News & Events | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Selections from Lettres en forêt urbain

May 1, 2025 Poetry, Translation

Poems appear below in English and the original French.

Translator’s note

I stumbled on these poems, fairly literally, in a bookstore in Québec.

I immediately recognized the hyper-connected world M. Bertrand Laverdure writes of—the new networks of pop culture and politicians and internet also familiar to me as an American, and the older networks of gargantuan trees, shaky trees, trees above streams and children playing and park benches and promotional flyers and guidewires. I recognized the surreality of his world. Of the double-address, where each poem is an epistle both to a specific tree with a clear local history, and to figures from cartoons (Skeletor), film (Poltergeist), myth (Penelope), classic literature (Gatsby), and more. The surreality where each tree and literary figure is also “a jpeg,” and where plugging devices into outlets, or each other, mirrors trees (the French word for plugged in is “branché”).

The Common x Sant Jordi Book Festival: Arabic Fiction Readings

April 30, 2025 News, News and Events

Some of The Common’s Arabic fiction contributors, MARYAM DAJANI, ESTABRAQ AHMAD, and ISHRAGA MUSTAFA HAMID, made virtual appearances at the Sant Jordi Book Festival last week! The hybrid celebration, sponsored by the eponymous Sant Jordi in New York, is held annually in New York City to raise awareness of literature in translation, and pays homage to the famous Sant Jordi Book Festival in Barcelona, where the streets are lined with bookstands and flower stalls in honor of “the St. Valentine’s day of Catalonia.” The Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the United States sponsors the festival and is led by MARY ANN NEWMAN, a renowned Catalan translator and contributor to TC’s Issue 28 portfolio of Catalan women’s literature in translation.

It might be too late to grab a book and a rose, but you can get a feel for the beautiful festival by checking out the readings of Dajani, Ahmad, and Hamid’s stories below—which includes a sneak peek at our Issue 29 Amman portfolio, launching next week!

Maryam Dajani’s “Sufi Trance,” trans. Addie Leak*
Jordan

*(forthcoming in Issue 29!)

Estabraq Ahmad’s “The Kitchen,” trans. Maya Tabet
Kuwait

Ishraga Mustafa Hamid’s “On the Train,” trans. Jonathan Wright
Sudan

dispatch from lebanon, 2023

April 30, 2025 Dispatches

By GHINWA JAWHARI

A photograph of a landscape with a road winding past the land.

Photos by Natasha Jahchan.

beirut and mount lebanon

Join Weekly Writes This Summer For Motivation and Accountability

April 29, 2025 News and Events

Need some summer writing motivation? We’ve got you covered! Weekly Writes is a ten-week program designed to help you create your own place-based writing, beginning July 14.

We’re offering both poetry AND prose, in two separate programs. Whether you’re the next Dickinson or Dostoevsky, pick your program, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a weekly dose of writing inspiration (and accountability) in your inbox!

Weekly Writes Summer 2025 kicks off on July 14 to keep you motivated and meeting your writing goals all through the late-summer heat! Sign up now!

Weekly Writes Summer 2025 includes our new accountability angle, alongside brainstorming prompts and writing advice. Committing to a regular writing practice can be difficult, but we’re here to help keep the pen moving! During these ten weeks, participants will turn in one page of writing per week via Google Classroom, and will receive an email from us acknowledging that they have completed their writing for that week. At the end of the program, all participants will receive an email letting them know how many weeks they submitted work. Writing will not be read and no feedback will be provided, but we will help you stay on track and celebrate your success!

Past participants, please note that prompts and advice for our Summer 2025 program are built on those from previous programs. So if you’ve participated in Weekly Writes before, you might see familiar material here. Prose prompts are from Weekly Writes Vol. 7, and poetry prompts are from Weekly Writes Vol. 8. If you have participated before but aren’t sure which volume you completed, feel free to email us at info@thecommononline.org so we can check for you!

The program costs just $25 for 10 weeks (that’s only $2.50 per week!). This fee includes one free, expedited* submission via Submittable after program completion.

Want to learn more about the program and how it works before you sign up? Visit our FAQ page.

Each week participants receive:

⇒ Three writing prompts appropriate for both beginning and advanced writers.

