Aidan Cooper

The Reading Life: The Acrobat

By JIM SHEPARD 

 

The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.

I always thought that one of the quieter sadnesses of my father’s life—and there were plenty of noisy ones, even given that everyone, myself included, acknowledged that he was a delight to be around—was his relationship to his own education and to reading itself. Shep—everyone including his kids and his wife called him Shep—only got as far as high school before World War II intervened, and then worked at Sikorsky Aircraft, a company that built helicopters, after returning home. He’d flown ground attack missions in Burma as a dorsal turret gunner in a B-25 and resupply missions as a cargo officer in a C-47 through the Himalayas to China, and the latter missions, referred to as going ‘over the hump’ in flyboy speak, were so lethal that the aircraft and crews suffered a twenty percent loss rate. When he got home, he needed to decompress, what I now realize was his version of PTSD. His account of the seven or eight postwar months in which he just lay around worrying his mother—the details of which always seemed to me to eerily echo Hemingway’s great short story “Soldier’s Home”—always included as a sad self-indictment, “I thought I might read, but I never had the concentration for it.”  

The Reading Life: The Acrobat
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Giving the Poem a Body: Megan Pinto interviews Lena Moses-Schmitt

author headshots

Lena Moses-Schmitt (left) and Megan Pinto (right)

When we listen to language, what do we hear? When we look at an image, what do we see? LENA MOSES-SCHMITT’s poetry beautifully captures the nature of perception. Her lyric-narrative meditations are interested in the mind’s movement across the field (visual, sonic) and the page. Moses-Schmitt writes in “The Hill”: “This morning I heard the man/ who lives downstairs say I love you to the woman–/not the words, but the rhythm, the shape, and I filled in the rest/ as if with red crayon.” Her debut collection, True Mistakes, moves between perception and imagination, the grieving for and the making of a life. MEGAN PINTO sat down with Lena Moses-Schmitt on a sunny June afternoon in Brooklyn. They marveled at the light through the leaves and drank cold seltzers with bitters. Their conversation shifted from superhero alter egos to how poetry sustains them through life’s many blips and heartbreaks.

Giving the Poem a Body: Megan Pinto interviews Lena Moses-Schmitt
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Before They Traded Devers

By AIDAN COOPER

Fenway Park

Photo courtesy of author.

Boston, MA
After Frank O’Hara

Father’s Day, it’s 8 a.m. & I’m late on the road
to Boston because I drooled too much sleeping
I’m driving to a Red Sox game, yes I’ll go
because my dad at one point liked the pitcher 
& the tank’s too full to not go 

when I reach the MFA beehiving with students
I wonder what’s on & it’s Van Gogh’s Roulin Family Portraits 
& I want to park there in case I have time to peruse
but it’s 50 bucks & I’m seeing my family anyway
so I circle Huntington until I find an empty spot 
on Parker & it’s Sunday so I’m off the hook 
& I don’t thank God pay a thing

Before They Traded Devers
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Podcast: Mariah Rigg on “Target Island”

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Transcript: Maria Rigg Podcast.

MARIAH RIGG speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her story “Target Island,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. “Target Island” is a story from her short story collection Extinction Capital of the World, out August 5 from Ecco; both focus on the islands of Hawai’i. Mariah talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the collection as a whole, and why reflecting contemporary Hawai’i is important to her work. Mariah also discusses playing with time and narrative flow in her stories, and working on a new project—her first novel.

Headshot of Mariah Rigg and the cover of Issue 29 of The Common

Podcast: Mariah Rigg on “Target Island”
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The Reading Life: Re-Reading The Reader: Book Clubs, Reading Aloud, and the Many Faces of Aunt Betsy

By MARY JO SALTER

 

The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.

 

Whenever I’ve been asked to join a book club, I’ve given a stock answer: No thanks, my life is already a book club. As an English professor who had led class discussions about books for decades, I had acquired an arrogant persona: I was someone who told other people what to read, not the other way around. Yes, I was grateful for book recommendations by certain discerning friends. But any sort of public gathering in which everyone got a democratic turn to assign the others a book, however far it ranged from one’s own interests, and then most members had to pretend to enjoy the book more than they had, was my definition of a lousy party.

The Reading Life: Re-Reading The Reader: Book Clubs, Reading Aloud, and the Many Faces of Aunt Betsy
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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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