I’m still a bit stunned to have had my essay “Family Tradition,” selected by Jonathan Franzen for this dynamite collection. The essay originally appeared in Southern Indiana Review. My memoir-in-progress is based on this piece:

“On my 27th birthday, in a two-bedroom bungalow in New Jersey, my father murdered his live-in girlfriend, her fifteen-year-old daughter, then shot himself. I never sensed the shots. I should have felt them in my gut, having been born of the same blood, the same inheritance, the same home. It should have been like that feeling one twin gets when the other is in trouble, a hand burned on the stove matched with the other’s intuitive pain. But the six pints of Guinness I’d slaughtered in celebration of my birthday kept everything muffled. Instead, I felt only the fog of drunkenness, that genetic trait of its own, and spent the end of the night passed out in a chair, cocooned in a deep, black silence….”

The collection can be purchased here.

Amazon description of the collection: A true essay is “something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity,” writes guest editor Jonathan Franzen in his introduction. However, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 was, in a word, risk. Whether the risks involved championing an unpopular opinion, the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably offending family, for Franzen, “the writer has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them.”

In 2016, my short essay on cleaning up my father’s estate after his crimes went viral across Hearst six Hearst sites, eventually reaching around 150K views and shares. The essay begins:

“On New Year's Eve of 1999, as I guzzled Yuengling Lagers and waited for planes to fall out of the Y2K sky, my father called for the first time in a year. But he was so drunk that he didn't recognize my voice. In fact, he insisted I wasn't me. I pleaded with him — Dad, it's really me — but he slurred at me to go find his daughter. Somehow, this was the proverbial straw.”

To read the complete essay, click here. Or here.

Somehow this goofy bingo card was the 5th most-read piece of the year on McSweeney’s. It also has an annual resurgence; when the faculty meetings approach, this thing bounces around Twitter. I feel like I should say right here that I genuinely love my job. It was just jokes. Really.

Click here to read or print out before faculty meetings.

Don’t you love it when your odd pieces find homes? These two pieces of flash fiction couldn’t be more different. “Schisma” is pretty traditional (narrative) that came from leftover research that I didn’t want to discard, and “Prix Fixe” is an experimental piece that grew out of the horrors of dating in Tallahassee. Luckily, Gulf Coast was into both of them.

From “Prix Fixe Dating Menu, Tallahassee Edition,” which was named in Wigleaf’s Top 50 short fictions of 2018.

“Coffee @ Obviously Christian Coffee Shop: Slurp a fishbowl of Arabic coffee. Mumford & Sons, the music so loud you can only nod at one another, smile in frustration. He points to the ceiling—he means the music—so fake liking the band because his fingers tap out a rhythmic Morse code on his knee. Watch him untangle his skinny-jeaned legs to drop a dollar into the donation box, the crucifix barely a watermark on its façade.”

Click here to read the rest of “Prix Fixe.”

Here’s the opening of “Schisma:”

“For ten euro, you’ll rest easy aboard Posidonia, the smoothest ship in all of Schisma. Happily we’ll sail to Kalydon, just twenty minutes across the sea, and through the main gate of the island we’ll walk past a field of wildflowers, maybe pause for a picture by the old fort. If you wish to hear of the Ottoman rule, I am the woman for you. I’ll tell you how during the revolt of 1878, Cretan revolutionaries took everything in the name of Christ but couldn’t touch Kalydon. You will learn the best of history from me, Anna. A perfect host, my facts lined up like so many pencils on a table.”

Click here to read the rest of “Schisma.”

Dance is high on my list of obsessions, and I wrote this, in part, to have an excuse for watching all of the Baryshnikov videos YouTube has to offer. An experimental piece written as five letters, this gave me a new lens with which to look at my anxiety.

