The Alexandria Papers Newsletter #148
13 July 2025
Mindfulness & Meditation
A Meditation for Letting Thoughts Float By Like Bubbles | Mindful org
Explore the practice of mind like it's a process & let thoughts float by like bubbles. Learn more with this meditation guide!
Nature-Based Mindfulness Practices for Families | Mindful org
Connect with nature no matter where you find yourself using simple practices from the SoBe Mindful method, created by mindfulness teacher and author Scott Rogers.
Migraine
19 Effective Ways to Accommodate an Employee With Migraine | Migraine Again
Learn 19 effective ways to accommodate employees with migraine. From sound protection to flexible work, these accommodations help people with migraine thrive at work.
How COVID Transformed Work for People With Migraine | Migraine Again
COVID reshaped work for those with migraine, highlighting the pros and cons of remote work. Discover firsthand accounts and get tips for an effective work from home environment.
Trauma and Sexual Abuse
Understanding Our Inner Child in the Struggle for Real Love | Psychology Today
In relationships, we tend to project childlike fantasies onto partners and then rage when they don't conform with the fairy tale.
This article was originally published by Your Tango. The past doesn't always stay where it should. If you experienced childhood trauma, it may come as a surprise that the traumatic problems you had when you were little are still present when you're an adult.
Resources for Sexual Assault and Domestic Abuse Survivors Who Aren’t Sure Where to Turn | Greatist
If you've experienced sexual assault or domestic violence, support is a few clicks away. Here's a list of resources to empower you and help you heal.
Mental Health
What to Do if Therapy Isn't Working | Psychology Today
If therapy isn't working, look into the therapeutic alliance, openness of discussion, and whether you correctly defined your needs, and measure progress correctly.
How Narrative Therapy Can Improve Self-Esteem | Psychology Today
When we think about our life stories, unconscious biases often distort the narrative. Narrative therapy helps us create a more authentic reflection.
Books
The Spooky Femme's Guide to Summer Reading | Crime Reads
As someone who spent a year and half living in Salem, Massachusetts, I can tell you for a fact that spooky season doesn't end in November.
25 New and Upcoming Horror Novels to Look Out for This Summer (and Beyond) | Crime Reads
It's hot as hell, so why not read some horror fiction? Especially since one of the books below involves a literal journey into hell, where it is surprisingly temperate.
Cooking and Baking
32 Fresh Summer Salads | Cookie and Kate
Summertime produce is in full swing, and I couldn't be happier about it! Salads are my specialty, so I've created a collection of my best summer salad recipes. They're perfect for parties, barbecues and summer evenings at home.
40 Easy Weeknight Dinners | Love and Lemons
These quick and easy weeknight dinners are healthy and delicious. They include tasty tacos, pastas, stir fries, and more. The whole family will love them!
The 12 best recipes to bake in July | King Arthur Baking
Here's what you should bake (or in some cases, freeze!) all month long.
Subscribe to My Newsletter
The Alexandria Papers Newsletter on Substack presents curated articles on mindfulness and meditation, migraine, healing from trauma and sexual abuse, mental health, books, cooking, and baking. To receive new posts by email and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I'm committed to having the entire archive free, but paid subscribers help cover the costs of research each week.
My Books & Blog: Poetry, Fiction, Memoir
His real name was Daniel David Davison III, but nobody called him that except Sister St. James and the principal every time he got sent to her office for disrupting class. He used to make fun of his own name all the time, saying, “3-D. I’m 3-D,” erupting into uncontrollable laughter. Since we were only third-graders, we didn’t get the joke at all, and he didn’t like to be called Daniel David Davison III, so we called him “Glue-Boy.”
First graders had to use paste spooned out of a communal tub. Second graders were allowed to have individual containers of paste that had to be stored on the shelves when not in use. As third graders, however, grown-ups that we were, we got to have our very own bottles of Elmer’s glue, which we were allowed to keep in our desks, and Daniel David Davison III could do amazing things with Elmer’s glue.
All day, every day, he’d paint elaborate glue-tattoos on the back of his hands and forearms. The glue was his paint, starkly white against the perpetually darker canvas of his skin. He created dragons and gargoyles, knights and castles, vampires and werewolves from his fingers to the edge of his stiffly ironed, short-sleeved white shirt. I sat beside him, in the last seat of the third row, and every day, he hunched over his bare desk, concentrating so hard on his fantastic designs that the tip of his tongue stuck out while the rest of us watched in silent admiration.
Sister St. James would be writing our lessons on the board or gazing out the windows at the river on the far side of the church next door, or sitting at her desk with her eyes closed while we did our reading assignments, and Glue-Boy would be covering all the bare skin on both his arms with swords and sorcerers, dinosaurs and treasures, pirates with ships flying flags with skull-and-crossbones. After he finished, he’d put the bottle of Elmer’s down on his desk, hold his arms out in front of him till all the glue dried, then turn and show us his creations...
