Arabs aren’t people, they say.
I delight in this for I have seen
What people do. I do not
Want to be among them.
Let me die an Arab, a sore
Animal hungry for God—
Or any measure of Grace.
– Omar Sakr, “Dehumanised in the Genocide”
Always about the Adirondacks is a pileup of loosely held, emphatically shared rumors. Alongside skiing, climbing, kayaking, and hiking—spreading gossip, and quizzing its sources, is local sport. Each time I return, I’m greeted with stories of varying validity. Once, asking a retired neighbor why this hobby seemed, in our experience, more commonplace among ruralites than city dwellers, she simply shrugged and yawned out: Something to do.
In communities where residents pass more deer than pedestrians on their Sunday joyrides, rumors fall and stick like midwinter snow, each local’s rendition building one soft layer atop another until it’s part of the landscape. I’ve heard many tales of North Country, first on chatter-filled trails as a visitor, and later over drinks in townie bars as a Regular-Enough. Some were suspected false, some proven true.
Mechanics in Ausable Forks pocket disposal fees and toss tires into the otherwise pristine Ausable river (true, and volunteers in kayaks fish them out during annual cleanup). Said mechanics get away with this due to blood relations to both the town judge and members of the police force (likely true, though I’ve been warned to report otherwise). There’s a hidden cave near Pharoah Mountain that was once used to stash gold (false, according to local anthropologists). A Moriah resident regularly feeds potato salad and hamburgers to bears (true, confirmed by DEC1 records). Ward Lumber refuses to deliver hay to an elderly goat-breeder in Wilmington (false, the cashier said, as I foolishly stuffed four loose bales of hay for her into my freshly cleaned car. She just won’t pay the delivery fee!) World renowned abstract artist, Frank Owen, is a regular at the Ausable Inn (true, and he’s as good a conversationalist as he is a painter). An anonymous family paid the techies that bought New Vida Ski Resort millions to deter them from developing the meadow bordering Jay and Wilmington (unsolved mystery). Patty Hearst currently lives in Keene (ibid.).
While local lore can liven an idle afternoon, there’s one category of it that particularly harbors my interest—a form of storytelling that locals employ, consciously or not, in attempts to connect to the living mountains. Uniquely situated in a perpetually liminal space between wilderness and civilization, the Adirondack Park churns out as many tales of its tailed inhabitants as those precariously balanced on two legs. I’ve been told compelling anecdotes of the crying loon, the creeping mountain lion, the elusive moose that recessed from the boreal forest to trek up Whiteface Memorial Highway, but few have outshined the chronicles of Adirondack bears. Every generation or two, there’s a bear that etches itself into the communal memory of the park, becoming near-mythological.
Though most anthropocentric tales eventually melt off with the winter’s snowpack, those of resident wildlife tend to linger. One in particular belongs to a bear named Tractor and his cunning offspring. Tractor was a unit of a bear—gargantuan, I’m told. Pete, a Keene Valley resident that I know, ran into Tractor in 2001 while backpacking with his wife and children near the Flower Lands. Pete later wrote of the encounter in The Adirondack Almanac, transforming it from myth to verified happening: “I have encountered plenty of black bears over the years. I have seen grizzlies in the wild. This looked like a grizzly, so bulky was he.” In the face-off with “several hundred pounds of creature,” as Pete put it, in a state where bear spray is rarely sold or carried, he was forced to forfeit their trip’s worth of backpacking food to Tractor, or risk the lives of his family. Pete, I have to think, did this with regretful awareness that, in choosing not to put their lives on the line, they’d potentially risked Tractor’s—bringing the bear one step deeper into food conditioning, and the aggression that often results from it.
Tractor, famous for his size, may have been amongst the largest black bears to grace the region. Many hikers were shaken by his presence—anxiously aware that he roamed the same mountain tops they’d camp on—and squirmed in their sleeping bags, sweating through nightmares of his sheer heft. Their tired imaginations fueled not by photographs but by hearsay. Years after Pete’s run-in with Tractor, the bear was euthanized for cornering campers in a lean-to. The only silver lining to his short-lived reign was the clever cub he left in his rocky path.