The piece begins:

“ACT I

Greetings, Mr. Baryshnikov:

Never before have I written a fan letter. Frankly, I know little of the form except that opening with “never before have I written a fan letter” is bland as boiled chicken, and you’ve likely already lifted your pale, Latvian eyes to the window before you, your vision hinged on the tangle of twigs that swing from the eaves of your neighbor’s brownstone, the cutting winter air finally here and you breathe, flooding your lungs with all of that earth and wet and the deep and smoky burn of peat, and I am sure this pleases you as you look so dashing in scarves.

Clearly, I am doing this wrong. Forgive me.”

To read the complete essay, click here.

This story appears last in my recently completed collection about Greek women and first-generation immigrants.

While unavailable online, it begins:

“When Gloria cries from her crib, her sound jams its notes into each of the six bedrooms before finding me in the kitchen, usually in the kitchen, at the stove or the table, eyes loose with sleeplessness. This palace is cold, so many rooms without personality, each of them filled with proof that we have money but no heart. Before we left Rethymno, Christos said, “Don’t worry, Sofia. America is made for opportunity.” Opportunity. I’ve been here eleven months and my opportunities have been to cook, to stay home every day without a person to talk to, to lie on my back at night while he rocks his pain into me, to give birth. Gloria. She’s so small, a sack of potatoes, six months old with doughy cheeks and blue eyes that can hurry up and change. She needs me all the time, her cries rarely stopping, and I’ve tried it all: feeding and singing and prayer, and Christos comes home and yells at me to make her quiet so he can sleep, and I swear this ridiculous house will be the tomb I am buried in…”

I wrote this piece with Brevity in mind and am still thrilled to have been selected. I wanted to capture that mixture of sexual curiosity that all teens feel with the many ways that curiosity can turn to violation.

The piece begins:

“We ran for ringing phones. Loitering in front of Sbarro, sweating through our bomber jackets, our hair partially shaved and streaked blue. We looked tough in our Docs (though not so tough as we thought), and at one ring, maybe a two hundred-foot clip, we’d abandon the food court to get there first. More often than not, it was Stevie.”

To read the complete essay, click here.

My intent was to write about a terrible guy that I dated years ago and somehow, as so often happens, my father snuck in here, too. I wanted to change the name of the creep I dated, so I asked my fiction students what I should call him. They unanimously chose Chad.

This essay was named by Hippocampus as a “most memorable” piece and later anthologized in Five Years of Hippocampus.

This short bit of memoir begins:

“I never say abuse. Instead, I slide into cliché. It was no picnic, I say. Had a rough childhood, but the texture means nothing to anyone else. Rough: my father’s cracked hands, the sound of them dragged across blankets in search of my curled body, hands full of static and intent. Or the burn of a cheek rough without shave: stubble, the texture of apology.”

To read the complete piece, click here.

This piece of flash won the Orlando Prize for Flash Fiction from the wonderful A Room of Her Own (AROHO) and later appeared in Los Angeles Review.

It’s another piece born out of leftover research from a larger project.

The story begins:

“We are silk people. That’s what I tell the dipshits at my new high school, but they call me Spider-Girl. They yell, Hey, Spider-Girl! Tarantula-Breath! Arachne! Because in Tarpon Springs, everyone’s Greek. A tourist might think it’s a sweet nickname, but the rest of us know that before becoming a spider, Arachne hung herself, which is exactly what I’d do if it wouldn’t give them all globs of satisfaction. They’re sponge people, the legacy of this stupid town, and my father always says, Never trust a sponge diver. Bottom feeders.”

To read the complete story, click here.

Inspired by an email a colleague sent me in 16 pt. Courier, I wrote this list condemning most fonts for McSweeney’s.

Click here to read.

Runner-up for The Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, “Heliciculture” is part of my recently completed collection.

