Lime Hawk

"I never mentioned my mother’s food and exercise habits to my counselors when I was hospitalized. Looking back now, this surprises me, but I recall at the time it seeming too facile and too ordinary to make note of, as if these cravings, these denials, these grim hours of fanatical calorie-counting and calorie-burning were the foundation, not of obsession or illness, but of ordinary womanhood."

From "Tell Me About Yourself" by Dana Shavin.

This International Women's Day, we celebrate author Dana Shavin and her extraordinary essay featured in Lime Hawk Issue 13. "Tell Me About Yourself" is a chapter from Shavin's memoir "The Body Tourist" and anthologized in "Parts Unbound," Lime Hawk's print collection of essays about mental illness and health.

"Better than any other genre, nonfiction has the power to reveal the absurdity and irony that saturate our human lives. In Dana Shavin’s essay, “Tell Me About Yourself,” you may feel uncomfortable chuckling as a well-to-do mother and daughter, both suffering from eating disorders, choose to eat lunch at a Wendy’s where they order “a lone dry potato” and “six pale lettuce leaves” for which the mother demands “a cruet of vinegar” from the baffled Wendy’s server. Shavin reveals the bony spine of life with anorexia and before you can look away you will find yourself consumed by it, sitting uncomfortably in “a thin sheath of skin” that is not enough to protect either of you from the pain."

-LH nonfiction editor Lo Williams

Read Shavin's essay in full at www.limehawk.org/dana-shavin-tell-me-about-yourself.

Dana Shavin - Tell Me About Yourself — Lime Hawk My mother is driving me to the interview. The reasonable part of me knows this is a bad idea and that I must hide her existence from my prospective boss. But her presence is not, in my twenty-one-year-old mind, the main obstacle to getting this job any more than is my alarmingly low weight, or the f...

Cold Storage is going to London! We're very excited to be screening at the inaugural Four Seasons Film Festival on February 4, 2018, at the remarkable Cadogan Hall. Tickets are available on the festival website. See you there!

Four Seasons Film Festival Holmlands proudly present, the Four Seasons Film Festival; a new festival for London, celebrating the best in independent film making and the arts.

Cold Storage will be screening at Anthology Film Archives in December! Come hang with us, NYC friends!

"Lindy laid the raw fish down on a whorled wooden board and started by carving the head out. 'Stay here tonight and take your truck down in the morning,' she said. She sliced down the middle and started removing all the pieces from inside and stored them on the end of the board like coveted treasures. 'Nina will be home at noon.' She sliced along an invisible seam, from collarbone to tail. 'Take the bookcase up the front stairs for her. She'll take it the rest of the way.' Stomach meat chopped in pieces, set aside. She plucked out the pin bones. She could have been sewing, tenderly, restoring. 'Go and light the grill for me.'

It was not an act of butchering."

From "Postcards from Alaska" / Abbie Lahmers
Lime Hawk Issue 12


Visual art / "Attese Consapevoli" / Paolo Di Rosa

Postcards from Alaska - Abbie Lahmers Lime Hawk is an independent artist collective and literary press based in Redding, Connecticut, producing works that muse on environment, culture, and sustainability.