Sam Spratford

SamSpratford

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

March 27, 2025 Poetry

Having made both poetry and fiction contributions to TC, the multitalented Catherine-Esther Cowie returns to us this month with highlights from her debut poetry collection Heirloom, forthcoming from Carcanet Press on April 24, 2025.

Publisher’s Note

Moving from colonial to post-colonial St. Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics, and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny, and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.

Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegize and celebrate her subjects.

Table of Contents

Mother: Frankenstein
A Bedtime Prayer
The War
Haunting

Mother: Frankenstein

Raise the dead. The cross-stitched

face. Her eye-less eye. My long

longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered

hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments.

To exist at all. A comfort.

A gutting. String her up then,

figurine on the cot mobile.

And I am the restless infant transfixed.

Her full skirt, a plume of white feathers,

blots out the light.

A Bedtime Prayer

We ate the fruit Lord,

boiled and buttered we ate.

Thought nothing of it.

It was pleasing to the eye.

Filled our mouths, our bellies.

It was the fruit of a breadfruit tree.

A tree as old as the first city.

How it grew taller than the house.

Those monstrous leaves.

Its roots echoing— cracks in the walls.

Its shadow falling through the back door, the corridor,

lengthening towards the front—

Ghost of our first father,

ghost begetting ghosts,

our lives thinned into his weakness,

his terror.

But we were fed, fed, fed.

Lord, you have cast us off,

left us to starve,

Sent that girl.

Girl born with a veiled face,

a caul, calling.

How did she find the axe?

She wouldn’t eat the fruit,

refused its sweetness,

weight of our father,

the first city.

Lord, she went down to the garden,

an axe flowering in her hand.

It was you Lord, the bouden blan

chirping in her ear.

What cruel instructions?

Didn’t we do your will,

kept a remembrance—

the tree,

our father,

we were hungry, Lord.

The tree fell into the house.

The War

St. Lucia, 194-

A disturbed hour, the sky loud

with the memory of assault.

But still, it’s Sunday, the trees shake

like shac-shacs in the breeze,

and the sea goes on and on

with its lullaby like it has never

given cover to the enemy.

It is Sunday,

and we go on with our lovemaking.

I refuse to hush, let my pleasure rise

against the weary tones

in the thin-walled rooms like ours,

it was yesterday, only yesterday,

another body washed ashore…

Forever and forever,

death our only guarantee.

Haven’t I died already,

years ago, on a kitchen floor,

under the weight of a different man,

my girlhood shot through,

I learnt the body as machine—

dead heart, dead pubis.

It is Sunday,

I teem with life like the flies

swarming the torpedoed ships

in the harbour.

Haunting

We frighten the children.

My hair ragged in red cloth,

I speak a language they don’t understand,

their ears tuned to English, tuned

to American cartoons.

And Leda, Gwanmanman Leda runs

cracks up the walls,

through the centre of our dinner plates.

It’s their own fault, you know,

they won’t stay in their rooms.

How she endures, endures,

Gwanmanman Leda. Leda.

Even after I married,

after she died, she endures.

Tanbou mwen.

Jab mwen.

But the children,

the children.

They stare.

Regard me strangely, sadly.

There will be no walk to the park today.

No jump rope high.

Only their rooms.

They will stay in their rooms.

Alé, alé. I chase.

They hide behind a wall. Spy.

I must clean my house like I cleaned Leda’s room.

Scrubbing. A form of memory.

A song. Trojan horse for my own blues.

Keeper of the madness.

The mad. Leda.

Mwen faché.

I was only a child,

only a child

made for play,

not the washing of soiled sheets,

of shit-stained walls,

of an old woman.

But the children,

how they stare.

Their blink-less eyes.

Pouty lips.

Why won’t they go into their rooms?

Leave me to Leda.

We are a pair.

She, because of her bad head.

Mal tèt. And I,

because I was a child.

Small. Piti.

Crushable.

Like a roach.

The mad and the little,

Give them a tickle,

Then a prickle.

Leda, stop your singing.

And I must stop this fool parade.

This arm muscling towards memory—

You’ve made it up,

Isn’t that what they said?

Mal tèt, bad head.

No one ever hit you. Mantè.

Isn’t that what they said?

But Leda, Leda,

my sweet Leda.

Mad monument.

Rogue memory.

But we must think of the children.

They cry for us, Mommy, Mommy.

Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St. Lucia to a Trinidadian father and a St. Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. Cowie is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.

What We’re Reading: March 2025

March 21, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

In this special edition of the column, JAY BOSS RUBIN shares a mini review of ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’s Theft, freshly released on Tuesday, March 18. JEANNE BONNER follows him with a novel that bears witness to the modern world from a very different angle, at the close of Nazi rule in France.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft; recommended by TC Online Contributor Jay Boss Rubin

The new novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft, is his first since he received the phone call informing him he’d been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Its titular theft is open to interpretation. The plot turns decisively on an accusation of stealing. Many references to historical thievery are woven into the narrative. But the book’s most unforgettable thefts may be the central characters’ encroachments—those committed and those just contemplated—on one another’s dignity.

Karim is born in Pemba and Fauzia is from Unguja, two of the islands that make up Zanzibar. Badar is from a roadside village on the mainland, a few hours inland from Dar es Salaam. They enter the story from separate directions, all three coming of age in Tanzania at the turn of the 21st century. Swiftly, they become entangled with one another via relationships of indebtedness and servitude, attachment and attraction. Karim’s world is upended by a series of losses: his father and grandmother both pass away; his mother moves out of the family home, and then she moves even further. Badar is dropped off, with little explanation, at a house in the city where he is to clean and assist with the cooking. Fauzia is a gifted student with a history of seizures; they’ve subsided, but they might be passed on genetically. Gurnah’s central characters are often those cast about by forces beyond their control, perhaps because he was, as well. Gurnah left home in the aftermath of the Zanzibar Revolution, when he was just eighteen, and has resided mostly in England ever since.

Theft contains in abundance much of what Gurnah has mastered across his eleven novels. His characteristic multilingualism is evident from the opening pages. Never predictable, Spanish is introduced in the text before Swahili, by way of a Zanzibari revolutionary just returned from Cuba. Swahili arrives in the next paragraph, along with its accompanying gloss: “Don’t try to fool me. Usinidanganye.”

Like its predecessors, Theft contains layers of submerged history. The European colonial layer is among them, but it isn’t the defining layer. “The Tamarind Hotel was on the narrow street near the old ivory workshop, round the corner from the former residence of the French consul,” a middle chapter begins. “The consul had lived there a long time ago, in the time when the Omani sultans still dealt independently with foreign governments, among them the British, the French, the Germans, and the United States of America. Later in the century,” Gurnah adds cheekily, “the British took over the sultan’s affairs in order to advance progress and civilization.”