My Childhood on Planet of the Apes (a memoir)
“Damn you,” cried the practically naked Charlton Heston as he fell to his knees on the beach in front of the half-buried Statue of Liberty. “God damn you all to hell.”
The hottest film in our world was the sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes, where three astronauts crash-land on a seemingly deserted planet, only to discover that in this topsy-turvy world, the apes can talk, read, write, ride horses, and shoot guns, while the mute humans are beasts, herded and captured, enslaved and oppressed. The film had just hit drive-in theatres, where kids got in free. We went to see the movie with our parents, with our friends and their parents, with the kids we ignored in school and their parents. We went with absolutely anyone to see Planet of the Apes. Again and again and again.
All the neighborhood children were so enamored of the film that we’d memorized the dialogue and played Planet of the Apes every day at an abandoned construction site on the other side of the railroad tracks. Since the site was vast and filled with gigantic concrete culverts and miscellaneous construction materials, it really was like we’d landed on another planet. It was the perfect setting for our Planet of the Apes games.
The first thing we did each day was draw straws to see who’d get to be the apes and who’d be the humans. We had very strict rules on our Planet of the Apes. Only the apes were allowed to talk. The humans were allowed to grunt, point, and use sign language. Sometimes the humans would huddle together in a corner of the site and whisper, but if the apes caught them doing that, they got mad and hit the humans really hard. The apes got to be up on top of the concrete culverts, and the humans’ goal was to get all the apes off the culverts so the humans could be on top. It was a Planet of the Apes King of the Hill...
At the First Meeting of The Liars' Club (memoir)
I stood, mortified into silence, in front of my second-grade class. My teacher, a tall thin woman with size 17 feet, held me so hard by the shoulders that later that day, when I got home from school and changed out of my uniform, I would find bruises from where her fingers had gouged me. The rest of the class was sitting at their desks, hands folded on top, listening to Miss Slewinski, but staring at me.
“This little girl here,” said Miss Slewinski, “is a liar. She makes up stories about her Mommy and Daddy…”
“He’s not my dad,” I said. “My real dad isn’t allowed…”
Miss Slewinski cuffed me on the side of the head.
“I called Sascha’s mother yesterday and asked her to come in and talk to me,” she said. “Her mother is a very nice woman. Do you know what she did when I told her all the terrible things Sascha has been saying?”
The entire class obediently shook their heads.
“What did your mother do when she heard about your lies, Sascha?” said Miss Slewinski, digging her fingers even deeper as she shook me. “What? Say it louder. So the whole class can hear you.”
“Cried,” I said.
“Yes. She cried. Sascha’s mother, one of the nicest women I’ve ever met, sat right here in this room and cried like her heart was broken. All because of this girl. This liar. She’s such a liar that I’m naming her the president of The Liars’ Club.”
She let go of my shoulders and stood there, glaring down at me, her arms crossed over her flat chest.
“Sascha’s going to stand here for an hour. Because she’s such a liar. Because she tells such awful stories about her parents. The rest of you aren’t going to do any work: you’re just going to sit there and stare at this terrible liar. But anybody else who wants to join The Liars’ Club can come right on up here and stand beside her...”
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs (poetry)
As powerfully written, darkly humorous, surprising, and accessible as Szeman’s prose works, these poems let you glimpse into the hearts, lives, and minds of ordinary people — whether they be mythological, biblical, literary, or contemporary — as they struggle to make sense of relationships, family, marriage, divorce, children, spirituality, faith, and the existence of God. As they struggle to comprehend the very things each of us experiences every day.
Awards:
• Grand Prize Winner, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Isabel & Mary Neff Creative Writing Fellowship
• First Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Second Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Centennial Review Prize for Poetry
• Honorable Mention, Non-Rhyming Poetry,
Writer’s Digest Creative Writing Contest
The Kommandant's Mistress (a novel)
Part One: The Kommandant
For who can make straight that
which He hath made crooked?
Ecclesiastes 7: 13
Chapter One
"Then I saw her. There she stood, in the village store, her hair in a long braid down the center of her back, her skin white in the sunlight, and my hand went to my hip, seeking the weight of my gun. As the girl spoke, I stumbled back against one of the shelves, my fingers tightening at the leather around my waist. While the shopkeeper arranged the food in the bag, the morning sun glinted on the storefront windows, illuminating the girl. The wooden shelves pressed into my shoulders and back. Sweat dampened my forehead and ribs. Another shopper spoke, frowned, pushed aside my arm to reach a jar on the shelf behind me, but I didn’t move. My hand slid down over my hip and leg. No, I’d forgotten that I no longer wore my gun..."
About The Kommandant's Mistress
The rumors spread by the Camp’s inmates, other Nazi officers, and the Kommandant’s own family insist that she was his “mistress,” but was she, voluntarily? Told from three different perspectives – that of the formerly idealistic Kommandant, the young Jewish inmate who captivates him, and the ostensibly objective historical biographies of the protagonists – this novel examines one troubling moral question over and over: if your staying alive was the only “good” during the War, if your survival was your sole purpose in this horrific world of the Concentration Camps — whether you were Nazi or Jewish — what, exactly, would you do to survive? Would you lie, cheat, steal, kill, submit?
