cars Archives - E.B. Bartels

“Over-Insured” in Evocations Review!

E.B. Bartels — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 12:45:41 +0000

For the full piece, see it in E vocations: A Literary and Art Review.
Published in the inaugural winter 2020 issue.

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Those of you who knew me back in grad school know that my MFA thesis was a long, rambling 300+ page meditation on my family’s insurance agency and intergenerational trauma, grief, loss, and anxiety. One day I still hope I can rework that beast into a book of its own, but when a place like Evocations Review gives an excerpt of Over-Insured a home, it feels like a little piece of my heart has a place to rest finally. Thank you for publishing this essay, Kim Coates! I’m honored to be part of the first-ever issue of Evocations.

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Job Security

E.B. Bartels — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 14:04:06 +0000

For the full essay, see it in Volume 1, Issue 1 of Agave Magazine.
Originally published in August 2013.

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Since it opened in 1930, Andersen Insurance, in Somerville, Massachusetts, has offered incredible job security. I started making photocopies and filing policies when I was ten years old. I began to answer phones and process payments when I was fourteen. I worked at Andersen Insurance every summer during high school and the ones in college when I wasn’t abroad.

This summer I am twenty-four years old, and I am at my desk in the office again. I am unemployed after two years teaching fifth and sixth grade girls on the other side of the river, in Dorchester, in a summertime life-lull before moving to New York and starting graduate school in September. No interview, no cover letter, no questions necessary; my grandfather simply asks what day I will start in June.

“It’ll be good to have you back, pal,” he says. “Especially with your mother away all summer. It’s nice to have another body in there in case it gets busy.”

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The Cars We Insured

E.B. Bartels — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:59:37 +0000

For the full essay, see it in Fall 2013 issue of The Wellesley Review.
Originally published in December 2013.

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Me “driving” in July 1989.

When, as an infant, I refused nap, my mom would often strap me into the car seat and drive head-on into the afternoon sun on Route 128. While I slept and the tree-smeared highway of suburban Massachusetts blurred into a green ribbon, my mom listened to music or reviewed her to-do list in her head or simply breathed in the silence of time. Perhaps it was the soothing lull of the car and the peaceful calm of these rides, absorbed through impressionable infant brain waves, which established my love of driving. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. It seems that motor oil runs in my veins, and that my heart beats by internal combustion, firing on eight cylinders.

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