Gurnah depicts his characters’ changing stations in life via their dwellings. When Karim’s mother, Raya, escapes her oppressive first husband, she moves with Karim back to her parents’ apartment: two “gloomy rooms,” “airless cells” on the first floor of a shared, sour-smelling house. When Raya remarries and moves in with an upwardly mobile pharmacist in Dar, Karim shifts over to his half-brother’s place. His new home is “small, narrow,” but Karim has his own quarters, finally, and space for quiet reflection: “The sun came round in the afternoon and planted a slowly moving square of light on the side wall, revealing the grainy texture of the lime whitewash.”

Along with gorgeous description, Gurnah distills incredibly complex subjects into single sentences. On the phenomenon of East African children growing up with multiple female caregivers: “It was not so unusual for that to happen, for an aunt or a grandmother to become the mother figure, or for a child to grow up with a sense of having more than one such figure.” On why guilt-ridden, overwhelmingly white Americans travel to Tanzania to study and volunteer (according to Fauzia’s friend Hawa): “Americans only come here to learn Kiswahili so they can understand how to get on with their Black people who of course only speak English.”

In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable, reads the epigraph to Theft. It’s a quote from Joseph Conrad, a writer Gurnah has admired. Some critics have suggested Gurnah’s Paradise is an attempt to rewrite Heart of Darkness. Gurnah rejects this, as does scholar James Hodapp. Paradise, with its embedded Swahili travelogues, “creates for itself a localized self-referential African literary genealogy, not dependent on European canonical texts,” he argues. A question more relevant to Theft is why Gurnah chose this particular quote. Why would such a remarkable author introduce what is perhaps his most remarkable work yet with what could be interpreted as a cautionary note on remarkableness?

To be denied the ability to determine one’s fate and fulfill one’s potential is sometimes a societal theft, sometimes an imperial one, sometimes both. But ambition that holds no regard for others is also a theft—a self-inflicted one. Along with the collateral damage it causes, it diminishes the dignity and eats away at the humanity of the shortsighted striver. Much more remarkable than conventional success, Gurnah suggests, are kindness, humility and the ability to endure.

Cecile Desprairies’ The Propagandist (trans. Natasha Lehrer); recommended by TC Online Contributor Jeanne Bonner.

Over the past two years as I completed my translation of Edith Bruck’s first short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End, I have been feverishly reading books about the World War II era. Bruck is a Hungarian-born Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, and I wanted to immerse myself in the oeuvre and world of my author. Luckily, I haven’t confined myself to any geographical boundary, or else I would have never found The Propagandist, written by Cecile Desprairies and translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer.

The Propagandist is an intriguing and sometimes shocking autobiographical novel about Vichy France. Desprairies reveals the anti-Semitic sentiment that seethed in France long before the Nazis arrived. Although she is a historian, she has a novelist’s eye for enchanting, if often chilling, characters: namely her mother, whom she refers to as Lucie to dispel the feeling that you’re reading a memoir. Lucie was a collaborationist who went to work for the Germans and, now that she is deceased, Desprairies also feels free to reveal intimate details about her mother’s first husband, Friedrich, who died young. Though the book is perhaps only nominally fiction, Desprairies has a novelist’s eye for real-life conflict and regret that’s cinematic in its sweep and depth: her mother essentially conducted the rest of her life as though still married to Friedrich, even though she was married to her second husband, the author’s father, for decades. During the period of the Occupation after the Germans invaded France, she and Friedrich were dedicated to converting France to Nazi ideology. At one point, Lucie, the titular propagandist, works on an exhibit whose aim “was to demonstrate … that ‘the Jew’ was always an interloper acting against the country’s interests.”

When reading about World War II, we often relegate it to the remote past. What’s shocking in The Propagandist is the revelation that Lucie and others of Desprairies’ closest relatives lived for decades after the end of the war pining for Vichy France. As the war came to a close, her family was seized with panic: “Unluckily for all of the Cinderellas, midnight was about to chime. In 1944 ‘the bastards’ entered Paris like a swarm of locusts and brought the —the good times, in other words—to an end.” When was the last time you read a book about World War II that referred to the Allies as “the bastards”?

Lehrer’s translation is skillful, especially in how she preserved bits of the original French text, juxtaposing those sections against their English translations. It reinforces the Gallic origin of this tale but without sacrificing the fresh, accessible quality of the English translation.

The Propagandist is ultimately a book about memory, specifically not forgetting. It’s appropriate to briefly mention a poetry anthology I’ve been reading that seeks to “gather works of poetic witness to the sufferings and struggles of the twentieth century.” The book, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché, is so comprehensive and ambitious that works are divided by conflict, which includes the Armenian genocide, the Indo-Pakistani wars and the Apartheid regime in South Africa, among others. It features poems by Edith Bruck, but one line that burrowed instantly into my heart came instead from a poem by Abba Kovner:

Sorrow already on his clothes
Like an eternal crease.

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

March 19, 2025 Dispatches

Poems by S. VIJAYALAKSHMI, KUTTI REVATHI, and PUTHIYAMAADHAVI

Translated by THILA VARGHESE

A farm in Tamil Nadu, India. Photo by Flickr user Emily Abrams.

Mullai Nilam (The forest and pastoral region)

Forest Fire
By Vijayalakshmi

My forest is on fire,
and a solar sphere explodes within.
There is fire everywhere,
both inside and outside.
Unaware of the intensity of the fire,
they maintain silence
like the serenity of a corpse.
From the burning fire
bursts out a waterfall tainted in red.
All over the shores have bloomed
the flaming lilies of motherhood.
Even when they smell blood
in those flowers,
they feign ignorance
and dig out the root
roasted in the forest fire embers.
Of the tiny birds that have fallen dead,
their tongues relish the taste of meat
of those cooked to perfection.
They are searching for animals
to turn them into meals,
pretending as if they didn’t hear
their lamentations
in the burning forest.
They raise their cups
filled with dark crimson fluid
from the river
that flows like a red streak
and say ‘cheers’ to one another.
The voices
of the lover,
husband,
grandfather,
father,
great-grandfather,
brother,
friend and comrade,
are all heard
in the second round of ‘cheers.’

Neithal Nilam (The seashore and coastal region)

Salty Tears
By Kutti Revathi

She who has turned into a sea
is totally oblivious
to her longings and sobbing
rising up as thousands of waves
in her tears.
Even in saltwater,
she cultivates immortal plants.
In her silent world,
she lets the life forms that are unaware
of the exterior world roam freely.
Crashing against the rocks
and pounding on them,
her hands drag into the sea
her offspring,
who yearn to reach the shoreline,
and send them to play in its depths.
Denying all her treasures and colours,
she spreads out her hands
and claims she has nothing.
She keeps going tirelessly
with no sleep or rest.
She, who has become intensely salty,
gives birth, day after day,
to the sun that rises
turning her into blood,
horses, and all eight directions.

Marutha Nilam (The agricultural and plains region)

Marutham*
By Puthiyamaadhavi

You are meditating;
I close the door
and sprinkle peace
all over the room.