The story begins:

“Ask anyone in Greece and they will tell you the same: our snails are best. From all over they come to our village in Crete to pluck the mollusks from their swirling shells and feel the soft dissolve against their tongues. My yia-yia says other restaurants are all the time with noise at dinner, but Artemidoros is quiet, a hum. Look around and it’s eyes closed, moans no bigger than whispers. When the people leave, stuffed, they look at my yia-yia and ask, “What is the secret? Tell us.” In the trembling spots of sweat on their foreheads you can see how much they want to know; they think if they too could make the snails at home, life would be better, maybe easier, which shows you what people know. But my yia-yia only smiles, her mouth twisted up on the left side. If the compliment is too strong—if she suspects envy—you can see on her brow the fear of the evil eye, so she mutters garlic under her breath for protection and hides in the kitchen to avoid a curse. And that is the end of that.”

To read the complete story, click here.

Another piece that I wrote with only one place in mind. I LOVE The Rumpus’ “Songs of Our Lives” column—almost as much as i love writing about the importance of punk rock.

It begins:

“In 1987, at a family arcade in New Jersey, I’d hoarded enough Skee-ball tickets for a real prize—not just some ratty stuffed animal. I claimed my bounty with fervor: a single-tape boombox small enough to keep under the covers and muffle the sounds of my parents’ endless fighting. In the dark, the volume at just one bar, I’d lie with my ear pressed against the speaker mesh, my index finger poised, waiting to hit record on any of the groups I loved—Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Exposé, Kool & The Gang. Then I’d spend hours sleuthing out each nuanced lyric, the staccato start and stops, until the vocals faded and the tapes finally gave out.”

I promise, better music shows up soon. Click here to read the complete essay.

When a young Greek girl who wants to become captain of her father’s ship realizes that that’ll never happen, she settles for being a mermaid instead. This piece is part of my recently completed collection.

The story begins:

“I’m hanging over the starboard of The Kalymnos, my father’s ship—the one with the world’s largest Greek flag—and my hands are pruned just beneath the surface of the Gulf as I wait for the snag at the end of my hooking pole. The water’s clear enough that I can see my haul won’t be much: a few pitiful sponges for a full day’s work, not one bigger than my fist, which is precisely why no one collects this way anymore. Soon enough my father’s head pops up about one hundred feet out, his dive over, and I watch as he swims toward me, fluid and confident. After climbing aboard, he dumps a dozen large sponges onto the deck from his gathering net, and I pile them in the aft, the thick stink of their membranes the smell of our family business.”

Unavailable online, the issue this story appears in can be found here.

Named winner of The Briar Cliff Review’s Nonfiction contest, my essay “Candy” about all things 80’s dance and body shame begins:

“I’d lose myself in Aqua Net. In Exposé’s “Point of No Return,” Stacy Q’s “Two of Hearts.” And God bless Saint Taylor Dayne. In 1989, my .99-cent Wet n Wild lipstick came in two distinct shades: Hot Pink and Orange, neither a great choice for a 12-year-old with olive skin and knobby patches of acne flanking her mouth. The foundation pilfered from my mom’s cabinet framed my face, a thin russet line of pancake circling my chin like a cheap Halloween beard. But more important than the make-up was the hair, the great heights it could achieve with a furious teasing of brush and spray, spray, spray. In New Jersey size mattered, and my bangs jutted out like the wings of a gargantuan bat. Add six or seven pumps of the rancid perfume Exclamation, and I was nearly ready for the 8th-grade dance. Standing in the basement, my feet flat against the cold linoleum tiles, I surveyed my body in the wall of mirrors that once reflected the Jazzercisers my mother taught for $5/hour. Sighing, I reached for my mother’s girdle and stepped into it, wriggling it up and over my thighs until my mid-section was braced tight. Never mind that the fat simply shifted, that great bulbs of skin appeared now at the top of my back, above my ass, my body a mound of dough that had been rolled flat at its center. Never mind that earlier that day my father had poked his head over the shower curtain and pointed at my naked body, laughing, cooing the meanest child’s singsong, so fat, look at you, so fat. A revision of the so big game we’d played when I was a toddler.”

Unavailable online, the issue this essay is in can be found here.

I put myself through years of school by slinging drinks behind various bars. This piece of flash comes straight from that experience. It also made the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fictions that year.

