Essays and stories by Joan Marcus appear in The Sun, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Laurel Review, Gulf Coast, Statement of Record, and elsewhere. She is a two-time winner of the Constance Saltonstall grant for upstate New York writers. Avoidant Type, her memoir-in-progress, tells the story of her battle with medical anxiety. She lives in Ithaca, NY and teaches fiction and narrative nonfiction at Ithaca College.
From Edmund to Laura Ingalls to Augustus Gloop, in children's books, sugar is otherworldly, transcendent, symbolic. In real life, my relationship with sweets is much more fraught.
As Discovery’s most notorious show prepares to return, we ask ourselves: Is it okay to be entertained by exploitation if we acknowledge we’re being manipulated?