You are exercising;
I wait with a towel
to wipe off your sweat.

You apply cologne on you
after showering;
I wait by the door
until you come down the stairs
wearing wrinkle-free clothes.

The light fragrance
that grazes you
wafts in the air
and gives me goosebumps.

The smell of the child’s diarrhea,
the vomited milk,
the curry that smears on me
as I hastily scoop up the gravy,
and the odour of sweat,
all of them dissolve on my body
in a split second.

As I stack up the periodicals
you’ve read and left untidy,
the pictures of smiling women
with beautiful, trim bodies
disappear inside their folds,
little by little.

*Marutham is one of the ancient land divisions described in Tamil Sangam literature that is said to date back between the 1^st to 4^th centuries. Marutham refers to the agricultural and plains region, in which the drive for ownership of land and property is reported to have played a major role in advancing the dominant role of men, thereby creating a power imbalance between partners back then. Gender inequality continues in modern days as well.

These translations were done with the support of the 2024 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program.

Vijayalakshmi, a teacher by profession, is actively engaged in the Tamil literary field, penning poetry and articles on literary, social, and environmental issues. An ardent feminist, Vijayalakshmi continues to contribute poems, short stories, and essays to Tamil publications, and has to her credit four published books of poetry, one book of short stories, and two collections of essays. A recipient of literary awards, Vijayalakshmi has also compiled and translated Afghan Landai poems into Tamil (through English).

Kutti Revathi, a Siddha doctor (Indigenous Tamil Medicine) by profession, is the author of 21 books of poetry, 6 short story collections and 3 essay collections and a novel in Tamil. A former editor of the feminist magazine Panikudam, Kutti Revathi is also a documentary and feature film director. With a focus on body politics, Kutti Revathi’s poetry challenges the traditional norms related to women’s identity and autonomy within the Indian context. A recipient of literary awards, Kutti Revathi continues to engage in discourse on power imbalance and resistance in a patriarchal social setup. She is also currently spearheading the website on the history of Tamil Music, “Karunamirthasagaram”, for the Oscar winning composer A.R. Rahman.

Puthiyamaadhavi, a retired bank officer, is the author of seven poetry books, six short story collections, three novels and six non-fiction books. A recipient of literary awards, Puthiyamaadhavi brings attention to contemporary sociopolitical issues and women’s place in society through her writings. Committed to feminist ideologies, Puthiyamaadhavi actively participates in literary forums to raise awareness of social issues arising from gender imbalance.

Thila Varghese is a writer and translator in London, Ontario, where she works part-time as a writing advisor at Western University in Canada. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in international journals and magazines. Thila’s translation entry was a finalist in the inaugural 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Her translation of Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer into Tamil was published in India in 2023. Thila was awarded a Mentorship in Poetry from a South Asian language with Khairani Barokka as part of ALTA’s 2024 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program in partnership with the SALT Project. Her translation entry received a First-Time Entrant Commendation in the 2024 Stephen Spender Prize for translation of poetry.

LitFest 2025: Recapping A Milestone Celebration

March 13, 2025 News and Events

With guest talks from physician Dr. Anthony Fauci and actor Jeffrey Wright, student and alumni readings, and a birthday party for The Common, this year’s 10th-anniversary LitFest was a celebratory occasion. From February 28 to March 2, 2025, attendees flocked to sold-out events in Amherst College’s Johnson Chapel, went behind the scenes with award-winning writers like Percival Everett, read poetry in the shadow of Emily Dickinson’s house, and celebrated the life and legacy of Amherst’s literary community.

Read on for a gallery of selected images and videos from LitFest 2025, and view all the event recordings here.

The Common’s 15th Birthday Party!

Acker and Elliott address a crowded foyer from the staircase.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker and Amherst College President Michael Elliott raise a toast to The Common.

One highlight of the busy weekend was a champagne toast honoring The Common’s 15th year in print. Complete with cakes decorated as some of our iconic issue covers, the gathering celebrated The Common’s growth over the past decade-and-a-half into the thriving hub for international and emerging literary voices that it is today.

A spread showcasing the magazine greeted guests as they arrived.

Each of the magazine’s 28 (and counting!) issues features an object from one of its stories or essays on the cover.

The Common’s 15th anniversary tote bags, designed by one of our interns and featuring sketches of objects from our issue covers, were on full display.

Later in the weekend, Everett led a masterclass for Amherst College students on the craft of fiction.

Jefferson smiling with a TC tote bag on his shoulder.

In a panel discussion about American Fiction, Jefferson gushed about the influence of Everett’s Erasure on the film.

Percival Everett, author of James and other acclaimed novels, was a fan of The Common’s new merch, as was Cord Jefferson, writer and director of American Fiction!

Wright smiling holding a TC tote bag, flanked by two TC interns.

Wright, who starred in American Fiction, fielded countless photo requests from fans over the course of the night.

In between rounds of drinks and hors d’oeuvres, TC interns also got a chance to chat with renowned creatives about their craft, like actor and Amherst College alumnus Jeffrey Wright.

The Common’s full-time staff and student interns are, from left to right: Literary Editorial Fellow Sam Spratford, Editorial Assistants Alma Clark, Kei Lim, and Aidan Cooper, and Managing Editor Emily Everett (back); Editor-in-Chief Jen Acker, and Editorial Assistants Sarah Wu, Sophie Durbin, and Siani Ammons (front).

Readings from The Common’s Interns and Amherst College Alumni

On Saturday, March 1, Editorial Assistants at The Common read excerpts from their prose and poetry alongside Amherst College alumni who had recently published their first book. The reading was followed by a brief conversation with the alumni, who offered advice for current students.

Sam Spratford ’24 (Literary Editorial Fellow) gave introductory remarks, followed by readings from Kei Lim ’25 (David Applefield ’78 Fellow), Sarah Wu ’25, Alma Clark ’25, and Aidan Cooper ’26.

Conversations With Dr. Anthony Fauci and Teju Cole

Cole signing one of his novels for a fan.

Tremor uses non-linear narration as it follows the life of Tunde, a West African man teaching photography in New England.

LitFest 2025 featured three sold-out events in Amherst’s Johnson Chapel. One of them, a Q&A with photography critic, novelist, and multidisciplinary scholar and professor Teju Cole, was moderated by The Common’s very own Jennifer Acker. Teju shared his perspective on autofiction in the context of his most recent novel, Tremor, and his signature intermingling of photography and prose in his myriad essays and criticism. (Cole’s first experiment with pairing text and images was published in The Common in 2015.)

Acker addressing the crowd from a podium with large purple banners behind her reading "LitFest" and "Amherst College".

Acker likened Fauci’s efforts to unite the public via science to The Common‘s mission to build global literary community.

