Intrepid Posts

Beth McNichol
Aug 18, 2024
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Here is a collection of memoir-esque essays or chapters exploring many of the themes I touch on in my newsletter interviews. Inside these pieces, I hope you’ll discover connections with your own life or the life of someone you know. The posts you see on this page are available to paid subscribers on the date they are posted. Free subscribers receive access about a month after the publish date.

Discarded

Beth McNichol
·
Sep 25
Discarded

If you are my mother, you might worry that you are expendable, that there is no love, only survival; and the way you hold onto that old fear transfers to your children, seeping into their roots and rising through the stalks of their souls. Maybe you, too, could be thrown over in this old, hard life by your parents, your siblings, your lovers. Your children. Maybe they, too, need to know that an uncertain ocean moves beneath them, that it would rampage and take them whole if given the chance.

Maybe that’s why we both, mother and daughter, have sought higher, unimpeachable ground.

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Thirteen

Beth McNichol
·
Aug 18
Thirteen

What I am saying is that some 13-year-olds hold flames aloft in places of worship and some 13-year-olds dance wildly by a summer lake and some 13-year-olds sit on a cold floor in a cold place in a cold month praying to the right gods for their heroes to prevail, and all of it—every candle, every chant, every joyful dance, every single third-and-forever—is an act of faith.

I am saying that football is never only about football, not for me. And not for my father, either.

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Heirlooms

Beth McNichol
·
Jul 20
Heirlooms

A gangly, silver-haired man wearing a pastel sports jacket and khakis secured by a nylon, Boy-Scout-beige belt floats into the row in front of me and sits down. He removes from his messenger bag the necessary provisions. A distressed, leather-bound notebook. A weighty-looking, black-and-gold pen with the circumference of a small spyglass. A thick manuscript swollen with a map of coffee stains, its bottom-right page corners curled up and over like breaking waves.

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