* * *
The only Adirondack bear legend more persistent than Tractor’s is that of his presumed daughter, Yellow-Yellow. Her sweet, simple moniker—derived from the yellow tracking tags pinned to either ear—still evokes fondness in the Adirondack community. Yellow-Yellow was known to roam the Marcy Dam-Lake Colden Corridor of the High Peaks Wilderness. Unlike her father she was quite small for a black bear, the scale halting at a humble 125 pounds, and regarded as profoundly timid. There was a period when those residing near the High Peaks—in Lake Placid, Keene Valley, Jay, Wilmington, and the like—cautiously wished for a visit from Yellow-Yellow, curious to see the notorious bear in action. But anyone who ran into her would deny they’d ever sought her acquaintance and leave the encounter feeling, quite literally, robbed.
Boxes of granola bars, seventy-liter backpacks filled with dehydrated stir-fry, containers of dry oatmeal—a picky eater she was not. There’s a video of Yellow-Yellow sheepishly approaching idling hikers, slowly clamping a fifty pound backpack between her teeth, and reversing her way into the underbrush. I imagine her as the kind of bear who, if she could speak, was probably saying “Hey, sorry to interrupt, please not the loud clapping thing so early in the morning, just here to get breakfast and I’ll be on my merry way.”
It wasn’t thievery that gained Yellow-Yellow notoriety, but how she pillaged. In 2005, bear-proof food canisters became mandatory for backpackers and campers in the eastern High Peaks, a regulation which led to a significant and steady decrease in negative interactions between humans and bears. Yellow-Yellow’s local fame reached far past the Adirondack’s white pine boundaries when rumors of her outwitting canisters were proven true. She was the first, and for some time the only, bear in North America to hack the BearVault. The company’s founders had tested the canister on wild grizzlies with success—or, as the grizzlies saw it, failure—but little Yellow-Yellow devised a winning tactic, pressing the child-proof style, double-lid tabs with her teeth. The revelation of the black bear’s hack brought flurrying discussions of innovation to the BearVault headquarters. Galvanized by the challenge she posed, employees updated the canister and sent new models to her territory for testing. The sow opened every iteration thrown her way.
Her fame peaked in the summer of 2009, when news of the fun-sized robber was spread by a New York Times article titled “Bear-Proof Can Is Pop-Top Picnic for a Crafty Thief.” In the months surrounding the publication, wildlife biologists at the DEC claimed to have received calls from The Colbert Report, National Geographic, and various interested documentarians. Within weeks, Yellow-Yellow did more to raise awareness of backcountry food storage than Smokey The Bear did for wildfire prevention in his whole, inanimate life. At least her devoted fans in the Adirondacks liked to say so. Sly burglar that she was, her gentle disposition led locals and admirers beyond the park to trust she’d meet a better fate than her father’s.
***
On October 12, 2012, as the foliage turned, Yellow-Yellow was slain by an opportunistic deer hunter. He’d stumbled upon her grazing in the mountains of Jay. Perhaps she’d been taking in the views, as bears are observed to do in the wild. The hunter seized the moment, his bullet splashing a new shade of red onto a sugar maple’s fallen leaves.
Some suspect the man ignored the two, iconic yellow tags adorning her fuzzy, domed ears, though it has also been said that the tags fell out by this time. It piled on to the list of unconfirmed gossip in the Adirondacks, with believers on either side holding the hunter in differing levels of regard.
Her slaying was demoralizing, and the eulogy was equally unsettling. (For a eulogy to be described as anything less than good, it has to be notably distasteful.)
The eulogy appeared in The Adirondack Almanack and read longer than most written for humans—well deserved, for a world-renowned bear. But the piece lacked the respect many felt her death deserved and was scattered with awkward, misplaced attempts at humor.
Some lowlights: “Hikers and campers that purchased the BearVault to use in the High Peaks region may be relieved they can once again venture into the area without the constant threat of having their delicious nutrition bars pilfered. In addition, those backpackers, who due to no fault of their own became victims of this intelligent bear, may be relieved to hear of her recent passing too. They may even think she met her just desserts…Apparently, advanced age brought about an alleged increased aggressiveness toward campers and hikers with food, which is a common phenomenon among the animal kingdom as anyone observing geriatrics at a Denny’s around five in the afternoon can attest. Perhaps this aggressiveness played a role in her recent demise.”