Perhaps the most anticipated event of LitFest 2025 was a talk by Dr. Anthony Fauci about his career in public service, as told in his new memoir, On Call. In her opening remarks, Jennifer Acker reflected on the significance of his visit to LitFest:

”One of my motives for developing LitFest at Amherst was a desire to bring people together, to build a bulwark against forces that push us apart. Since Covid, we have unfortunately become more broken as a society, but when I think back to those days of 2020, 2021, and 2022, while I remember the isolation, I also remember communal, uplifting moments that stand out like stars against an otherwise black night sky. And one of those moments was watching and listening to Dr. Tony Fauci […] When Dr. Fauci took the microphone, we uttered a collective sigh of relief. We thought ‘Here’s someone who’s going to tell it to us straight.’”

Fauci shaking Murphy's hand at the end of the Q&A.

Fauci spoke about how his upbringing in an Italian Catholic family in Brooklyn profoundly shaped his worldview.

Dr. Fauci both took to and left the stage with prolonged standing ovations from the audience. You can view his full conversation with TC Board Member Cullen Murphy ’74 here.

Thank you to Amherst College and all who made this milestone LitFest such a memorable one! The Common is delighted to have now officially kicked off our 15th anniversary year. Stay tuned for more celebrations in the coming months.

Bungalow Boogie Countdown

March 12, 2025 Fiction

By REBECCA BAUMANN

A watercolor illustration of a Spanish-style, white-stucco bungalow. The house is short, with an almost flat roof and symmetrical windows on the facade. It is framed by bright green landscaping in the front, and, behind, by palm fronds.

“untitled,” watercolor, by Cuyler McDonald. Image courtesy of author.

Ten

We claw-dance between the folding walls.

“Are we sinking?” I ask.

Our backs flatten into herringbone patterns against the floorboards. Oil from our noses stains the adobe ceiling.

“We’re doing the boogie!” he says.

He waggles a finger that can no longer stretch up. I laugh-cry. I listen to the house moan. “Do you hear me creaking?”

My ribcage smushes into a desert plateau.

“It’s not us. It’s only the wooden boards, I’m sure,” he says.

I believe him. Our jaws begin to no longer align and limbs freeze up in the growing pile of rubble. My eyes face south to the new homes. His face north to the speakers, still uncrushed, singing Nina Simone to our bones.

Nine

The house is a Matriarch. A figurehead between rows of since-razed craftsman figureheads on a once tree-lined street that now belongs to various HOAs. She looks ancient next to the metal condo garages and stucco siding and shades of beige trim. Dilapidated among all of this new, she is a shell of her former self. Born at the tip of the Los Angeles Spanish revival, she is a river mouth, pooling what is left of her 1920s architecture into some protective cradle of reverence and dignity. The last post-colonial sister to Frank Lloyd Wright’s pre-Colombian Hollyhock, she is alone. Surely, they will not take her, too, in this melting away of decades, this erasure of peoples.

Inside of her my feet melt into the mahogany floorboards, the ones he did himself a few weeks earlier. I say they’re still wet but he says they’re fine, that the stain has dried. That the brown on my feet is only dust. I’m not so sure. I breathe it in, a fish gasping in a hot tackle box. Hands around each other, I lean into him, buzzy, spilling the wine.

“I can taste you,” I say, licking the salt from his shoulder. I want to take back the nutrients lost from our bodies.

He says nothing, but leans in, eating from me in the heat of the evening. Sucking my sweat.

The roof collapses.

Eight

No matter we haven’t ventured out of the home in months. No matter our skin hangs more sagged and wrinkled than ever, just like our Matriarch. No matter he lost full-time last year. That he was offered per-diem instead, but he didn’t want to be a dog on call. No matter.

“I want to be someone,” he’d say.

And he’d hold his head high, shaking alive that old elementary school promise:

YOU CAN BE ANYTHING.

*If you work hard enough.

**If you follow your dreams.

What was the dream? To be a house of three? That was diagnosed impossible. By me, not him. No matter. He holds me, rocks me back and forth. We drink more wine. A happy state, in the womb of our Matriarch. We are the family of three.

“We need no one else,” he assures me when I pull thin flaps of bicep skin six inches from bone like a flying squirrel.

“We look like skeletons,” I say.

He laughs. “We’re the foundation of ourselves.”

We keep rocking. Our phones died weeks ago; visitors stopped coming weeks ago. There is no doorbell, no knock on the windows. Just us. Together. The house. Nina on those speakers of his. We vibrate to the trudging of horn lines deep and powerful. Jazz-swung time swaddles the home in a sense of grounding, a sense of rebellion. Our thin glasses settle into an endless ebb and flow of empty and filled and empty and filled. We cheers our Matriarch.

Seven

“I Put a Spell on You” is the only record left. The rest have sold, or cracked, scratched, and shattered in their old age. But Nina still goes round and round. He re-sets the needle. She plays again. We listen.

Outside, littered across the lawn, suffocating the mint-green tin mailbox that hangs from the front porch beam between the unopened bills and the assorted ads touting fun at a price, there are stuffed envelopes with red labels stamped at an angle across the cream white: FORECLOSED. We don’t care. We aren’t leaving. We’re a family of three. Me and my husband and the Matriarch. I push my finger into the screen door, toward the growing pile of bank threats.

“Should we at least get the mail? It looks suspicious.”

“If we go outside, someone might see. They’ll call the cops. They’ll kick us out for good. Lots of mail means there’s no one here. It’s not suspicious. It’s strategy.”

I consider us. A pair, hurtling through some trajectory of American goalposts. We have the marriage, we have the house-child, we have the home—almost. Is this what we want?

“If this doesn’t work out, we could rent again?” It is a question because I question our rentability. Our credit is shot.

“No,” he says. “She’s ours.”

I nod again. “Good. We’re here to stay.”

Resolved, I lean against her cool white plaster walls. I look up to the 1950s stained-glass ceiling light fixture, to the old dusty fan that stopped its lazy whirling when the electricity was shut off last week.

Where else does a couple go? Wearing the same Y2K clothes for so long that they themselves have become today’s vintage. He says, back when he had work, that colleagues half his age called it Recession Core—a gentle, well-meaning name for one generation’s prolonged dying.

He removes my finger from the screen door, closes the flimsy Dutch door with the little split in the center for fresh summer air. He locks the two halves of the door together, locks the handle, locks the safety chain, locks the bar lock, and presses a doorstop into the bottom for good measure. I trust the good measures, they feel secure. We are shut in. We lie down. We fall asleep.

Six

Morning comes brightly as we sit up together, nocturnal and diurnal beasts, the old Tannoy speakers buzzing white noise from the needle head. He crawls over to them, re-sets the needle in the middle of the record, this time to “Feelin’ Good,” the only entertainment left in the house. His sweet Nina, his holy adoration.

“I just love her,” he says.

“I know.” He says it every time.

We let Nina cycle. The needle stops again. He re-sets it again. Pushes the speakers to medium-high volume. Not enough to call attention to our presence, but enough to drown out the rumble of jackhammering and cement churning across the street.

“Original, from 1960. You really feel the era with these babies,” he scream-talks over Nina as he pats the speaker heads. He sways in circles to her cries, tired and automatic, an also-machine turning round and round. It seems it is all he can do.