Flashing back and forth through the narrators’ memories as they recall their time before, during, and after the War, and leading, inevitably, to their ultimate, shocking confrontation, “Szeman’s uncompromising realism and superb use of stream-of-consciousness technique make [this novel] a chilling study of evil, erotic obsession, and the will to survive” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
A New York Times Book Review “Notable Book” and one of its “Top 100 Books of the Year,” Winner of the University of Rochester’s Kafka Prize for “the outstanding book of prose fiction by an American woman,” the tales told by the Kommandant, his “mistress,” and their “biographer” will mesmerize and stun you, leaving you wondering, at the conclusion, which, if any, is telling the complete truth about what happened between them.
Awards:
• New York Times Book Review “Top 100 Books of Year”
• New York Times Book Review “Notable Book”
• University of Rochester Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize
“the outstanding book of prose fiction by an American woman”
• Publishers Weekly starred review: “Outstanding Merit”
• Talmadge McKinney Award “Excellence in Research”
(1st edition published by HarperCollins / HarperPerennial NYC; 2nd edition published by Arcade, NYC; 20th Anniversary Edition published by RockWay Press)
Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on The Holocaust
Where Lightning Strikes includes all Szeman's Holocaust poetry, from the poems featured in her Ph.D. dissertation Survivor: One Who Survives, to the original versions of "Rachel's poems" appearing or mentioned in Szeman's award-winning, critically acclaimed first novel The Kommandant's Mistress. The poems in this collection revisit the classic themes that have inspired poets for generations: love, passion, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, faith, and survival — this time in the context of the period before, during, and after the Holocaust with its systematic persecution and extermination of the majority of European Jewry by the Nazi regime.
Along with her non-Holocaust poetry collection, Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, this volume, Where Lightning Strikes, was unanimously accepted for publication by all outside readers of UKA Press. Szeman's themes, though set, in this collection, around the Holocaust, are universal, encompassing the perpetrators', victims', and survivors' perspectives equally insightfully. As powerful, unsettling, and lyrical as her first novel, The Kommandant's Mistress, these poems will take you on a compelling, chilling, and unforgettable journey into the lives, hearts, and minds of all those who were in the Holocaust.
Awards:
• Grand Prize Winner, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Isabel & Mary Neff Creative Writing Fellowship
• First Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
• Second Place, Elliston Poetry Prize
Only with the Heart (a novel)
Part One: Claudia
Doubts are more cruel
than the worst of truths.
Molière
Chapter One
They got there sooner than I expected. I was waiting at the upstairs window, so I saw them when they arrived, their lights flashing, their sirens silent. There were two policemen, in two separate cars, and the paramedics in the ambulance. As they got out of the vehicles, the emergency lights turned everything a strange, pulsing red: the snow, the ice at the edge of the window, the bedroom where I stood. They slipped across the yard on their way to the front porch, their breath hanging white in the air. As they rushed up the front steps and disappeared from my view, I let go of the lace curtain and turned around to look at the body. I suppose I should’ve gone over to the bed and closed its eyes or covered its face, but I couldn’t make myself do it.
The squad stopped at all the other bedrooms on the floor before they found the right one. When they saw me and the body, they rushed in, plying stethoscope, oxygen mask, and blood pressure cuff, calling out to each other in their own telegraphic language. Their hands rushed as quickly as their words, but none of that made any difference. There was no life left in that body. There hadn’t been for ages.
All that time, I didn’t move or make a sound. When the policeman came over to me, he had to put his hand on my arm to get me to look at him. It was almost as if I were the one who was dead.
And to think that was only the beginning...
About Only with the Heart
When Claudia Sloane is arrested for the murder of her mother-in-law, everyone is stunned, especially her husband Sam. Claudia loved Eleanor as if she were her own mother and would never have hurt her. At least, that’s what Claudia insists. But even Sam begins to wonder how far Claudia would go in the name of love: did she help the terminally-ill Eleanor commit suicide?
During the widely publicized trial, Sam tries desperately to maintain his belief in his wife’s innocence despite the mounting evidence against her. Meanwhile, Claudia unwillingly begins to suspect that Sam may have helped his own mother commit suicide, but is letting his wife risk conviction for the murder.
Gripping and suspenseful, compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, Only with the Heart deals with the dreadful effects of terminal disease on its patients and their Caregivers, explores our primal need for acceptance and family ties, and examines the complex and evolving nature of love.
"Piercing, close-to-the-bone fiction." -- Barnes & Noble
"Bold and ambitious." -- San Francisco Mercury News
"[A] delicately structured, poignant novel of love, memory, & family responsibility." -- Publishers Weekly
(First edition published by Arcade, NYC; 12th Anniversary Edition, Revised & Expanded, Legally & Medically Updated, published by RockWay Press)
My Other Books