For prose writers, two prompts each week will focus on generating new material and the third will guide participants through the process of writing a longer story.
For poets, the three weekly prompts will be a mix: generative prompts for creating brand new work, and prompts to guide revision on previous compositions.

⇒ Examples and readings to accompany some prompts, which were directly inspired by content from our magazine.

⇒ A look behind-the-scenes from our editors and contributors, with advice about writing, revising, and submitting, in addition to insights into what we’re looking for when selecting work for The Common.

⇒ An accountability incentive: upload one page per week to our system, and receive acknowledgment of your commitment to your writing practice (pages will not be read).

Candy and Layer Cake: Zack Strait in Conversation with Richard Siken (and Five Poems)

April 24, 2025 Interviews, Poetry

In this month’s poetry feature, ZACK STRAIT talks with RICHARD SIKEN about influences, confrontation, readers, accountability, sacrifice, balance, surface beauty, deep meaning, writing, and Waffle House.

Review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser

April 21, 2025 Reviews

By MICHELLE DE KRETSER
Reviewed by AMBER RUTH PAULEN

Cover of Theory & Practice by Michelle de Krester

One of the brilliances of Michelle de Kretser’s newest novel Theory and Practice is how the author lassoes life’s “messy truths” into a neat and slim book. To do so, de Kretser asks many questions at once: How does shame lead to silence? Why write? What to feel when an idol falls from grace? How do you break free from your mother (the Woolfmother included)? How do class and race determine your place in the world? What to do when life doesn’t fit your ideas about it? Additionally, de Kretser remains flexible in form: fiction blends with essayistic, academic, and autobiographical elements. Even the cover of the Australian edition features a young de Kretser, as if to say, this book might be about things that have actually happened. With so much going on, it might seem like the book would fall apart, but it is a concise and searing portrait of what it’s like to be alive in a certain place and time and body.

What We’re Reading: April 2025

April 18, 2025 Reviews

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring.

Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman

I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.

Glass: Five Sonnets

April 16, 2025 Dispatches

By MONIKA CASSEL

Author’s Note:

Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.

Photo courtesy of author.

Berlin, Germany

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939

We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn–
underground station Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter–Bahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.

—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

April 14, 2025 Interviews

JEHANNE DUBROW is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of creative nonfiction. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, her husband recently completed his tenure as an officer, and this transformation led Jehanne to write Civilians, the final book in her military spouse trilogy, a sequence that began with the publication of Stateside in 2010 and continued with Dots & Dashes in 2017.

Novelist, poet, and Marine veteran spouse VICTORIA KELLY sat down with Jehanne to discuss Civilians, which confronts pressing questions about marriage, transitions, love, and war. Though they have known each other virtually for over a decade—as two members of the very small literary community of military spouse writers—this was the first time they connected face-to-face.

Victoria Kelly (VK): Your new book Civilians is the final volume in your trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse. Can you give us some background on your family’s experience with the military?

Jehanne Dubrow (JD): I’m the daughter of two U.S. Foreign Service Officers. I grew up in American embassies overseas. To be a diplomat is to be a civil servant; so, I thought I understood—through my parents’ work—what it means to serve.

The Common Young Writers Program is Open for Applications!

April 10, 2025 News, News and Events

Applications are now open for The Common Young Writers Program, which offers two two-week, fully virtual summer classes for high school students (rising 9-12). Students will be introduced to the building blocks of fiction and learn to read with a writer’s gaze. Taught by the editors and editorial assistants of Amherst College’s literary magazine, the summer courses (Level I and Level II) run Monday-Friday and are open to all high school students (rising 9-12). The program runs July 21-August 1.

Level I is for beginners and anyone excited to try their hand at fiction. Level II is for students who have already completed a creative writing class or workshop, and past TCYWP participants.

Full and partial need-based tuition waivers are available for both levels; we hope that no student will let financial difficulty prevent them from applying. Tuition waivers will be awarded to students with strong applications who cannot attend the program without financial assistance. In the application, students will have the opportunity to briefly describe their financial circumstances and state the amount they could afford to pay, if any, if accepted into the program. No tax returns or other documentation is required.

Click here for more information and details on how to apply.