Mona’s writing appeared in:
Featured writing
The Indigenous Story: a Horror Tale Unheard of and Untold
If you had to talk about the lives of the indigenous peoples that inhabited California before and during the arrival of whites, would you have much to say? Do we really know much at all?
That was precisely how I felt before I read "We Are Not Animals" by Martin Rizzo-Martinez. Their real story, the way they must have felt, the way they must have made sense with a world pulled out from under their feet.
To me, the indigenous story had always been effusive. It was a world so far away and so unheard of, so unspoken of, that it felt near impossible to really connect, to understand the fragments I did learn of.
Belonging
"How do you heal from such things, things that are bigger than you, from history? How do you forgive yourself when there’s never in a thousand moons enough shame for one person to feel? Enough shame to make up for the cruelty of an entire atrocious era in time?"
Out of the Cold
The baby hummingbird drank greedily from the dropper. She had named him Finn. Mona let out a pained sigh of relief. It was 3:37 a.m., exactly four hours and twenty-three minutes before her graduate committee would arrive. This Ph.D. defense was her last exam. She would have to demonstrate how torpor worked—the state somewhere in between a power nap and hibernation that hummingbirds went in and out of to withstand cold temperatures.
Shameful Friendships
“‘You need to cover your arms – you're way too skinny,’ my best friend said over dinner. I shoveled more peanut sauce over my meal, just so she wouldn't think I was trying to be thin on purpose.”
A Wild Frontier Intact
The howling grew distant.
Elizabeth had only narrowly escaped. An abandoned rail handcar had saved her from a wolf chasing her through the land of nothing, the land of desert, of the Western frontier.
She gasped, hoping, holding on to the rattling car for life. Somehow she’d known how to release the brakes, and the steep downhill tracks meant that she didn't need another person across from her to pump the handcar like a seesaw.
Forgetting
My grandmother’s decline started long before the beginning of the end.
It started long before she began repeating the same questions over and over, in thirty-second intervals. A long time before she tried to leave the house at night to go find her long-deceased mother in town. It started long before she thought she’d make coffee for the guests of her childhood boarding house that had been torn down some 50 years earlier.
And then it ended. It ended with me seeing death for the first time.