“In my phone sex voice I say, the quesadilla of the day is caramelized onion and chorizo. Chef makes ‘em special. Sure, I say: $5 house wines, $2 off apps. Would you like to start a tab? I nod a lot. Sometimes I remember to smile. Rocky says, check out the tits on table 20, and indeed, there are sizeable tits on table 20. He hands me two fingers of an Old Vine Zin and we tap glasses, agree that it’s too sweet. Later he passes me a Post House Penny Black, a big South African red with legs for days and we know damned well we should let it breathe, but we throw it down anyway—a necessity in this small town where a little money goes a long way and everyone thinks they’re rich. Rocky whispers, not it—I went to high school with that d-bag—and I look up to see a guy wearing a tee painted with metallic angel wings, a garnet visor pulled sideways over his ears, and say, of course you did. Before the pop, I draw penises on the backs of the bev naps—one with a papal miter, another with the long curls of an Orthodox Jew, one holding The Book of Mormon—and at some point, every person at the bar has a blasphemous cock on the underside of his napkin, a secret that tickles me so much that I almost forget that I have a PhD, $100k in student-loan debt, and a smattering of job applications sent to colleges in states I’d rather be dead than live in…”

To read the complete piece, click here.

Here’s the opening of the list essay “How to Date a Stalker…”

“1. Revel in how good-looking he is, how he channels Jude Law when his lazy eye doesn’t wander, how his weaving a ghillie suit that he keeps in the rusted hutch of his white pick-up shows exceptional dedication.

2. Convince yourself it’s meaningful because he plays Nina Simone as you disrobe and paw at each other for the first time. Pay no attention when the music flips to “The Piña Colada Song.”

To read the complete piece, click here.

PS Stalkers are the worst.

This essay first appeared in Southern Indiana Review. Those folks kindly submitted it for consideration in Best American Essays and it was selected for inclusion. I love SIR.

This essay begins:

“On my 27th birthday, in a two-bedroom bungalow in New Jersey, my father murdered his live-in girlfriend, her fifteen-year-old daughter, then shot himself. I never sensed the shots. I should have felt them in my gut, having been born of the same blood, the same inheritance, the same home. It should have been like that feeling one twin gets when the other is in trouble, a hand burned on the stove matched with the other’s intuitive pain. But the six pints of Guinness I’d slaughtered in celebration of my birthday kept everything muffled. Instead, I felt only the fog of drunkenness, that genetic trait of its own, and spent the end of the night passed out in a chair, cocooned in a deep, black silence….”

The issue this essay appeared in can be found here.

An experimental essay about anxiety & doctors’ offices. It begins:

“1. Waiting Room
 
             Muzak earworms a song so deep into your subconscious that for weeks afterwards: hum, hum, hum. And it’s Juice Newton. It’s Steely Dan. The Girl from Freaking Ipanema. The golf magazines, the parenting advice and this-is-your-future gunmetal hair, pages moist and crumpled like leftovers from someone else’s bathroom. Saltwater tanks flash exotic plumage—a mirror of the unnamed diseases I fear I have. Plants barely hanging on, leaves shriveled brown at the edges, stalks dry as chalk at the bases. But worst is me. In a doctor’s office, I am hypervigilant, tuned into the pulsing, ticking micro, and I get, well, nervous.
             Now when I write nervous what I mean is six-alarm panicked. Accelerated heart rate, darting eyes, sweaty everything—clammy knees, sticky ankles—dizziness, a snowball of mania. From the minute I’m parked in the waiting room, I plan, I plot, working out the logistics of just how long I have to keep it together for before I can make a break for the exit…”

To read the complete piece, click here.

Poet Erin Belieu nominated me for the Chautauqua Review’s New Voice Spotlight, and they kindly published an excerpt of the memoir that has long since been rewritten. It was, at the time, part of my dissertation.