I cringed at the presumption that hikers—who, one hopes, respect the wilderness they explore—should be relieved by the death of a famous black bear because their nutrition bar’s security was no longer compromised. It reflected the sentiment of outdoor explorers who seem to want only the sense of roaming the wild, without the risks of being truly within it. More upsetting was the eulogist’s falsely asserted late-in-life aggression in order to somehow justify her killing, despite all records and rumors pointing to her gentle disposition. The same journal published an article about Yellow-Yellow less than a year prior, describing her as a non-confrontational, “shy” black bear. Unlike the gossip about town, his baseless accusation struck me as especially unjust—an animal, especially a dead one, can’t prance into a packed trivia night at Raquette River Brewing and set falsities straight on their own behalf.
Over a decade later, BearVaults are still not an approved brand of canister in the High Peaks Wilderness. A lasting reminder of one little bear’s act of defiance.
The tale of Yellow-Yellow’s demise echoes similar accounts of wildlife that are revered but ultimately killed as soon as we’re reminded they’re not the ideal, anthropomorphized symbols they’ve been projected to be. This dynamic is paradoxical, since they’re killed due to the various domino effects of human encroachment. They’re hit by tourist vehicles, like the beloved Teton Grizzly 399 run over in 20242, or inadvertently killed by the very species fostering their food dependencies3, like Tractor. These slain animals are emblems of the broader natural world mankind continues to destroy, emerging from dense woodlands and desolate tundras to beg for an end to their ongoing eviction—reminding us the rivers we pollute, the forests we log, the mountains we carve into, are their homes. These long-lamented issues of encroachment seem to have anticipated much of the political climate today.
* * *
Of all the quadruped anecdotes in the Adirondacks, the death of Yellow-Yellow and her father included, none shook me as much as that of the lone gray wolf. The last native wolf to the Adirondacks was killed in 1893. Wolf hunting is now illegal in the Adirondacks and New York at large, where the species is protected. Despite periodic murmurs of sightings, it’s rarely been proven that wolves return to their native mountain ranges. But a splash was made in 2021.
When news of a poached wolf got loose, it spread through the park instantly, as though each phone in a hundred mile radius received a simultaneous text. Shortly after, a friend and I lamented over beers and discussed our subjective thoughts on what constitutes ethical hunting. If, philosophically, “ethical” killing can truly exist. As we agreed that hunting for food was generally noble, a man sulking down the bar shouted to the waitress or no one, “Who the damn cares! Hunting is an American right, a heritage sport!” And brought our discourse to a temporary halt. He stared down at his resin-colored drink, as if his manners might be found inside the glass. Silently, I agreed—for some American politicians, it is very much part of their heritage to take life, for no reason, while invading another’s territory.
Upon hearing the wolf was shot, I was reminded of Matthew Olzmann’s poem, “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America”:
Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom. To stand
on the precipice of some wild valley,
the eagles circling, a herd of caribou
booming below, and to yawn
with indifference. To discover
something primordial and holy.
To have the smell of the earth
welcome you to everywhere.
To take it all in, and then,
to reach for your knife.
Tell me what it’s like to be face-to-face with an object of such concentrated wonder, and then, to reach for your gun. To, in some final punctuation, pull the trigger. All the while, harboring the belief that it is your right.
***
Shortly after the poaching spread by mouth, it spread by paper. The photograph comes to mind in unfortunate detail, a combination of rage and confusion having seared it inside my eyelids: A pale hunter laden with sparkling, first-hand gear, face tightened to a shit-eating smirk, tilting the slain wolf up by the nape. The wolf’s vacant eyes were pulled back into dark slits and its jaw swung ajar. Looking at the picture, you could almost hear the machismo lauding from behind the camera. In lieu of remorse, the man’s eyes exuded glee.