“I know,” I repeat.

I’ve lived with the speakers for years. I know what they sound like. I am waiting for him to do something, anything other than sway.

“I just love her.”

He tears up, looks somewhere else, tracing her invisible voice through the air above our heads.

“Didn’t you have work?” I ask, pouring him a 7 a.m. shiraz.

He stands, takes a sip, and walks to the window.

“Eh,” he trails off.

It seems he is no longer on call. I follow suit, trailing off toward the window to meet him. We get lost in the view of new construction. We remember easier things. Like how at dinner parties he called himself an artist, but his old day job confined him to a dingy office (in his words, shabby-chic) near the Arts District, where he used to sit at a small desk making graphic designs for ad companies who found Adobe Suite befuddling and cheaply outsourced talent. Easy money.

Then the easier things stopped. The recession came, full-time became on-call, the friends no longer threw expensive dinner parties. Then their babies came. And when our babies couldn’t come we no longer found precedence in the tiers of social standing, other than perhaps a pitied glance or on the day of the news, a few bouquets of mourning flowers from moms and old coworkers and a smattering of distant family.

But no matter. The social pressure of children has gone. We are glad. It’s my husband, the Matriarch, and me. We make her our bungalow boogie baby, we dance together across her floors. This is where we’re supposed to be.

I remember my freelance projects, when we first bought the Matriarch, selling kitschy trinkets on Etsy that I hand-crafted. Time spent perched cross-legged on grandma’s wicker chair under the shade of our red-tiled front porch. Vintage, all of it. This old home and its old bones and the old things we put in it. I reach for my favorite Etsy item, the last crocheted uterus period pouch with an angry emoji face sewn into it. The only one I kept. The rest sold out. Hundreds of them shipped. But hundreds were not made back. We went broke.

I fondle the frizzy pink uterus yarn, run my thumb across the stitched emoji face. I watch him watching the outside commotion through the front window.

“Do you see that?” he asks me.

The pathway to the sidewalk is an ocean of political ads, Sunday Times, grocery store coupons, flyers promising nightlife scenes and weekend warrior must-dos. They must know a couple lives here. They have traced us somehow. We gaze past the marketing piles, across the street and up to the tops of the finished townhome that boasts artisan terra cotta roofing stacked in a flawless display of prestige for hungry buyers. A billboard above reads LUXURY ECO TOWN HOMES.

“Bastards,” he says to it all. To the builders and greenwashing and investors and price hikers.

I nod another agreeable nod. We shake our fists in the general direction of a tenacious industrialism. We turn away from it, back to the music with our filled stem glasses. We, the anti-capitalists. We, who shall not be moved.

Five

A letter unlike the weekend warrior ads sits curt on the porch. I eye it through the opened top of the Dutch door. The first FORECLOSED notice. We know what follows. The bank sale, the LLC buy out, the property razing, the breaking of ground with champagne to welcome new construction. Out with the old, in with the new. I open the bottom of the Dutch door. I have not bothered with clothes today. I toe the letter away from the porch. It flutters onto the lawn. The sprinklers wet it. I watch the red bleed out across the white. I’m feelin’ blue.

“What are you doing?” My husband asks of my foot halfway out the door.

“Fucking the man’s various government infrastructural systems and amorphisms of bureaucracy,” I say.

“Good,” he smiles.

I smile back, proud. We are the final bastions of some fading Americana. Or is the fading the progress? I second guess it all. Our evasion of these economic systems.

“Do you think we’re safe?” I ask him.

“If they bother to check for squatters, which they certainly will,” he says. “Surely, they will. They can’t raze a house with people in it.”

“No,” I agree.

I bend to grab the bottle of wine nearest my right pinky toe, now one of many bottles across the floor. Its coolness fades as the glass loses contact with my skin. I scan the room for the opener and find it at the foot of the 1970s Goodwill couch. As the sun tucks away for the evening and ripples in the window, distorting a sherbet sky, it casts an electric orange through the rush hour smog. Without clothes, my torso has burned.

“Wow! That’s red,” I slur to the sky, sucked in by its changing colors, to its intense warmth.

My husband comes up behind me.

“Wow, you’re red!” he says back and pokes at the side of my sunburnt breast, just at the lifted curve that hangs taut like sweet fruit above my lolling foothills of ribs and valleys. “Ow!” I say, holding myself.

I scowl at him and he grins at me until I lighten up a little and we burst and cackle and fall to the floor in heaps. We touch each other, feeling our wetness. Feeling our wine.

Four

I am up at dawn, alone, the empty bottle on its side by my hand, my clothes at my feet. He must have left for work, but a small note on the subway tile kitchen counter reads: Will get more TBC. Terse promises. He’d awoken a grouch. Something about infighting at his full-time gig, the low and not-rising pay that cannot keep up with the cost of this all. Boomers versus Millennials versus Gen Z, all three fearing the Alphas to come. That, and he’d said decent carrots were almost eight dollars a pack these days so technically alcohol is now cheaper than produce and isn’t that America for you, and that I’d already sold most of our things to make the mortgage payments so if I can’t find a job we’re kerfuffled. All understandable fodder for his anger. Nothing a Two-Buck Chuck can’t fix, a mantra we adopted the first month of marriage after an uninsured fender bender with a parking lot pole rendered the car totaled, though he more often says “TBC to the rescue!” these days.

I finish scanning his chicken scratch and glide in hazy dream flight back to the poured glass window, so engrossed with the sounds of building that I’d forgotten my own walking. I leave my clothes where they lay. My never-plucked brows furrow at the industry across the street. What were yesterday only bare bones of wood and nail now outline a hoard of townhomes. They are covered with walls, all the same. They are covered with paint, all the same. They seep with promises of a monochrome ease. My skin prickles at the speed of their rising, at the disregard for the histories torn down. At the elimination. We are in a queue. I fear for our Matriarch, the last on her street.

While he is at work and I am out of work, there is nothing to do but stare, entranced all day by the men across the street, also at work, scurrying like carpenter ants, carrying and lifting and building up, up, up. My feet throb purple after hours of watching, motionless. My areolas and raw, exposed torso are tender from the day’s cycled light. I look at the skin, feel heat on my face, see the arrow-straight line of red across my hips that splits me in half. I laugh. The front door bursts open. I jump for my clothes.

“You scared the shit out of me!” I say.

“Sorry,” he says. “Wrote I’d get more wine.”

“Yes, I saw.”

He unloads three duffle bags of table wine lugged from Grocery Outlet (also cheap but not TBC, not Trader Joe’s as hoped), sliding them on their sides across the living room floor where they clank against her original adobe walls. A few hit my heavy feet, coaxing them to lift. I know we will need nothing else, just Nina and the wine.I bring the glasses. We are hunkering down.

They can’t raze a house with people in it.

