Janice Harper

My mother loved her chocolates. A box of Russell Stover was her favorite, though she'd never turn down a Whitman's Sampler. Anything better was just too good to be eaten and only meant to be admired and sniffed, like the cap from her Chanel No. 5. But her Russell Stover...

On July 30, 2010, 52 year old Kevin Morrissey, Managing Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, shot and killed himself, becoming one of over 37,000 Americans who died from suicide that year. Yet Kevin Morrissey's death has stood out from these tens of thousands of other...

"Can we have fast food for dinner tonight?" my daughter asked the other day. She might as well have asked me if we could slaughter a kangaroo and dig a pit in the backyard to roast it, the question was that absurd.

"Fast food?" I repeated, thinking I hadn't heard...

One time when I was a little girl, I decided to run away. I stormed out of the house and began marching across the football field behind our home, hell-bent on never seeing my parents again, probably for no better reason than they'd told me to clean up my room....

Back in the 70s when people ate nonsensical foods that tasted like lumpy dust and oily crabgrass, I worked in a health food store in Eugene, Oregon. This was when whole foods referred to a type of grain and not a supermarket chain, and the word "foodie" had not yet...

I once lived in a rainforest in Madagascar where about the only things people owned were a few pots and pans, a couple of knives and a change of clothes for market day and funerals. When I showed up with more things in my backpack than the average rainforest household...

Shortly after my parents separated when I was a teenager, I asked my mom if she and my dad planned to get a divorce. "Oh, no!" she assured me, "that's not necessary." I felt a momentary sense of relief before she added, "We divorced years ago, right after the war."

When it came time for my daughter to start Kindergarten, it suddenly hit me. I would have to get her to school each morning. On time. For 13 years. The thought had never occurred to me, and had it crossed my mind six years prior, she would probably not exist....

When my daughter asked me for a new pair of shoes I had to tell her the truth. "We can't afford shoes until I get a job or Bob Dylan dies, whichever comes first." She wailed about the injustice of it all and went away, as teenagers tend to do...

In the last half century or so, workers in the U.S. have seen improved working conditions through policies and laws addressing discrimination, harassment, whistleblower protection and safety violations. But when these protective measures are disregarded, enforcing them falls on individual workers who must pursue their claims through arbitration, investigations by...

No one likes a tattle tale. So it should come as no surprise that when someone does report misconduct to their employer, they often find themselves the target of cruel and damaging retaliation. Once commenced, retaliation is rarely limited to one or two vindictive managers and is likely...

Shortly after moving to Tennessee, my then seven-year-old daughter and I were shopping for some clothes. She saw a big puffy dress and commented on how pretty it was.

"Yes, it is pretty," I agreed, "But where will you ever wear it? We don't go to church."

"Shhhh!!" she scolded...

Growing up in a working class family deep in the heart of the Michigan auto industry, I always thought of myself as immune to the arrogance of extreme wealth, as if somehow I were innately more humane in my treatment of others. Any fantasies of prosperity were inevitably accompanied by...

One of the least discussed aspects of bullying and mobbing, and perhaps the most powerful and damaging, is the practice of shunning. Shunning is widely practiced among certain religions; the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Church of Scientology, even the otherwise forgiving Amish have made shunning a religious tenet to control the...

In previous essays I've discussed some of my concerns with the use of the bully label, the failure to distinguish between workplace and schoolyard bullying, and the need to distinguish workplace bullying from workplace mobbing. Now, as the year comes to a close and...

Years ago, back in the early eighties after reading too much Henry Miller to do a woman any good, I found myself in Paris, squatting in an old and dusty room above the legendary booksellers, Shakespeare & Company. Not the Shakespeare & Co of Sylvia Beach and her salons, but...

Against all better judgment, I got it into my head to go Christmas shopping. In real stores. Considering we live in a world that enables anyone with a credit rating and internet connection to go bankrupt amassing everything from psychotropics to caskets without ever leaving home, the idea of going...

As concerns about workplace bullying and mobbing bring to light the damaging toll of interpersonal aggression, there remains a disturbing tenor to many of these discussions that leaves me wondering just how possible it will ever be to minimize workplace aggression. With calls to purge and shun anyone labeled "bully"...

I began to dread the calls. I knew what he wanted: money, help, love. But he'd gotten himself into this mess, I reasoned, and there was nothing I could do. Any money I sent would go to drink, and besides, I didn't have much myself.

I had known my...

Do only bad people bully? Apparently if good people are encouraged to treat others badly, that's exactly what they will do, and often without remorse. A number of memorable experiments from the sixties and seventies have demonstrated just how easily it is for someone in a position of authority to...