The Emptying: The Agonizing, Funny, and Utterly True Story of Packing Up My Childhood Home

Published by Longreads April 2022. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2022.

I check the bathroom first. Tiles lie fallen in the tub. The paint has given up. Mildewed curtains shade the toilet, a nasty mess of orangey brown. The sink, a topographic map of hardened scum, threatens to collapse on an ancient hamper. The floor warps under threadbare mats, no longer rubberized: a tripping hazard that hasn’t killed anyone — yet.

Without tripping, I fall into a well of memories: oil refineries lurking beyond the curtains and the howling wind on winter nights when I cracked the window to vent steam. The medicine cabinet, crammed with baby aspirin, calamine lotion, and viscous bottles of rose-water-glycerine. My mother’s angry, reddened hands. My pale face staring back as I balanced on the sink to reach the mirror. My tight and anxious heart. The night I couldn’t stay another day. My great escape. Keep Reading: The Emptying (longreads.com)

Cabin Seizure: First Place Non-Fiction in WCWF Awards 2022

 

We bought a weed whacker for the cabin and used it in broad daylight.

An act of purest treason.   

For 40 years,  the cabin was governed with an iron fist, the fierce will  of my inflexible mother. The property was her domain, a family cabin in name only, though my brothers and I flocked there every year in hope of a different experience.

She’d ruled the roost at home, too, though not as effectively; she couldn’t see what happened behind closed doors.  Her regime launched all of us into the world before our wings were dry. I left at 14—but that’s another story. Keep Reading Cabin Seizure

Kenny Baron Specials: First Place Non-Fiction in Word on the Lake Awards 2020

At 17, new to Vancouver and desperately broke, I walked the seedy side and scored a job at the State Hotel, a disintegrating flophouse hunkered atop a fragrant French bakery. No paperwork was required. I was hired on the spot by virtue of having climbed the pee-stained stairs and mentioning the sign. If I could do that, I could chambermaid the innards of the sorry State Hotel. (Excerpted from Paradise Road) Keep Reading Kenny Baron Specials