Audio

Podcast: Mariah Rigg on “Target Island”

Apple Podcasts logo

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Spotify Logo Green

Listen on Spotify.

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”
Read more...

Podcast: Pria Anand on “The Elephant’s Child”

Apple Podcasts logo

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Spotify Logo Green

Listen on Spotify.

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”
Read more...

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”

Apple Podcasts logo

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Spotify Logo Green

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Lucas Schaefer Podcast.

LUCAS SCHAEFER speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about his story “Tuesday,” which appears in The Common’s brand new spring issue. “Tuesday” is an excerpt from his novel The Slip, out June 3 from Simon & Schuster; both center on a motley cast of characters at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Lucas talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the novel as a whole, which started over a decade ago as a series of linked short stories. Lucas also discusses how the novel’s central mystery came together, what it was like writing with humor and in so many voices, and how his own experience at an Austin boxing gym inspired the story and its characters.

lucas schaefer next to the common's issue 29 cover

Podcast: Lucas Schaefer on “Tuesday”
Read more...

Raffia Memory

By LILY LLOYD BURKHALTER

The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.  

Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.  

Raffia Memory
Read more...

Decapitated

By TERESE SVOBODA

We traveled as a group to Kenya on assignment to photograph zebra in complete abstraction, or the pores around the elephant’s flickering eyelid, or herds of giraffe clustered around salt licks like politicians deciding the fate of the country. We also drank. Fred, a Texan beer-sipper, always used a longer lens than the job needed. He worked in advertising, which meant that an assignment like this was his big chance to express himself. Franco bore his drink and our presence sardonically, a finger to the ear and always a story to accompany his glass of wine, usually about a donkey and metaphysics. It wasn’t a donkey after all was often the punchline. He was important enough that he could invite Heinemann to tag along on the trip. Heinemann’s wife was tending to an extremely pregnant NGO daughter, an activity that offered little for him, he said, personally. He was a professional magician elsewhere, not a photographer. But he was also very adept in the academic world, with an air of abstraction that suggested he had cleared collegiate hurdles in boredom. He drank vodka well. As for me, I drank gin and tonics as if they would stop malaria in its tracks. I had a name in photography, but after shooting the body for decades, my work had begun to disappear. A woman the men’s age, I had become invisible, as if I were left in too little fix. 

Photography made Heinemann uncomfortable; he was an expert in everything else, or else he pleased his friend Franco by demurring to his opinion. The rest of us declaimed as if we knew every ABC in the book, but really Heinemann was the one we all envied with his academic paycheck, as evidenced by our earnest critiques of his amateurish attempts at taking pictures. Your gloating hyena is too hackneyed, we argued, the baobab against the sunset too obscene, and the dancing women adorned in beads and gold cloth are far too pretty to be pithy. Heinemann laughed and pulled a coin out of Fred’s ear. Advertising! he exclaimed. He settled on photographing the steam pouring over the car engine. 

Decapitated
Read more...

LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal

Amherst College’s tenth annual literary festival runs from Thursday, February 27 to Sunday, March 2. Among the guests is PAISLEY REKDAL, whose book West: A Translation was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Common is pleased to reprint a short selection of video poems from West here.

Join Paisley Rekdal and Brandom Som in conversation with host Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, on Sunday, March 2 at 2pm. 

Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.


Not

LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal
Read more...

Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)

By ELIZABETH HAZEN

 

The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter 

hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room” 

where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.

Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)
Read more...

Dominus

By ANGIE MACRI

Danger, as in strangers, men or women;
as in twisters at night when you couldn’t
see them coming; as in the machines
that made work so easy you forgot
to watch what you were doing,

Dominus
Read more...

In Montgomery County

By THEA MATTHEWS

 

                              Maryland, 2020

My partner wears the panopticon,
and I carry the rope. Hungry
for the rush, the chase, we locate
the missing black calf
about two-tenths of a mile
from East Silver Spring.
He’s wearing a long-sleeve
jersey T-shirt, navy blue jeans.

In Montgomery County
Read more...