Three

The boxes are moved in by August. We sit as a couple in our new living room sipping a $1.75 clearance table red bought from our now walkable Trader Joe’s, surrounded by towers of open, half-rummaged boxes with scribbled Sharpie labels: KITCHEN, FRAGILE, BATH, MISCELLANEOUS SHIT.

I lean my head against his shoulder. “This is perfect.”

We stare lazily out of her 1920s poured-glass living room window. The old Matriarch is aged-pristine, her ebony hardwood floors like tar.

“It is. It is perfect.” he says. “I’ll refurbish the floors. Back to the original.”

This pleases me. I cheers my glass to his. The wine trickles across our lips. Into our necks and muscles. Into lust, for each other, for the idea of this Matriarchal womb. A place of our own. A place for a family? The Moms keep saying so, that we have to be quick, but what do we know about timelines. We only want to nestle into the crux of this queen. Not every womb needs filling.

We rise from the hard floors. From the window, the view across the street is mundane, non-picturesque, ugly. A razed field. A parked BMW. A man in a suit, holding a clipboard, pointing at other men in reflective vests and hardhats who are scrambling to put up chain link fencing. We scan the pre-construction site. Perhaps something nice. Perhaps a coffee shop. Perhaps a park. A green space.

“Does it bother you?” I ask him of the fence.

“Nothing but a short-term eyesore,” he assures me.

We sit. We melt into the sofa. The street is lined with condos. Our bungalow sits alone, the last house of its kind surrounded by new: townhomes, artist lofts, organic farmers markets. The razed field is an anomaly. Maybe a promise.

Two

We accept the little paper scrap, smile, and forget about the advertised listing completely until two weeks later, on laundry day, when he shoves his hand into the dryer to find the crumpled and somewhat legible clipping stuck to the air release vent: ICONIC SOCAL SPANISH BUNGALOW–ONE-TIME LOW-COST OFFER. HOT UP-AND-COMING NEIGHBORHOOD.

“Hey, remember this?”

He shoves the clipping into my open palm. His grin is different. It stretches ear to ear, toothy, hungry, as if the home were gold to seek. A beautiful relic in a sea of same. A far cry from our cockroach-infested, 600-square-foot rental off Sunset. A sensible place for a child, Mom said when she gave it to us.

Instead, the details are a draw: cheap, close to work, in a buzzy neighborhood. It is something with character, something artsy. Something cool but not mainstream cool, still trendy but not like everyone-had-it trendy, because it had to be unique. Something hipster.

One

At the family dinner, Mom smiles and rummages through her purse. She pulls out a For Sale ad from the Sunday paper. Not, of course, in the Sunday Times online, to which my husband and I are subscribed and prime members. It is a clipping she cut herself to physically give us, with no understanding of cloud-sharing options or AirDrop. An imperfect zig-zag-cut trapezoid, detached from the whole newspaper and folded to sit in her purse for weeks in want of a family dinnerwhere the news could be shared with my mother-in-law and her grown child, my husband, who she still affectionately calls Little One.

“Look, Little One. For a family,” my mother-in-law says as she hands the clipping to my mother. My husband laughs. My eyes laugh back. I urge him to take the clipping. He takes the ad and studies it.

“It does look nice,” he says. He hands it to me backwards, where a little cartoon was half cut off by a frantic scissoring. The joke ends where mom tore it away from the paper.

I flip it over and, like my husband, study the house for sale. I reach for the bowl of mashed potatoes. I look at my expectant mother-in-law. I see Mom, expectant too, smiling at the newspaper ad in my hand. The mothers hope for the same. A family.

I fiddle with the paper and glance down at what of the cartoon the scissors spared. A husband elephant with his elephant wife throws his trunk in the air: IN THIS ECONOMY? I’D RATHER—

Zero

My now-husband lies face-up in bed. He rolls the ring around my knuckle. Admires its newness. A hot breeze rolls in through our rental window. Sirens ring outside on the street. Clouds reveal a bright honeymoon. Black silhouettes of tiny roaches dot the light along the vinyl flooring. The refrigerator whirs.

“What do you think about a house?” I ask him.

“Expensive,” he says.

“Less than renting. After initial costs,” I add.

I feel hungry, in this moment, for a settled life. For the safety of a place all our own. I begin, in the depths of my head, to idealize it. I begin to refuse to let this go.

“We’re priced out of the new stuff. We’d have to go fixer upper. Still expensive,” he counters.

“You have a solid gig,” I remind him.

“What if I lose the gig?” He turns to face me. I can see the same hunger in him. A companion animal looking to nest. “They’d raze a fixer-upper to the ground. Build more new homes. Or another Whole Foods. So if they razed it. If they could do such a thing, what would you rather do?”

I consider the efficacy of making a house a home against the potential of losing it. I consider the absurd idea that a company could raze a house with people in it. I consider the joy of an old womb, a matriarchal place of comfort and solidarity and union. A life raft in a flood of landlords.

“I’d rather die in it,” I say.

He nods in agreement. It’s settled. We’d go down with the ship. We’d stain her white ceiling with the oil from our noses. If we had to, we’d claw-dance until her walls folded in.

Rebecca Baumann is an LA native, California writer, and editor. Her work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Golden State: Best New Writing from California, 52 Men: The Podcast, and 7X7 LA Magazine, among others. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and Women’s & Gender Studies. Her novel about a child prodigy’s fame, exploitation, and love in the art world is seeking its forever home.

Finding Hope in Horror: Blake Hammond Interviews Julian Zabalbeascoa

March 10, 2025 Interviews

JULIAN ZABALBAEASCOA’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a work of narrative ingenuity and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War and has recently been named a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, and Ploughshares, among other journals. In this interview, BLAKE HAMMOND and Julian Zabalbeascoa discuss writing about your heritage, riffing on your research, and empathizing with evil characters.

Blake Hammond: Your story “Igerilaria,” published in The Common in 2021, is about a Basque refugee, the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna attacks, and fascist Spain in the late 20th Century. When did you start writing about the Basque Country? Or has it always been a central aspect of your work?

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Since the word go, really. And then, with even greater fervor, when I was twenty and studying in the Basque Country in Spain. It was a transformative experience. As the world was opening to me, I was trying to put it on the page. My family is from the Basque Country. My father is from the Spanish side, and my mother’s family is from the French side. And I grew up in a community of Basque immigrants in the Central Valley of California. It’s a common story, I think, but, in my teen years, I was determined to get as far as possible from my hometown. But what did I end up doing? Studying in the Basque Country. Planting myself in the headwaters, the source of it all. From the frying pan into the fire. It was magical though. It was also me trying to make sense of everything—my childhood, what brought my family to America, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape us, etc. I never sit down at the desk as though reclining on the therapist’s couch, but I suppose that’s what I’m unwittingly doing morning after morning on the page.

BH: You can tell Spain is a huge part of your life because the setting is so central to every chapter, especially for a country as regional as Spain. In a way, the landscape is one of the most constant characters throughout the book. Can you speak more about that regionality and your approach to writing settings and landscapes?