Still, Belieu had some tremendously kind things to say about my work:

“The terrible truth is, terrible things happen to people. Deeply personal, seemingly unspeakable things. We throw the word around too often in our culture for the sake of hyperbole, but there are people who walk amongst us carrying genuine, soul-shattering tragedies. How can a writer possibly write about such things? And even more so, how does a writer do this without the scene-shop scrim of fiction to veil their intimate reaction to such horror? How does a writer do this particularly in the form of memoir, which allows the writer no place to hide, affords no relieving illusion of distance to protect themselves and their reader? Lisa Nikolidakis answers this question for us, and she does so in prose that is beautifully transparent, disciplined, immediate, moving, and even occasionally black-humored. I can’t imagine what it felt like to hold this stick of dynamite, patiently working away while the fuse was lit in her hand. But she did it. And for that I am very grateful.”

One of the first essays I wrote about the complications of being Greek-American, centering on what happens when your Greek family comes to visit and turns your world upside down.

The essay is unavailable online, but it begins:

“Just after noon on June 16th, 1986, my reward for a year of good grades and being through with elementary school arrived in the mail. The sheer size of the package, though it was mostly stuffed with Styrofoam peanuts, signaled that my attention to grades, my constant adherence to the rules and assignments, had paid off. My closest (and only) friend, Crystal, had longed for a new Huffy bike—a red number with a white basket—but she’d pulled a “C” in English and a “C+” in Social Studies. Secretly, I was a little glad since she’d knocked my choice of gifts, claiming that it was one of the three times in the whole year when I could get whatever I wanted, and I shouldn’t waste it on more “schooly stuff.” There’s your “C” in English. Anyway, I scored a much coveted plastic, Kelly green file box with the words “Illustrated Wildlife Treasury” on the front and my first set of 20 glossy cards, a different animal on each. I set right out to filing them alphabetically, aardwolf to zorille, though later, as more cards arrived, I arranged them by zoological classification. This was easier than it sounds since there was a legend on the front of each card, a black outline that indicated which phylum each creature was a member of. A silhouetted snake or udders made all the difference between reptilia and mammalia…”

The essay appears in Vol. 11, No. 2, and can be found here.

Though I watched every second of it, the Twin Peaks reboot had me yelling at the TV often, so I vented with humor.

The essay begins:

“Accuracy ★

The room really is red, so I guess that’s accurate. And calling this “a getaway like no other” is also technically true, but lots of important details were left out of this listing.

For starters, there’s no bathroom, kitchen, or bedroom. Definitely no Wi-Fi. I know this was listed as a “shared room,” but I expected like one or two people at most. You want the tally? A giant, a little guy, a blonde girl who only stared and whispered, a one-armed man who kept yelling MY NAME IS MIKE (we get it, buddy), and a long-haired guy that never stopped villain laughing popped in and out of the room all night long. If you want privacy, this isn’t the place for you. Bring pepper spray…”

Click here for the full piece.

Necessary Fiction was kind enough to publish a trifecta of flash fiction, all of it a clear indicator that I was having bad luck dating back then. “Options” got listed by Wigleaf as a Top 50 Short Fiction for the year.

“Avoidance” begins:

“Robert tells me I talk about food when I’m not getting any. He says, “People turn all tuna tartare when sex isn’t an option” as I recount the seafood bisque I had with Greg, my latest ex, the night we broke up last week. A couple of years ago Robert and I started messing around out of boredom. Some Jodie Foster number on cable and my hand worked its way under his belt, slid beneath the band of his boxer briefs until he leaned into me so close I could feel the hiccups of his body. Eventually, the fooling around stopped. He said handjobs without love just don’t amount to much…”

To read all three pieces, click here.

I had so many contenders for “favorite essay to teach,” but I chose one that never gets shaved off of my syllabi. Though the author, Spencer Wise, is a good friend, I truly do love teaching this piece.

Click here for the link to Wise’s essay, which won Narrative Magazine’s Nonfiction Contest.

