I may never live down The Tamale Incident, my moment of infamy in the Lopez-Lee family. In this live personal story, I confess what happened that day and why sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like a failed Mexican woman. Thanks to Larry Dean Harris for inviting me to...
Personal storytelling is back to the live onstage world, and what a gift to fully interact with storytellers and audiences again. Through the pandemic, I've been grateful to use Zoom and other online streaming platforms to stay engaged with community via the art of...
Do you feel it, the desire to tiptoe into the New Year, lest you wake a new giant that might confront you with another endurance test of our humanity, our environment, our peace? Yet it was with unexpected joy I opened my mailbox this holiday season to find a reminder...
Just before the new coronavirus became the 2020 Pandemic, my story Disaster Pants was published in DoveTales, the journal of the nonprofit Writing for Peace. I briefly stopped sharing the link to that story, about living through the Thomas Fire, when fears over the...
I recently received a request from a blogger to answer a question he has asked more than 1000 people he characterizes as leaders, thinkers, writers, writers, researchers, elders, artists, CEOs, laymen, etc: What is the meaning of life? Although I don't believe this is...
? After more than a year striving to find my voice in the world of oral storytelling, I won The Moth StorySlam in L.A. on January 23, 2018. The night's topic was Achilles' Heel. It was humbling to win with a story about my weaknesses. I now qualify to compete in a...
By Cara Lopez Lee I’ve been getting rid of them this week. The extra words. I often say too much. My obsessive compulsive disorder makes this so hard to control that sometimes it feels like I only have two options: say everything or nothing at all. Sometimes I write a...
In case you missed it, my short personal story of love and marriage, called Smelly Make This Bed, makes an appearance today at The Manifest-Station, a beautiful online journal "On Being Human." This Valentine's Day, let it remind us that whatever challenges we face in...
In this month's edition of Long Story Short, I take a personal look at a sacred yet strange space, the marriage bed: "...when you spend years sleeping with one person everything that happens in bed is too much information." Please check out Smelly Make This Bed (if...
By Cara Lopez Lee The stares always come first. First the stares and then the question, which goes something like this: “What are you?” I’ve memorized the short answer: “Mexican-Chinese-Irish-English-Swiss-French-and-Cherokee.” “I knew it,” one woman said, “Mixed-race...
Cara Lopez Lee is the author of the novel, Candlelight Bridge, and the memoir, They Only Eat Their Husbands. She’s a winner of The Moth StorySLAM and is featured in many personal storytelling shows. Her writing appears in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Manifest-Station, and Rivet. Cara and her husband love traveling, but their home is coastal Ventura, California, where they enjoy tending their Certified Wildlife Habitat full of birds, bees, and butterflies.
