Flavia Martinez

fmartinez18

Ask a Local: Kayla Rae Whitaker, Louisville, Kentucky

August 31, 2017 Interviews

How long have you lived here: One year. Still feels very new.

Three words to describe the climate: Because it’s July, humid – on some days, the air feels like drinking cotton. In the winters, damp. But in the fall – particularly the long falls – and the spring, it feels forgiving.

Best time of year to visit? NOT DERBY. May is a beautiful time in Kentucky, but Derby snarls Louisville traffic in the worst possible way. I say this as a newcomer to the city (while I wrote about Louisville, I had never lived there until this year). It only took one Derby weekend for me to see some of the most ridiculous displays of driving I’ve ever seen. Early summer is a good bet. Fall’s nice too.

Nobody’s Home

August 30, 2017 Dispatches

By ELLEN BIRKETT MORRIS

Louisville, Kentucky

I hear the call, one voice:

Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge. This simply cannot be allowed to happen.

Then the response, many voices in unison:

Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge. This simply cannot be allowed to happen.

Light from cell phone screens illuminate clusters of people standing in the street. Around two hundred of us, young and old, parents and children, stand in front of our senator’s condo. The road is blocked on either side by police cars, who mute their lights so they don’t hurt our eyes.

El Putxet

August 23, 2017 Dispatches

By FLAVIA MARTINEZ

I woke up early to finish some reading, but have been in bed for hours scrolling through Facebook, with little fingers and tired eyes fixed to the screen, and now it’s 1 pm. Though the streets of Barcelona are sunny most days, only secondhand light teases in from the center courtyard of the apartment building, and sometimes in here I forget what sun is. It’s the only bedroom that faces inward, the one my host mother lived in as a girl. This was her childhood home.

The Iron-On Labels

August 9, 2017 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

In the late eighties, when I was twelve, I went to a camp called Walking G Ranch. My sisters went, too. It was in the mountains of California, in Taylorsville, but now I have to look that up on a map because when you’re a kid you never know where you are. It was a working ranch, and we all got up early in the morning to take care of the animals – milk the cows and feed the pigs their slop – and sometimes at night, my friend Anne and I slept in the hayloft. On other nights, we rowed out to a little island in the middle of the pond. It felt immensely far, but it was just a pond.

Review: Outside Is the Ocean

August 5, 2017 Reviews

Book by MATTHEW LANSBURGH

Reviewed by JULIA LICHTBLAU

Outside Is the Ocean, Matthew Lansburgh’s debut short story collection, is a particularly complete and satisfying example of the linked genre. The stories reveal a long, novelistic arc, while the broken chronology captures the fragmented personality of the central character, Heike, and the chaos she sows.

A gentile, post-war German immigrant to California, Heike speaks and thinks in a German-inflected English that’s full of mangled idioms—as in the opening line of the book: “Al gives me zero.” Or: “She thinks the world will give her French toast on a silver platter.” Heike disappoints and infuriates everyone, but is perversely optimistic, which gives many of the stories a certain hilarity, even the saddest ones. Humor enables Heike’s gay son, Stewart, a literature professor, and her adopted, one-armed Russian daughter, Galina, to survive her boundless narcissism and neediness.

Friday Reads: July 2017

July 21, 2017 Reviews

Ah, July Friday Reads, where the temperatures are high and the stakes are even higher. This month, read alongside Issue 13 contributors and our managing editor as we face devastating epidemics, maternal death, and the eternal angst of feminine adolescence. Though each book finds a uniqueness in its approach to calamity, each work uses the minute details to capture the universal perils of love, loss, and loneliness.

Recommendations: Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, The Girls by Emma Cline, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, recommended by Megan Fernandes (poetry contributor)

Welcome Our New Board Members!

July 9, 2017 News and Events

We would like to extend a warm welcome to W. Drake McFeely and Suketu Mehta, the two newest additions to The Common’s Board of Directors.

Gestured to and not yet quite: an interview with Muriel Leung

July 2, 2017 Interviews

SARETTA MORGAN interviews MURIEL LEUNG

In this month’s interview, Saretta Morgan talks with poet, editor, and academic Muriel Leung about her poetry collection Bone Confetti; queer love; how loss can activate political consciousness; Hortense Spillers; and writing in a state of transition. Bone Confetti was released by Noemi Press in 2016.

Why I Love the MFA

May 12, 2014 Essays

BY JAMES FRANCO

I love MFA programs, because they are a purified space where the love of art is nourished.

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This is an essayistic love poem written to MFA programs. It is a form that I learned from my mentor, Frank Bidart. Frank is a poet, but he is also a lover of film, acting, theater, music, pop-culture, Hollywood history, food, and sex.

Frank is old and doesn’t have sex anymore. At least I don’t think he does. But his poems are full of deep life, and sexual connotations.

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