Aidan Cooper

Sisterland

By NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

Two Sisters reading in a wheelbarrow

Photo courtesy of author

Ithaca, NY

I want to start by saying that this is not about when I was in a New York city cab and the cabbie and I struck up a concrete jungle duet about where we were from—Gaza, Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Ukraine, India…—and what winds, fair or foul, had blown us to the country that’s being made great again by a certain real estate developer. I want to start by saying that in what I have to say there is no New York City or cabbie. That’s not the kind of story this is. Rather, in this story there is a sister—or sisters—and a land—or lands.

I want to start by saying that I propose, simply, a new topos for going “back home,” for the return to Ithaca. I call this topos Sisterland.

Sisterland
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An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

Rosa Castellano (left) and Raychelle Heath (right)

Rosa Castellano (left) and Raychelle Heath (right)

RAYCHELLE HEATH (RH): Rosa, it is so lovely to meet you, and All is The Telling is such a beautiful read. The book is structurally interesting, and it’s inspiring on many different levels. The stories of different girls and women drew me in immediately. But, I want to start with the title. You’re telling a layered story here, and I’m curious how you arrived at the title. How does the title poem place the characters in the story arc of the book?

ROSA CASTELLANO (RC): I love this question! I hope that the collection’s title and the poem prepare readers for all of the telling that takes place in the book, which is largely concerned with telling stories and telling our truths, especially the stories we carry in our bodies. I subscribe to this idea of the layered self, like a series of paper dolls we can tug open to find a line of selves connecting who we are now, back to all the selves we’ve been, those previous identities that we hold. That’s how I’m hoping the poems in this collection work, linked together with various kinds of repeating patterns, working to tell the interconnected stories of a self. It’s a complicated thing, most days, to be an alive person.

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano
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The Common Magazine Announces 2025-26 David Applefield ’78 Fellow

(Amherst, Mass.) — Award-winning, international literary journal The Common announced today that Aidan Cooper ‘26 will be the third recipient of the David Applefield ’78 Fellowship. The fellowship, the magazine’s first endowed student internship, was established in 2022 by a group of friends and family of David Applefield, a literary polymath who attended Amherst College and founded Frank, an eclectic English-language literary magazine based in Paris. 

The David Applefield ’78 Fellowship funds one student intern annually who possesses exceptional editorial and leadership skills to work alongside the magazine’s other student interns and magazine staff on editorial and promotional assignments. Among other responsibilities, the Applefield Fellow coordinates the Weekly Writes Accountability program, leads the Level I section of the Young Writers Program for high school students, and provides research and production support for podcasts. In addition, the Applefield Fellow trains and mentors other interns, and organizes events for the Amherst College community.

Headshot of Aidan Cooper

Aidan Cooper ‘26 enters the role following a year as an editorial assistant. They’re the acting President of Amherst College’s Poetry Club, Editor-in-Chief of The Lilac magazine, and a bearer of various literary positions around the college and beyond. They’re in the midst of many writing projects, from a research paper on early modern horsemanship and mercantilism begun at the Folger Shakespeare Library, to an English thesis on nothingness in avant-garde poetry.

Cooper thanks the more than fifty friends, classmates, and family members of David Applefield who contributed to the fellowship fund for their generosity and trust, as well as the magazine’s staff for their mentorship. “The Common, through its mission and care, champions such a worldly and passionate writing community,” Cooper said, “and I’m so thankful to immerse myself in it.”

 

The Common Magazine Announces 2025-26 David Applefield ’78 Fellow
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Podcast: Pria Anand on “The Elephant’s Child”

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Transcript: Pria Anand Podcast.

 PRIA ANAND speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her story “The Elephant’s Child,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The piece is a vivid retelling of a Hindu myth, the origin story of the elephant-headed god Ganesh. Pria talks about the process of writing and revising many versions of this ancient myth, why she felt inspired by it, and how her literary writing intersects with her career as a neurologist. Pria also discusses her debut book, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, out this month from Simon & Schuster. The book explores how story and storytelling can illuminate the rich, complex gray areas within the science of the brain, weaving case study, history, fable, and memoir.
 

Headshot of Pria Anand next to Issue 29 cover
Podcast: Pria Anand on “The Elephant’s Child”
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Two Poems by Hendri Yulius Wijaya

By HENDRI YULIUS WIJAYA
Translated By EDWARD GUNAWAN

Content warning: Some offensive slurs that appear in the source text have been carried over into the translation.

 

Translator’s Note

Fueled by far-right nationalist politics and religious extremism, persecution and violence from both state institutions and the general public against queer and trans Indonesians have reached unprecedented levels—mirroring similar disturbing patterns worldwide.

Two Poems by Hendri Yulius Wijaya
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Target Island

By MARIAH RIGG

Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the U.S. government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. On Maui, the shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.

Target Island
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Heel

By RICK BAROT

I was jump-starting the car, having asked a stranger to hook up their car to mine. I was worried about her biopsy. Then I was talking to him about his new jacket, his awful landlord, his blinding headaches. He told me about left-isolate construction in sentences. I was writing, the work of it like a pilgrim’s progress conducted on one’s knees. Because the nights were so hot, I was unable to sleep. I was laughing because he insisted on building his own bookcases, painting them cantaloupe-orange. I was helping her clear out the backyard of junk. I was with her by the river. I was thinking of him, the taste of smoke on his lips. In the dusk, he showed me the lighthouse. I was often wondering where he was, day after day, the baseball cap that had to be taken off him to lean into his face. I was listening to the small dogs barking and making noise like small kids. I myself was being brought to heel.      

 

 

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Heel
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