Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialst, and Master Photographer.
I was twenty-three when they sent me home. Three summers of devotion, three years of sunburns and scraped knees, of singing around the fire and waking up before dawn to make sure my campers were safe, fed, and cared for. I had built my world around the summer camp where I spent every summer since…
The world never roots for the stegosaurus. It doesn’t have the sleek, predatory prowess of the Velociraptor, the sheer brute force of the Tyrannosaurus rex, or even the rebellious charm of the Triceratops. If the dinosaur kingdom were a high school, the T. rex would be the star quarterback, the raptors would be the overachieving…
I drove like hell through the night, the highway stretching endlessly before me, my headlights cutting through the darkness like a blade. The only sound was the hum of the tires on the asphalt and the music playing on my cell phone. I didn’t stop, didn’t slow down. I just kept driving, pushing forward even…
Some moments in life feel like they belong in a dream—sharp, surreal, drenched in the kind of reckless abandon that only makes sense in retrospect. It started with a dare, a playful nudge from my girlfriend as we walked past an unfamiliar house in Upstate New York. The place was immaculate, almost unnervingly pristine, the…
When I think of the places I used to know, the locations where keyframe events in my life took place, I feel desideratum. Almost as if there is a feeling of loss, or grief for something lost, as if in that moment I was part of something I cannot see. Forever lost, though completely intangible…
The wreckage of my past is the war that’s never won. Often times I think about all the things that were said to me so many years ago; I would always listen to the negativity, silently as if I were laying down in the wake of someone else’s incompetence or insecurities, my elders and a…
It is curious how one’s fears change as we grow older. When I was a child, I had the typical and classic childhood fears; fear of the dark, fear of death, fear of getting hurt, but above all else, I had an irrational and overwhelming fear of mirrors. Fear is the emotional paralytic that draws…
Day breaks, the lost girl inside wakes, the birds sing, the wind blows through the trees, and the angels sigh. My mornings in Vermont begin early with the rising sun, my days often occupied with my own pursuits of untamed introspection as I try to unravel the mysteries of life, followed by early nightfall to…
I used to write in riddles, and I used to write in rhymes; my body ached to write the words, the prose is what kept me alive. I write into the dark veil of the night, and in another set of chances, I’d take the ones I’ve missed. All the times in which I spoke…
“Sky above me, Earth below me, a fiery passion forever burning within me.”—Emily Pratt Slatin I have always been a little different. Even as a young child, when other girls were content with playing princesses and tea parties, I found myself more engrossed in embarking on imagined adventures, climbing trees, and dreaming of the vast,…
Emily Pratt Slatin
P.O. Box 1231
Middletown Springs, VT 05757-1231
United States Of America