The Big Brick Review Archive

Building on the narrative of our lives...one brick at a time.

 

ISSUE 1: INTRODUCING THE BBR


Sweet Tooth

by Sonja Livingston

“REMEMBER THE WAY you ate sugar right from the bowl?”Steph says. “You’d perch on a chair in your little kid underwear and toss back crystals with the shovel of a tiny spoon." Not the most flattering image...read more

365

365 Pelham Road

by Sejal Shah

RANCH HOUSES, WHEN I was growing up, were not cool. At least in my mind, at least on that street, in the 1980s.  Ranches seem appreciated now—or maybe it’s just everyone’s eventual knee problems...read more


A Guilded Cage

by Alison Smith

IN JULY 1984 my brother Roy died in a car accident. He was eighteen. It was raining when he left for work that morning. A half-mile from our house an oncoming car spun out of control on the wet road...read more


Dear Me (Note to Self)

by E. Zosia Green

DEAR ME, MY DEAR. To find your thoughts sandwiched there, in your sketchbook, where you used to draw when you thought that was your path. Stumbling upon your written word buried in the thick black cloth-bound book....read more


The Boss

by Georgia Beers

LIFE IS ALL about building. Every day we build on something, whether we realize it or not, whether we intend to or not. Our homes. Our jobs. Our families. Building, building, building, all the time...read more


Moving

by Susan Bono

IN THE CONFUSION of lumber scraps, heaved earth, and ravaged lawn that has been our backyard for the last eight months, a tiny cottage has been born. All last spring I bent over blueprints, trying to imagine its future shape, feeling like a shipbuilder designing the cabin of a seaworthy craft...read more

Vault Beach, 1996

by Jenny Lloyd

MY GROWN-UP CHILDREN and I sit apart from each other on the sand.  It is sand only by courtesy, a false promise gleaming seductively from the cliff walk.  In fact it is tiny white and gray pieces of gravel, coarse to the touch, unpleasant to walk on barefoot...read more

My Runaway Plan

by Gregory Gerard

I WAS VISITING Gram the day I hatched my runaway plan. At eight, the youngest in our crowded Western New York farmhouse – Big Brick – I was different from the rest of them; I sensed it. I longed to get away through the craggy forest behind our property and discover my own adventure...read more

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