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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.

The post “Over-Insured” in Evocations Review! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

To read the full piece, buy a copy of Infinite Scroll, either online or at Magpie in Davis Square.

Below you’ll find a preview.

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In the summer, the office gets hot. The large picture windows let in scorching light, and when the air conditioner is off, I’m a goldfish in a bowl in direct sun. When the air conditioner is on, however, I’m in a Siberian blizzard, and the high school summers that I worked at Andersen Insurance––my family’s business––my desk was in line with the blower. I suffered equally from wind-chill and heat stroke. The ancient motor of the air conditioner was deafening: a plane taking off in a hurricane with all the passengers screaming.

“What, pal?” My grandfather, Puppy, shouted over the roar.

“I’m almost done with filing!”

“What?”

“I said: I’m – ”

“Wait a minute, pal.” Puppy reached up to the window, using a long wooden stick to power off the air conditioner.

Silence followed, except for ringing in my ears and a sigh from Donna, the office’s longest-running non-familial employee.

“I said: I’m almost done with filing,” I repeated, already feeling heat from the windows.

The post Claustrophobia appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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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.”

The post Job Security appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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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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