Category: Articles

November 10, 2025

Fact

Please don’t ask me about my abuse. I wasn’t really there.
October 27, 2025

“I never saw my mother”

In surely one of the most moving passages ever written in the English language, former US slave Frederick Douglass penned words that remind me of something vitally important. ‘I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life, and each of these times was in very short duration,…
October 24, 2025

Untitled mixed

a cowboy crowd camehuge under loud confetti tunespainted horses in everyones glanceglued to street prance frownsa story played with floating balloon chanceinside a rolled parade
October 11, 2025

“The pine tree of Formentor:” more than a nature poem

Translation from Catalan of Miquel Costa i Llobera’s “El pi de Formentor” by Brett Hetherington and Antoni Cardona The pine tree of Formentor Miquel Costa i Llobera (1875)My heart loves a tree! Older than the olive tree,more powerful than the oak, greener than the orange tree,holding onto eternal spring in its leaves,and fighting against the…
September 20, 2025

Where have all the Sad and Angry songs gone?

How mainstream music no longer reflects the temper of our time I heard a French song on the radio the other day. It sounded like one of those lovely ballads from around the time of the Second World War, and it had a melody and lyrics that were sung with just enough melancholy to somehow…
September 11, 2025

Swimming against a sea of immigration lies

It makes me happy to see that others enjoy what I enjoy… Vicente Molina Foix once wrote about riding in the Madrid Metro: “I like to see the juxtaposition of various skin colors, and hear the melody of incomprehensible languages, as the train of the future approaches on the rails of life.” Here is a man at…
August 18, 2025

“The Snowflake Effect: How the Self-Esteem Movement Ruined a Generation”

Just reading the contents page, I had the feeling this could be a good read and I wasn’t disappointed. In this punchy little book, Trey Willis makes logical, well-researched and largely convincing arguments for why his own Generation Y is essentially selfish, especially when compared to previous generations of North Americans. He looks at popular…
July 30, 2025

Memory: the sincerest of witnesses

And how it serves… (Listen to my reading of this article here: https://bretthetherington.substack.com/p/memory-the-sincerest-of-witnesses) One of the strangest things about our memories is how they come to the brain from seemingly nowhere at all. First thought is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I…
July 21, 2025

How to read this poem

Please make sure you are:Sitting in a little child’s wooden classroom chairReading this with someone else’s glassesPiling information blocks on top of each otherStopping, starting, stopping, startingJust as importantly, make sure you are:Watering heavily in both eyesEmploying the great deftness of AI to understand the meaning of these linesUniting with the community, in a fashionWhile…
July 9, 2025

Oh, father! Where art thou?

An excerpt from my first book (“The Remade Parent”) published at The Good Men Project “The American author and father Paul Theroux once said that the expression “Be a man!” strikes him as insulting and abusive. That it actually means: “Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient and soldierly, and stop thinking. Manliness…is a hideous and crippling…