It’s the grin in the photo that gave me most pause, most gut-twist. I recalled research from Raincoast Conservation Foundation and Applied Conservation Science Lab, where scientists studied thousands of social media posts of hunters and their prey. They assessed the particular smiles of hunters, and the joy beaming from each. The study concluded that the “odds of true ‘pleasure’ smiles are greater when hunters pose: (a) with versus without prey, (b) with large versus small prey and, (c) with carnivores versus herbivores (among older men).” The research was said to “emerge with a generalizable achievement-oriented hypothesis to propose that the prospect of displaying large and/or dangerous prey at least in part underlies the behavior of many contemporary hunters.” The modern, digital version of campfire bragging rights: Pics or you didn’t kill it!
At this point, I’d befriended a few hunters despite my initial, city-bred reservations. Though taking life is not within my conscience, I’d learned more about ethical hunting, and even tried my hand at butchering a deer. When it comes to possible foodways, I hold more respect for those who hunt for food than for myself. I rarely eat meat, and when I do it’s sourced hyper-locally, but the crucial phase of processing is conveniently out of sight and mind. I can almost, to my worry, forget a steak comes from the same big-eyed, long-lashed bovine I awww’d at while visiting Jay’s Sugar House Creamery. Once, exiting a farm store in Montana, I was embarrassed to find myself cooing hi, beautiful to a cow at the ranch—a ground pound of said cow’s sibling in my waving hand. I can appreciate the value of sustainable hunting for food. Hunting for sport, trophy hunting, or poaching—there, I hold no space.
In the Northeast, it’s assumed that most coyote, bear, and now wolf kills are made by opportunistic deer hunters who accidentally run into more prized mammals while scouting for cervids. This is because the time, patience, and knowledge of behavior patterns it takes to properly stalk and hunt far-ranging species like wolves is beyond the style and skill set of most modern hunters. The hunter who killed the wolf, claiming innocence, said he mistook it for a coyote. Why, then, did he call the DEC to report that he may have shot a wolf? Of course, he didn’t mind posing for the camera before picking up his phone.
In case it doesn’t go without saying, I will say it: He knew it was a wolf. At least that’s what park inhabitants believed at the time, and the sentiment remains as the story’s retold. It wouldn’t be a surprise for the average person to mistake a wolf for a coyote, but more is expected of those with a permit to kill. A hunter confusing a wolf for a coyote is like a rodent control expert confusing a city rat for a field mouse. Though I can’t speak for hunters at large, I will say they are generally not inept, and tend to be quite in tune with nature and its critters—an attunement they can use for better or worse. Most competent hunters who haven’t dropped their glasses can distinguish a coyote from a wolf. If they can’t, they shouldn’t be hunting. I’ve bitterly imagined the words passed between the hunter and DEC during their call, before he giddily uploaded the photograph to social media—the man rubbing the wolf’s fur between his fingers with a blooming smirk, while telling them the news with casual bravado: I mean, coyote, wolf—close enough.
DEC protected the identity of the hunter and took a disconcertingly long time to release the results of the DNA tests, which proved that the animal was ninety-eight percent grey wolf. Some speculated that implications the information could have on coyote hunting—specifically, that outcry could lead to an increase in DEC’s currently scant list of restrictions—to be at the heart of organization’s reluctance to release the findings.When the dust settled and the blood dried, regulations remained the same, and DEC placed a few new lines of copy on their website, reminding hunters that wolves are a protected species in New York State with tips on how to distinguish them from coyotes4.
There may have been a time when the community would’ve given the hunter who killed the wolf the benefit of the doubt, aware that cross-breeding between eastern coyotes and gray wolves can result in a blurred product. But it was the gloating grin in the hunter’s photo that resolved any question marks. He bore the same unconcealable “pleasure” smile, as dubbed by researchers, that’s on display in nearly every photo of a trophy hunter with their take. This smile told us that perhaps when hunting is not a bid towards self-sufficient food systems it is, particularly for those hunting predators, a stage to play out violence and domination in a culture that glorifies both.
