Mental Mapping
We drove over seven hours to watch Adri and ninety-nine other middle schoolers answer questions about culture, economics, and rivers I couldn’t pronounce.
Courtney Zonnefeld graduated in 2018 with a degree in writing. She currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works for Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking, and saving up for more herb plants. You can usually find her wandering a farmer’s market, hunting for vintage books, or browsing the tea selection in coffee shops.
Homesick
When you visit a city you once called home, a part of you settles even as another part slides out of place.
A Museum of Lost Things
If fashion trends exist on the Island of Lost Toys, perhaps they’re all wearing the mismatched earrings and socks our past selves misplaced.
Flowers, Nine Ways
Over a decade ago on a family trip, my aunt taught me to take close-up photos through Queen Anne’s lace and other wildflowers.
A Good Book Can
A good book can fill you with an odd evangelistic urge to press its pages into someone else’s hands.
Chase Your Fears
I stood up, ripped my curtain open, and saw the source of the commotion: a blackbird. Fluttering his wings. Inside my house.
Fictional Cities Where I Wouldn’t Move
My Midwestern self would need enough help to assimilate into the real NYC, let alone one where the Woman in White might attack.
Yet to Come
The best days of our lives are behind us; the best days of our lives are before us.
Tips from a Year of Museuming
Whenever I enter a museum, I rediscover rhythms that I haven’t used since my last trip to Adventureland for nerds.
Light
The older I become, the more I am convinced that Christmas is about abundance that looks like scarcity.
In Season
Perhaps I am a person who loves the seasons because they help me know that time is truly passing.
Airports
Cruelty and its cousin insensitivity are not surprising in an airport. Kindness is.
Personal Geography
Fictional characters aren’t the only ones who can’t be described without their settings.
A Field Guide for Spotting a Good Adaptation
Instead of caring about Oberon, Titania, Puck, and their compatriots, I spent my time wondering what chaos backstage had created the confusion onstage.
Holding the Metaphor Lightly
Metaphors are tools for meaning-making, and when those tools have harvested bushel after bushel of meaning for my life, of course I struggle to see them as incomplete, limiting, or dangerous.
The Single Talk
If we are not committed to friendship, if we do not grieve and fight and ask questions alongside them, then we are the church but hardly a community.
Exempli Gratia
Whenever I finish typing out a list of any kind, I’m wincing at the realities my commas elide.
In Defense of Cinderella
Some people might dismiss those films as guilty pleasures, the Little Debbie cupcakes of my media diet—simple, sweet, and absolutely atrocious for my health.
The Company We Keep
Growing up is just a matter of noticing the neighbors.
Drinking the Garden: A Day of Tea
I’ve grown to adore the process of crushing ginger, cardamom, and cloves in a mortar and pestle, of boiling the spices until the kitchen smells like heaven.
Still Learning
Learning something new often requires a long time where we are the worst in the room. Ugh.
A Quartet Sampler of the 2021 Musical Buffet
If the emotions of the story feel honest and true—even if the specifics of the story are absolutely insane—I’ll be captivated by every moment.
I Don’t Feel Like Cooking Tonight
I often struggle to admit when I’d rather be anywhere but the kitchen.
Why I Wear Lipstick
I identify my mugs by a familiar stain around their edges.
Welcome to Nowhere Specific, Midwest, USA
But when a place is hardly (if ever) depicted, a place can be stereotyped into invisibility.
Writing Is
Reading others’ work and wondering if you could write between the gaps of their legacies.
In the Dirt
The words didn’t seem so distant from everyday life, from the people who’d small-talk about crops over their coffee.
Ada and Me
The long-dead Ada does not need to be the only woman we know in STEM.
Goodbye Packard
When I move the last box out of this place, I will no longer live next to four years of memories.
Pollen Springs Eternal
Antonio Vivaldi captured his spring’s breezes in his concertos, and yet I always welcome spring with a wince.