JZ: Few things on this planet stir my soul as much as the mist on the mountains in the Basque Country, on both sides of the border, Spain and France. It’s an ancestral feeling, I’m sure. A sort of pleasurable response that has existed longer than I have. But I also love Spain’s arid landscapes, its high plateaus, the near-forests of twisting olive trees, the stone-scraped mountain peaks found around León, the Arabic influences in architecture down south, all of it. It’s a lifelong love affair for me. So it was bound to find its way into the book. However, my characters are fighting for this land, killing and dying, and risking their moral compasses, so the land would have to be central to how they view and experience the world.

BH: With this ancestral connection, and having spent so much time there, I’m curious about your research for this book. Did any of it come from first-hand accounts you heard while in Spain?

JZ: While I’m an advocate for the powers of the imagination, it would have been very difficult for me to write this book without many of those lived experiences, which included being told anecdotes by people in Spain and the Basque Country that helped give it shape. I did a year of undergrad in the Basque Country in Spain, then attended grad school in Madrid over the course of five summers. Since 1999, I’ve been in Spain and the Basque Country at least once a year, oftentimes more. So many of those experiences, which included focused research with a clear eye of where my characters would wind up, informed the writing of this novel. The thing with research, though, is that if you’re not careful it becomes endless. It is important to step out onto the high wire before you fully test its viability. You should be a little reckless. Meaning, you should give your imagination space to dream. I’m currently studying the Spanish Civil War once again for a class I’m teaching this spring, and I’m coming across a few things I would have loved to include in the novel. This is despite having studied the war for over a decade now. But if I were going to wait to read all that can be read about the Spanish Civil War before putting the first words down, I’d still be stretching my legs behind the starting line.

I never sit down at the desk as though reclining on the therapist’s couch, but I suppose that’s what I’m unwittingly doing morning after morning on the page.”

BH: You do a great job of weaving the historical context for the war, and the political turmoil of the time into this book. How did you create such an authentic sense of urgency from a conflict so far removed from the American consciousness?

JZ: This follows that idea of research. You want to know your material and be able to internalize it, but then you should forget about much of it. Have you learned your instrument? Great, now start jamming. I knew I didn’t want these narrators to be tour guides for the Spanish Civil War. I didn’t want to bog the reader down with exposition that might deepen their understanding of the conflict but, quite possibly, slow down the narrative. I wanted to put faith in the reader that they’d meet my characters where they were, and that enough context could be created through action. I also had faith that there were recognizable elements in the conflict for today’s American reader. I began this novel in 2011. I wouldn’t have guessed then that the Venn diagram would overlap with America as much as it does now.

BH: I was interested in your decision to write from the viewpoint of characters on the fascist side of the conflict in some of these chapters. Can you talk more about that?

JZ: This war affected most everyone in society, so I strove to have diverse voices on the page. That includes fascists. To that, there’s no great sport in putting a character on the page to ridicule them or tear them down. As much as I might disagree with a character’s view of the world, it’s not my job to judge them. Instead, it’s my job as a writer to remain curious, to follow after them, transcribe what they’re telling/showing me, and keep asking questions. We’re not encouraged to show such generosity, especially not online, but I think it’s an integral quality to maintain when you’re at your desk.

BH: Was it difficult for you to inhabit those characters, the ones you don’t agree with? To try to remain neutral while getting their voice onto the page? Faustino and Juan are two fascist characters that come to mind, and even though they’re committing unspeakable acts of violence, I felt bad for them. They didn’t feel villainized.

JZ: I was recently in conversation with the writer Sebastian Stockman about my novel, and he referenced this line from the Jean Renoir film The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everybody has their reasons.” Part of the job of the fiction writer is to explore what those reasons might be. To withhold judgment while doing so. I have some strong, possibly even inflexible, political opinions. I likely wouldn’t have written this novel were I not so concerned about the current trajectory of the country and the world. But I’ve learned not to let those convictions drown out whatever my characters are trying to tell me. Otherwise, what would I produce? Something akin to a social media post that might fetch a few likes. But certainly nothing cousinly to literature.

BH: There are some incredibly well-written, yet horrifying, passages of violence and war in this book. But what seemed to connect everything was the theme of family, especially parental and sibling relationships. Was that an intentional throughline, or did it occur as you were writing?

JZ: It’s amazing how, in fiction, you can out yourself. Even in historical fiction! Half of this novel was written very slowly over more than a decade, while the other half was written all at once, not long after my wife and I learned we’d be having our first child. Becoming a parent was very much on my mind while working on these chapters every morning. It is also representative of the struggle playing out in the book. You have those fighting for a positive vision of tomorrow, who want a better and more just—and therefore a more secure—world for their children to live in. Meanwhile, they’re at war against reactionaries of various stripes, those determined to return the country to a past they can recognize and feel secure in. They likely believe their children will, as well. And so the fight goes on for another day.

BH: That positive vision of tomorrow gives the book an admirable overtone of hope, which was moving for a story that is also so filled with terror. Out of all this tension between hope and fear, right and left, family and war, what do you want readers to take away from this book?

JZ: In the end, hope. But, along the way, visceral glimpses of the terror? Is that something you can want for the reader (even though life has a surplus of it and dishes it out disproportionately and at random)? If so, first, the terror: Spain’s fate in the 1930’s need not be ours. We still have time. We can give in to the algorithms and the demagogues, blame our fellow citizens for all the ills we feel are before us, and remain constantly outraged, but what will happen then? We’ll ultimately become irrevocably divorced from each other, leading half the country to fully embrace an authoritarian’s agenda. Ours remains a democracy, and a democracy requires us to maintain conversations with those we agree with, those we don’t, and those who’ve tuned out for all sorts of reasons. When we stop talking to one another, when we subscribe wholesale to the us vs. them narrative, when only cultural and ideological hegemony can save the country, then we will begin to hear, as Twain warned, history rhyming. Now for the hope: those fighting in Spain against the fascist-backed Nationalist Movement stood under all sorts of flags. In the novel, I tend to focus on those fighting to defend the Second Republic. The odds were against them from the start. The world’s democracies had abandoned them. Meanwhile, the insurrectionists had the backing of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Despite being outmatched and suffering one loss after another, they maintained hope and continued fighting to realize it in their world. I believe that we are in urgent need of that sort of hope and resiliency.

Few things on this planet stir my soul as much as the mist on the mountains in the Basque Country, on both sides of the border, Spain and France. It’s an ancestral feeling, I’m sure. ”

BH: Many of these chapters have been published as stand-alone short stories, and this book functions as both a novel and a collection of short stories. At what point did you realize that you had a novel on your hands? Were you thinking of it as a collection, or a novel, or just writing?

