Growing up, the holiday season was not one of joy for me. I’d lost my father mid-December when I was three years old and spent my first...

Early 2000s…Northwest Tennessee. The two of us. Two jobs each, and a little freelance newspaper writing gig on the side for me. By day, I...

It was really a peninsula, but I suppose somewhere along the way, someone thought ‘Marina Island’ sounded better than ‘Marina Peninsula.’...