatred. Our lack of visual acuity is our cross to bear. (Mine is -8.50 in both eyes, if you think you’ve got me beat.) And let’s not even start with bifocals, or progressives as they’re called now for us vain Gen-Xers. Going out to dinner post-40 means grabbing a candle from the next table just to read the menu. Did you increase the font on your phone? For nearly two decades, I read newspapers, books, magazines, prescriptions and mail (everything) to James, a partially sighted man. I learned a lot about the complicated world of the visually impaired. There are levels of blindness, and those …

Karen’s Note: Best of TueNight 2015

By Karen Gerwin

(Graphic by Helen Jane Hearn/TueNight) Here we are, two years after launching this site, looking at another year’s worth of amazing storytelling from our spectacularly talented and diverse group of contributors. It was not easy for Margit, Adrianna and me to narrow down our list to only twelve posts to represent the best of this year. As we started to think about your year-end “best of” post, I jumped at the chance to write the Editor’s Note, since I’m coming up on my one-year anniversary of joining Team TueNight (woot woot!). For inspiration (er, procrastination), I checked Facebook and Twitter to see what people are talking about this morning (oof, Steve Harvey), listened to Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” then watched a YouTube clip of the final scene of When Harry Met Sally, and now I’m listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. I also went back and read the post that launched it all back in 2013, wherein Margit so brilliantly distills who we are: “You aren’t dead yet. Not even close. In fact, you’re …

Rachel’s Note: Peace Is The Word

By Rachel Sklar

When Margit first suggested the topic of “Peace” for my guest-edited issue, I rolled my eyes. I envisioned big peace signs on garish tie-dye with that hippy-dippy bubble font, maybe worn by long-haired hippies burning incense and telling each other they were blessed. Think Don Draper on a mountaintop. It just seemed so banal and saccharine, the “thoughts and prayers” of holiday topics. Then I remembered that I have a baby daughter and that every time we leave our home I am terrified about what might happen to her in this world. Then I remembered that this relatively new fear for me is old hat for a black person running into a cop. Then I remembered that I maxed out my personal giving donating to the refugee crisis, though then there were other reasons to donate: to Planned Parenthood, to Sandy Hook Promise and Everytown USA. And there always seems to be a GoFundMe campaign supporting mass shooting victims, at best for wounded survivors, at worst for funeral expenses. Then I remembered Donald Fucking Trump. At that point I was starting to feel really bad …

Stacy’s Note: Saying Grace

By Stacy Morrison

Gratitude we practice. Grace we are given. Sometime it appears when bidden. Sometimes it appears when it seems all is lost. And plenty of times, grace arrives on our doorstep even when we thought we had no use for it. We can be thankful for grace — and so many other things — as we head into this first week of the holiday season and prepare to sit down with our families (chosen or otherwise) and have the luxury of quibbling over who forgot buy the extra tube of rolls and who has to clean all the dishes, amid the plenty that surrounds us. But before we get to all that hubbub, the chaos and indulgence of our feasts, before we say grace at the Thanksgiving table, let us dwell on the very idea of grace and try to conjure this untouchable sensation that can lace the most quotidian of exchanges with the poignant call to: Stop. Breathe. Pay Attention. Feel the tingle of something you can’t quite explain run up your spine and alight …

Stacy’s Note: Breaking the Habit

By Stacy Morrison

This is not particularly good news for many of us, as we teeter-totter on the seesaw of Good Habits and Bad Habits, trying to adopt the former and shed the latter in a way that will balance out, making us one step (or, okay, 375 FitBit steps) closer to our imagined ideal. The data we collect may tell one story — such as the symbiotic relationship between my recent weight gain and my also-recent inability to go more than one night a week without a drink or two with dinner — but it’s the other stories these habits tell that we are after this week at TueNight. The stories we tell ourselves as we wrassle with these habits. Such as… Lindsay Bell-Wheeler on never quitting…on quitting. Rita Arens on using the very mental tricks that pulled her to anorexia to keep it forever at bay. Alice Bradley on the bad habit we all need to ditch. Amy Barr on the other bad habit we all need to jettison, pronto. And Alexandra Rosas and Vikki Reich …