By ANNA NORTH
I killed a bird in Iowa City. It was lying, dying, on the concrete steps that led to my apartment, a basement lair whose drains sometimes backed up and belched black ooze everywhere. The bird was gasping and twitching and its eyes were shut very tight. It was a titmouse. I stepped over it and went inside.
I tried to work, but I kept thinking about the bird. I decided to call my mom, who lived far away, and ask for her advice.
From our friends at Tottenville Review, on its place of origin:
It feels strange to look at an old photo, one taken long before you or your parents were born, and recognize something. It’s a disconcerting feeling that uproots you from your present life. Suddenly you find yourself in a faraway place that feels antiquated and remote—but it’s also eerily familiar. You realize that you once knew it very well.
My book Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden is a history of people who have searched for the Garden of Eden on Earth. This seems like a project with the perfect excuse to travel to all sorts of exotic locales, but it started out as a way to get inside someone’s head. According to family rumor, my great-uncle, an allergist and university professor who died before I was born, had planned to travel to the Garden of Eden, by plane, in the 1950s. My great-uncle, apparently, was a believer both in science and in the literal truth of the Bible. But how could he hold conflicting ideas in his mind at once? If I could figure out where he thought Eden was, maybe I could get closer to understanding this.
Maura Candela is one of my favorite writers, as well one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met—two talents that don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. Her debut fiction, “The Boys’ Club” was featured in the first issue of The Common. Maura has also recently finished a novel called The Love Dogs, which is set in contemporary New York and deals, in part, with the long-term effects of 9/11 on rescue workers and their families.
Deb Olin Unferth likes to change it up. Her first book was the story collection Minor Robberies, then came the novel Vacation, and this winter she published a memoir. Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, like much of her other work in other forms, tells a daring story rife with humor and touched with melancholy, desire, and regret.
By LAUREN GROFF
Once upon a time, I believed that writing was the same thing as being a writer. This was before I understood that scribbling a messy sentence in a notebook was not actual writing, a time when I bought gamely into the self-sparked romance of becoming a writer: a life of moonlit walks beside rivers, bare apartments dancing with light, foreign languages drifting through a window full of geraniums. Being a writer meant being somewhere else, anywhere that promised architecture and meaningful encounters with sophisticated natives and a chilly, ascetic version of me pinned like an anchorite to my pages. I knew I could never be a writer in the place where I was born, small, cold Cooperstown with its mysterious lake. Laughable idea, that!
Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer Prize winner, former Poet Laureate, and Editorial Board member for The Common, celebrated his 90th birthday on March 1. Here are photos from his birthday celebration at Amherst College.
With burning eyes
she rose before dusk
the mountains beneath her
and all the hills
filling like window panes with liquid suns
If I forget you Jerusalem, may my right hand wither away. . .
If I do not remember you . . .
—Psalms 137:5-6
To write in Jerusalem
in a garden
with a wind that comes from the mountain
under a canopy of grapevines
By HONOR MOORE
Of sheets and skin and fur of him,
bed of ground and river, of land,
or tongue, of arms, the wanton field,
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