From Amazon:

A powerful memoir about the traumas of a perilous childhood, a shattering murder-suicide, and a healing journey from escape to survival to recovery.

Growing up, Lisa Nikolidakis tried to make sense of her childhood, which was scarred by abuse, violence, and psychological terrors so extreme that her relationship with her father was cleaved beyond repair. Having finally been able to leave that relationship behind, surviving meant forgetting. For years, “I’m fine” was a lie Nikolidakis repeated.

Then, on her twenty-seventh birthday, Nikolidakis’s father murdered his girlfriend and her daughter, and turned the gun on himself. Nikolidakis’s world cracked open, followed by conflicted emotions: shock, grief, mourning for the innocent victims, and relief that she had escaped the same fate. In the tragedy’s wake, questions lingered: Who was this man, and why had he inflicted such horrors on her and his last victims? For answers, Nikolidakis embarked on a quest to Greece to find her father’s estranged family and a reckoning with the past she never expected.

In her gripping and moving memoir, Nikolidakis explores not only the making of a killer but her own liberation from the demons that haunted her and her profound self-restoration in the face of unimaginable crimes.

“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.”

An essay about the difficulty of navigating chronic illness, slowing down, and losing myself in books about whales.

Click here to read.

Click here to read the essay.

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An essay about drowning, trauma, and the ways we go unseen, kindly published by New Orleans Review.

The essay begins:

“I envy the grace with which some people take to water: their bodies slick, their confidence unquestioned, feet-first, head-first, the body first a closed fist, then a palm extended, plunging and gliding and breathing with ease. I’ve a graceful doggy paddle at best and more often than not have to hold my nose, an embarrassment for a woman over forty. Still, all my life I’ve been drawn to the water, like my mother before me.”

To read the full essay, please click here.

An essay about trauma, sleep, and buying a couch. I wish this one were available online, but instead, it’s only in the print issue of Salt Hill 42.

The essay begins:

My vision blurs from fatigue, but since I can’t sleep—since I haven’t slept well in months—I drive to Ashley Furniture to purchase my first brand-new couch. I’d planned on going the gently used route again, but when I flipped up a cushion on a plaid sofa at the Habitat for Humanity home store and spotted an enormous hobo spider waiting for its victim (me), I thought new. New’s the way to go.

I stroll into the lobby and out of the Indiana downpour, shake the rain out of my bangs. A man with black hair gelled into stiff merengue peaks greets me with a deep, enthusiastic drawl. “Are you from Alabama?” I ask. One of my closest friends bleeds Tuscaloosa red, and for a moment, his voice feels like an unexpected hug.

“It’s weird how much people say that. Born in Hawaii, raised here.” He looks me over—will he make a sale?—and half smiles. I picture myself through his eyes: a gal with tattoos, a Lou Reed tee, purposefully mismatched shoes, a decent purse. At best a fifty-fifty shot.

“Do you need help?”

“Nah. I’ve done my research,” I say and wander past him into the store.

In 2016, my short essay on cleaning up my father’s estate after his crimes went viral across Hearst six Hearst sites. 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.

In early 2020, my short story “With Mercy to the Stars” was selected as winner of the Lamar York Prize for Fiction.

The judge had this to say:

“A wonderful and surprising coming-of-age story about two Greek teenage girls, an unwanted pregnancy, and a dancing bear named Callisto. I was totally drawn in from the first page, happy to be in the company of a young narrator who is just starting to glimpse the limitations of the adulthood that awaits her, as confining as the cage that houses her father’s prized bear. The story forces the narrator to make a choice that will have ramifications for her, her best friend, and her family—and fully initiate her into the world of choice and consequence. A powerful story that is a pleasure to read from the opening sentence to the harrowing last line.”

—Anthony Varallo

The story begins:

“It is something to live with a bear that doesn’t like you. Callisto was a cub when my father brought her home after the earthquake in ’78, the same quake that took my mother, and because I was six years old—or maybe because the bear’s eyes were a familiar shade of brown—I was convinced that Callisto was my mother, her spirit somehow fused with this cub. In her call, a sweet note like someone testing a harmonica, I heard a welcome, maybe even love. Of course, my father warned me and my younger brother Stelios to stay away from her cage. He’d say, “Step near her, and Cronus will eat you in your sleep.” His warning worked for a while, but eventually I knew his threat was blank as a cloud. I couldn’t help myself; I had to touch her. Early one morning, I got about a yard away—I could even smell her, wet and musky—but she turned, swung her arm at me, and growled for the first time with such volume that it woke my father. You can guess the smacking I got. After that, anytime I came near she clacked her teeth and let loose sharp, bursting grunts of air. I realized quickly that two things can be true at once: you can love and fear the same thing.”

Unfortunately, this is another print-only journal, available 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.

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…”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The essay 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.

This bit of flash made Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fictions. It begins:

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. “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.