Chris Parent

Portfolio of Work

Girl in the Doorway

Memoirist 

Published on June 27, 2020

A  memoir of how a birthday party I attended when I was 8 years old changed my views on race.

“I have a dream that one day … little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Martin Luther King Jr.

Race and money made for an easy roadmap in 1978 Atlanta. It was orderly. The white and black communities knew where to go and not to go. Each knew where to eat, where to shop, where to live, and where to send their kids to school. Against this backdrop, controversy brewed when my classmate, Raquel, delivered invitations to her birthday party.

Name is a Four-Letter Word

Memoir Magazine

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Published on October 27, 2021

A few days after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I received a call from an organization that was making blankets for the families of the victims.  I was working at the time as trademark counsel for Nintendo and was tasked with offering legal approval of licensing requests.  One victim was Noah Pozner, whose family had described him as a Nintendo fan, a brand loyalist even at his young age.

Song of Silence

Kairos Literary Magazine

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First Published in December, 2021

In truth, to “live with the monks” had been a goal of mine since I took a seminar in college 20 years before on the subject of Transcendentalism.  After reading Self-Reliance, I did not abandon my Catholic faith or trust in authority.  I wasn’t radical enough to do that.  It did, however, challenge my pre-conceived notions about the power of silent prayer versus the value in Mass.  I heeded the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson that “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind” and pushed myself to hear the voices that only one can hear in solitude, something that has never come easy for me.  I found sitting in the silence of my university’s Cathedral and by its pristine lakes more enlightening than the manic ritual of Mass.