JZ: Six of one, half dozen the other. There was a time when I was trying to have the novel be a thing it was not. The Great Basque American Multi-Generational Novel. Once I abandoned that track and focused solely on the Spanish Civil War, I refused to put any guardrails on the novel, the shape it would take, and how it might even be classified. Not pragmatic for the marketplace but necessary to invite some generosity from the muses. So whichever narrator was speaking to me, whichever image wouldn’t leave me alone, whatever the murky subconscious was trying to bring forward, I’d abandon myself to it. I’d glance at the structure the novel was beginning to take, but I tried not to let that dictate much. Just as I’d blindly follow a character to a chapter’s denouement, having faith all the while I was heading…somewhere, the same was the case with the overall structure of the novel. I had faith it would all coalesce into a unified shape. Now, having said that, after all that dreaming on the page was through, my heady waking self shouldered in and began barking orders. Such is the revision process. Gone is the mystic communing with the subconscious or collective unconscious. In comes the cold, calculating, and merciless logician. I also had the immeasurable great fortune to fall in love with an incredible fiction editor: Katie Sticca, the Managing and Fiction Editor of Salamander. The novel wouldn’t be what it is without her careful reads and notes that filled up all the margins.

BH: Speaking of your editing process, I was curious about revising a novel with this structure, with each chapter giving us a new voice. Some characters appear and then reappear later, and some only appear once, with Isidro in the center. Was it harder to deepen Isidro’s character? Were there characters who appeared in drafts that you felt deserved their own stories?

JZ: There were some challenges along the way, most certainly. Plenty of reverse engineering. Each narrator will experience a sort of narrative arc in their respective chapters, but throughout all these, there is the character of Isidro, and even Mariana, who experience a larger and longer arc. Isidro has an unquenchable thirst for life, and a deep and constantly present appreciation for the flightiness of time and the brevity of our lives, so some of the narrators might be able to appreciate that we’re following him throughout the novel. But I’m willing to wager that if you asked the other narrators, they’d tell you their experiences constitute the authoritative story of the Spanish Civil War and that Isidro played a small, sometimes meaningful, part in it. The world, as we experience it, tends to feel like it’s spinning around us as its primary axle. So I had to honor that feeling while also, adding new textures to Isidro and Mariana’s storylines. As for the second part of the question, sometimes a character required their own chapter. Xabier’s, Isidro’s brother’schapter was one of the last I wrote, as I felt that people’s thoughts and memories of him made him a touch one-dimensional. He seems to be everybody’s martyr, so he requires his own chapter to demonstrate to the reader that he is just as conflicted and ego-driven as all the rest of us. But by and large, when a character does reappear, they do so as quickly-glimpsed shadows. I’m hoping there’s some fun for readers in identifying them when they brush a scene’s periphery.

BH: What books and authors inspired you as you wrote this novel?

JZ: The novel was written over thirteen years. So the bibliography would go on for pages. But the two biggies for me when I was carried off on an eight-week writing sprint in which I wrote half this novel, would be the work of Svetlana Alexievich and Irish fiction writ large. I dedicated a couple of chapters to Svetlana Alexievich. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature nine years ago for her oral histories of the Soviet Union and Russia. Anything with her name on it, pick it up. It’s oftentimes brutal. Secondhand Time stands alongside Part IV of 2666 as the most violent and visceral series of pages I’ve ever read. But it’s also shot through with humor and great wisdom and many people who, despite their circumstances, continue putting one foot in front of the other. Her work made me realize I could write a novel populated with voices. Mine has twenty chapters, and each chapter is told by a different narrator. It was Svetlana Alexievich who permitted me to pursue that. As for the Irish, they constitute a large part of what I’ve been reading since 2020. I’ve been beating this drum since that seismic year, but the island of Ireland is producing some of the most exciting and dynamic literature of our times. It’s not even a pound-for-pound thing. They can enter the ring against any country, no matter the size, and have their opponent on the mat before the bell ends the first round.

Blake Hammond is an MFA student at SNHU’s Mountainview MFA program. His work was a finalist in the Salamander2024 Fiction Contest, and has been published in Mulberry Literary.

Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here was published this November by Two Dollar Radio. Among other journals, his short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Common,Electric Literature, Glimmer Train, Gettysburg Review, One Story, and Ploughshares. He teaches in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

When I Go to Chicago

March 5, 2025 Dispatches

By SHELLEY STENHOUSE

Chicago, Illinois

things break. The last time, on the last day, the pipes in the kitchen burst and flooded my parents’ blonde wood floor. When I’m up in that 87^th floor apartment, I look at the sky’s blank expression. I keep the little square office window open for the sliver of nature. It’s hard to read with Fox News blaring, so I drift from room to room.

Each time before I fly to Chicago, I lose my debit card. This time it leapt out of my raincoat pocket on my way to the grocery store and refused to reappear. I had the new one shipped straight to the Hancock.

Podcast: Julia Sanches on “The Advice”

January 31, 2025 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Transcript: Julia Sanches

Translator Julia Sanches speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about translating “The Advice,” a story by Irene Pujadas, which appears in The Common’s fall issue in a portfolio of writing by contemporary Catalan women. Julia talks about her translation process, and the importance of capturing the tone and style of a piece, like the understated absurdist humor in “The Advice.” Julia also discusses how she approaches collaboration with other translators, how she chooses the books and stories she wants to translate, and how starting her career at a literary agency gave her a crash course in the behind-the-scenes of publishing.

A Tyranny of Dreams: Review of Proper Imposters

January 28, 2025 Reviews

Reviewed by SAM SPRATFORD

In Proper Imposters, Panhandler Books compiles four novellas from authors who are attuned to the mystical nature of doubles, a timeless form, and who hold them up to the contradictions of our moment, the paradoxes and counterparts on which our societies rest. MAURICIO MONTIEL FIGUEIRAS, JEFF PARKER, CHAYA BHUVANESWAR, AND JASON OCKERT each spin gripping tales of doppelgangers, pairs whose likeness in body or spirit fades in and out of focus. These are stories of concealment, intentional or not, and revelations of often melodramatic proportions. When the authors align these pieces just right, it resembles the dazzling effect of a hall of mirrors. Each author manages, at various times, to pierce through narrative’s typical strictures into the world of dreams, where fantastical images diagnose with overwhelming clarity the ills of our time.

What We’re Reading: January 2025

January 24, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

As we’re finding our footing in 2025 and, in the U.S., shoring up against new political realities, January has been pervaded by a sense of uncertainty. The books our community is reading right now seem to respond to this feeling, in areas of life spanning from assimilation to cooking anxiety. Read on for recommendations from our contributors AFTON MONTGOMERY, HEMA PADHU, and ADRIENNE SU that just might help to stabilize your spirits—or, at the very least, provide some quality distraction.

Miriam Ungerer’s Good Cheap Food and Margaret Eby’s You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible; recommended by Issue 28 Poet Adrienne Su

When working on my last book of poems, Peach State (2021), I often wrote my way to the kitchen: writing about a dish made me want to cook it. These days, I’m cooking my way to the proverbial typewriter. I read about food. Then I cook something I’ve read about, and the process nudges me to fill a page.