Here’s my take on it, and click here for the original piece on Assay’s dynamite blog.

Lisa Nikolidakis on Spencer Wise’s “The Second-Worst Rug My Father’s Ever Seen”

One question that we investigate in my Creative Nonfiction course is how do we take that funny anecdote we tell at parties and turn it into compelling memoir? Spencer Wise’s “The Second-Worst Rug My Father’s Ever Seen,” which won Narrative Magazine’s 2013 Fall Contest, is a perfect model. Wise could easily have on his hands an essay that is only about the time he almost flunked out of school and his dad bailed him out, but I’m not sure any of us would care much. Instead, he gives us heart: a father-son story, one about what’s expected of us and why we sometimes fail. Almost flunking out of school is plot—and it isn’t enough—but wrestling with identity and figuring out how he fits into his family is what moves this essay from local anecdote to one that touches those memorable, universal nerves.

Most students love this essay, but each semester at least one doesn’t. When asked why, the answer has been the same: he’s spoiled. In some ways, the student is right; Wise is on the cusp of not graduating from his fancy prep school when his father, a factory owner, rescues him. And he saves him again when Wise in college. It’s the second time that pushes a student into dislike territory, but this is a teachable moment: if we only read for plot, we might not respect his choices, but once we figure out that this essay is really about how families become codependent on one another, that narrow view suddenly broadens and allows for both a portrait of Wise’s vulnerability and a great writing prompt: What behaviors do we engage in with our families that outsiders might not understand?

Wise takes cues from fiction in crafting scenes and setting up the essay. He writes, “When I told my father that his good Jewish son and the future vice president of his shoe-manufacturing company was signing up for a floor loom weaving class, he said over the phone, ‘All my life I worked so you could be the best at arts and crafts?’” He starts close to the end: we have character and conflict from the opening line.

Wise’s voice is funny from the outset, particularly in how well he captures his father’s nuanced, Yiddish speech. I ask students if they like the father, and everyone does; he’s very funny. But then we look at him in isolation—we try to imagine that we don’t know the rest of the story. Wise writes, “Sometimes he would nod off in his chair beside me, but as soon as he stopped hearing the swish of the shuttle through the warp and the soft thump of the beater and the clack of the treadles, he’d snap up in his chair, rub his eyes, and yell: ‘Work, goddammit. Work!’” Later the father says, ““Shovel it down your throat and get back to work. There’s no time for lounging.” When taken out of context, this character suddenly sounds harsh, almost abusive, which yields terrific discussion on the work we must do to make a potentially unlikeable character loveable.

Finally, on a language-level, Wise’s prose is gorgeous; sometimes it’s lyrical, letting us get lost in long, fluid sentences. In other spaces, he punctuates a paragraph with a sentence so poignant, so true, that it resonates loudly. His attention to detail throughout the piece is impressive, but the closing paragraph is a tutorial on how to get out of an essay. Instead of wrapping up with a moral, as many students try to, he instead gives us a short scene that ultimately shows how inextricably tied to one another these men will remain. Wise writes, “And then, right as I was about to make my move, steal out of the room, he reached back and lay his arm over my chest, as if he knew I wanted to get away. Leave for good. And it’s true. Part of me wants to run. The other part wants to stay in that motel room until the paint peels off the walls.” In the end, both image and language are his outs, and they work effectively.

One of my earliest flash-fiction publications, this piece begins:

“My father pulls the footstool I made in woodshop last year to the edge of the counter so I can learn how to de-bone a snapper for avgolemono, and my heels are squared on the pointe shoes I’d painted in pink acrylics. His hands are leathered from years of work in diner kitchens, their rough edges making noise when he drags them against something soft like a blanket, though now they glisten, his knuckles reflecting the overhead light, his fists 75 watts of fish guts. Nancy, his mistress, shuffles behind us to the fridge and turns with a refilled glass of White Zin, a straw peeking over the rim globbed with fuchsia…”

Click here for the complete piece.