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Adam and Eve—and Reverend West—in Ohio

May 23, 2011 Essays

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.

Once Upon a Time

March 29, 2011 Essays

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!

The Serpent Lesson: Adam and Eve at Home in Ohio

March 1, 2011 Essays, Issue 01, Issue 01 Essays

By BROOK WILENSKY-LANFORD

In the beginning, the Lord God created man in Adams County, Ohio, just north of Peebles and south of Chillicothe.

On the very western edge of the Appalachians, in the craggy countryside of southern Ohio, the three branches of a small river called Brush Creek converge in a valley lined with pitch pine and chestnut oak trees. A steep rocky bluff rises one hundred feet above the riverbed. And on top of this bluff lies an ancient mound of soil, waist high, built in the shape of a serpent. The snake’s head—120 feet long and 60 feet wide—faces the north end of the bluff, overlooking the river. From there, the snake’s body stretches southward 1,300 feet in loose waves, and ends in a tightly curled triple spiral.

Brown Road (1853-1932)

March 1, 2011 Essays, Issue 01, Issue 01 Essays

By TED CONOVER

If it weren’t for the detailed map in my hands—a page of the New Hampshire Atlas and Gazetteer, from DeLorme, with the small state divided up into more than thirty spreads—I’d have had no idea that a road existed here, half a mile from our house. And in fact, the atlas has oversold it: Brown Road does exist, but not in a condition where you could drive a car or even an SUV down it. Nor a mountain bike, unless you were hardcore and could lift it over fallen trees, slide it under branches, and skirt some soggy bogs.

The Idiomatic Idiosyncrasies of Place

February 8, 2011 Essays

By LINDSAY STERN

In Germany, to be drunk is “to be full of stars and hail.”

French teachers urge their students to “seize the moon by the teeth.”

In Russia, the concept “never” calls crustaceans to mind: “when the crayfish sings on the mountain.”

“Have Bed. Need Floor.”

January 27, 2011 Essays, News, News and Events

By MAX KAISLER

College students are a lot like hermit crabs. For four years they divide the warm and cold seasons between home and school, shuttling back and forth with a few overstuffed bags in tow.

Literature vs. Literature: A Match to the Death

December 16, 2010 Essays

By EMILY GRECKI

Reading is a solitary experience. The reader can cozy up with a book (or e-reader device of choice) and be silently transported. But what happens when the reading experience is brought into a public, competitive forum? Such is the case with the Literary Death Match.