* * *
As a child of Lebanese refugees, I struggle to refer to the aforementioned injustice in the stories of Yellow-Yellow, her father, and the wolf, as a manifestation of human exceptionalism—the idea that humans are different from, and superior to, all other living organisms. I see more clearly than ever that the issue—stemming from greed—bleeds beyond species lines, well into the category of Homo Sapiens, and through boundary lines between nation-states: The insatiable appetite of imperialist countries for land and resources, the gall of politicians representing those countries to discuss lives lost with levity, the drive to gain security by undermining another’s. It seems regions rich in natural resources are proportionately vulnerable to the threat of intrusion, to a wide-eyed world power, wanting needlessly for everything, knocking at the door with a lustful, dreaded cry: Room for us?
What I’ve observed in the past twenty months is not human exceptionalism but elite exceptionalism, which tends to be privileged, white exceptionalism. And I have the uncomfortable hunch that the vast majority of humans will not ultimately be safe—will not be counted among the ranks of the last standing “exceptions.”
When it no longer feeds geopolitical narratives to see us as humans, a favorite mentonym for Arabs that’s resurfaced is—according to certain leaders and their xenophobic supporters—Animals. Some memorable quotes through the years: Nobel Prize Winner Shmuel Agnon, 1945: “[Arabs are] without dignity, accepting humiliation…annoying, filthy…resembling dogs.” Israeli Ambassador to Burma, David Hacochen, in conversation with Robin Maxwell-Hyslop in 1967: “But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs.” Israeli Lieutenant colonel Dov Yermiya, addressing Lebanese and Palestinian detainees during the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon in 1982: “You are a nation of monkeys.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in reference to the Arab countries bordering Israel during a speech in 2016: “In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.” Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, 2023: “We are fighting against human animals.” The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a piece titled “Understanding the Middle East through the Animal Kingdom,” published February 2, 2024: “Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature. What does this parasitoid wasp do? According to Science Daily, the wasp ‘injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.’…Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars.” US envoy Tom Barrack addressing Lebanese journalists at a press conference in Beirut on August 26, 2025: “[Do not become] animalistic…act civilized.”
Dehumanization as a precursor to merciless aggression is nothing new, it’s part of the playbook for nearly every genocide, including and unfortunately not limited to: the Native American genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the Darfur genocide, and as I write this, the Palestinian genocide (perpetrated by Israel and funded primarily by the United States), and Israel’s sustained military aggression and illegal occupation across significant parts of Lebanon and Syria5. As I witness parallels between the struggles of indigenous populations, subjugated communities, and the natural world—I can’t help but observe that all animals are “dehumanized” in the hyper-individualistic West. In a human-centric and capitalistic society, dehumanization is just another way of saying devaluation. All species are subject to this devaluation—humans, bears, and wolves alike—to justify asymmetrical wars, both figurative and literal, until they begin to resemble ethnocide and ecocide.
Politicians at the helm remain naively optimistic about their plunder, approaching the people and creatures of the natural world as objects to dominate, rather than integrate with. Said politicians never pause to consider that the riches of nature are exhaustible, that they’ll inevitably be the victim of their own rapacity—the last domino to fall in their line of play, perhaps, but one doomed to fall nonetheless. What I used to label as “human exceptionalism,” I now perceive as broad-reaching, bipartisan greed that those holding power struggle to evolve from. This is a lesson most indigenous communities around the globe learned long ago. Those on the exploitative side of the scale, only they seem to be the exception.
The nameless gray wolf, Tractor, and Yellow-Yellow met the same unjust end, like much of the wildlife that came before and, for a too-short time, will come again. Each of these killings weakens the integrity of the wilderness in which they occur, and the community surrounding it.
As is the case when observing oppressed humans—or so-called “animals” whose mass murders are swept under the communal rug of corrupt governments, whose land is stolen under the fog of war—it’s the moral burden of those who witness to tell the stories of ecological cruelties. The obligation to social justice in the former case and environmental justice in the latter are inextricably linked.
And when speech is suppressed, as it increasingly seems to be through intangible social mores, targeted murders6,7 and written regulations alike, the challenge for those doing the telling is to remain steadfast in the truth.
* * *
At the apotheosis of her looting career, Yellow-Yellow taught her descendants to break into bear canisters. It became clear she wasn’t the only bear who’d figured it out when break-ins were recorded in her territorial range even after her death. They could kill the bear, but they couldn’t kill her lessons.
