Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
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I’m tucked indoors at midday, listening to the clock tick and the walls creak in the heat. The sun outside is merciless UV Index 9, which my weather app labels “very high” in that polite, understated way. In truth it’s dangerously high, the kind of sun that turns my front yard into an ultraviolet hazard zone. What…
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They came barefoot through the ash and glass,dragging the hem of history behind them like it owed them something.Daughters of memory—etched in the brittle pages of notebooksthat never made it out of the fire. They did not arrive with lullabies or lanterns,no soft hands,no rosaries tucked into coat pockets. They didn’t knock.They didn’t ask. I…
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I’m out on the porch when the call comes through. The local tractor dealership is on the line, letting me know that my new mower deck—a long-awaited upgrade—is being assembled and will be delivered in the next couple of days. I thank them by name, because by now they answer with Hey Emily, as if…
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When I was little, I used to imagine myself barefoot and wild, running through fields that never ended—thick with tall grass and wildflowers, the air alive with monarch butterflies swarming around me like they knew I belonged there. In those dreams the sky was a fearless blue, the sun gentle on my skin, and I…
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Life isn’t just lived, it is passed down like a well-loved leather diary—full of scribbled notes, tear stains, and lipstick prints in the margins. We inherit it in pieces—half-truths, coded glances, fragments of letters never sent. The lipstick print on the margin says, “I loved once—recklessly, fully, with a laugh that echoed through motel hallways…
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I was raised by a father who tried to script every facet of my life. Each day was dictated by rules that my mother and I never agreed to. Having given up on trying to control my mother, he focused on me. He decided what I wore, what I could say, even what dreams I…
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As far back as I can remember, my childhood was haunted by a profound sense of fragility. While other kids were preoccupied with cartoons and playground games, I was grappling with questions of life, and death. I carried a storm inside me even as a little girl—a churning cloud of existential dread that lived under…
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I spent a year in the mouth of a whale. Not literally, of course, but in a place just as dark and confining. Inside, the outside world became a muffled hum, and time lost its meaning. It was a space of suspended existence—quiet, briny, and claustrophobic—where I felt both strangely protected, and painfully trapped. In…
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I changed the ending of the story I was handed. And I didn’t do it loudly, or for attention—I did it quietly, like planting a tree I may never sit under, trusting that its shade will still offer shelter to someone, someday.”—Emily Pratt Slatin It was late, I pulled my skirt off, tossed it in…
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I don’t take pictures to make things look pretty.I take pictures because some things deserve to be remembered the way they really were when I found them—broken, discarded, forgotten about. My work is about the spaces people leave behind—the silence after the machines stop, the stories still stitched into the rust and the dust.It’s about…
Emily Pratt Slatin
P.O. Box 1231
Middletown Springs, VT 05757-1231
United States Of America