One sunny day while I napped in my cabin in the Adirondacks, sluggish with summer and an uncommonly hot morning spent swimming in the Ausable River, my dog barged into the bedroom and pawed at my hanging arm, leaving jagged red marks. Still swaying in dreams, I shooed her away. She ran to the front door and knocked loudly on the glass—rather than barking she tends to communicate with her hands. She repeated this in a torturous cycle, clawing lines into my exposed limbs then romping to the sliding glass doors, until I reluctantly rose, left eye glued shut, and followed her to the balcony. Rubbing my eyelid loose, I caught sight of our supposedly bear-proof kibble container lying on its side, open and empty. Parallel to the scene of the crime, a downy woodpecker clung to a birch tree, pecking madly, as if trying to convey what it had seen through morse code. I picked up the lid with confusion, studying large impressions of teeth along the plastic rim. As I crossed off one suspect to another—marks too big for a raccoon, container too heavy for opossums—I leaned over the wooden railing and noticed fresh bear scat beneath the balcony. Now we had a story of our own to spread about town. I wished our visitor better luck than their ancestors. Finally, blessed with a visit from Yellow-Yellow, or—close enough.
1 New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
2 According to data shared by the U.S. Department of Interior, Grizzly 399 was one of at least 46 bears killed in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 2024 alone.
3 In the past nine years, DEC has euthanized over 54 bears in the Adirondack region as a result of human interaction specifically due to food conditioning.
4 Some distinctions between a gray wolf and coyote, as summarized by the DEC website: The average gray wolf has a significantly larger stature than a coyote, and can sometimes weigh more than double a coyote. The face of a coyote is pointier than that of a wolf. Wolves have shorter and rounder ears, a blocky snub snout, and taller, lengthier builds. The paw prints of a wolf will typically be five inches long and four inches wide, while those of a coyote are usually three inches long and two inches wide. As represented by photographs on the website—although coat colorations vary greatly—gray wolves tend to have more color variations in their fur than coyotes.
5 On April 16, 2025, Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz released a statement saying that Israeli troops will remain in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza indefinitely.
6(The following data represents the span from October 7, 2023 to August 12, 2025)
According to the UN Human Rights Office, Israel has killed at least 242 Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Other sources, including Al Jazeera, have reported that nearly 270 media professionals have been killed. This includes six Lebanese journalists: Issam Abdhallah, Farah Omar, Rabih Me’mari, Hadi Al-Sayed, Ghassan Najjar, and Mohammad Rida. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an additional 132 reporters have been injured, 2 are reported missing, and 90 have been arrested without charge. Israel has also threatened and subsequently killed family members of journalists (One such example is the case of Al Jazeera’s bureau chief for Gaza, Wael Al Dahdouh, who lost his wife, two sons, daughter, granddaughter, nephews, and several other relatives). Israel is also known to conduct “double tap” strikes on journalists—wherein they target journalists, wait for rescue personnel to approach the scene, and target again (the most recent example of this took place at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip on August 25, 2025, and killed five journalists). A 2025 Zeteo documentary exposed that certain IDF units use a photograph of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh—killed on the job in 2022 by IDF sniper Alon Scagio—for target practice. Israel has not been held accountable for the murder of any journalist, despite proof, footage, records of threats made to journalists, and the fact that the intentional targeting of journalists is a war crime.
7 The murder of truth-tellers is not exclusive to wartime, and is present in the environmental struggle as well. One example that’s stuck with me since 2005 is the case of the American-born Brazilian nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, who received death threats from loggers and landowners as she advocated for the protection of the Amazon rainforest—especially the region near Anapu, which sits along a logging frontier. One morning, she was followed and brutally killed by two armed men while on her way to a community meeting where she planned to discuss rights for the Amazon.
Stevie Chedid is a Lebanese-American writer currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Montana, where she is the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her writing can be found in The New York Times Magazine (forthcoming, August), Tahoma Review, Edge Effects, The Plentitudes Literary Journal (2025 Prize Winner), Adirondack Life Magazine, The Sun Magazine (Reader’s Write), and elsewhere. You can reach her on instagram @ _bodegacat_ or via email at steviechedid@gmail.com. This piece is an excerpt from a work in progress essay collection.
