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

Stop Being Precious About Process: Julian Zabalbeascoa interviews Michael James Plunkett

October 13, 2025 Interviews

In this interview, JULIAN ZABALBAEASCOA and MICHAEL JAMES PLUNKETT explore how a chance visit to the World War I battle site of Verdun sparked a decades-long journey that led to Plunkett writing Zone Rouge. Their conversation took place across time zones as Zalbalbeascoa was in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, and Plunkett was home in Columbus, Ohio, having just welcomed his second child. In their correspondence, they cover makeshift writing rituals from Morgan Stanley’s cafeteria to subway rides, the joys of publishing with independent presses, the art of dodging probable plot twists, resilience in the face of climate change, and “fiction’s ability to explore the human condition in ways data can’t.”

Julian Zabalbeascoa (Left) and Michael Jerome Plunkett (Right)

Julian Zalbalbeascoa (JZ): Since The Common is a journal that celebrates how place functions in our lives, I thought we’d begin with the setting of your novel: Verdun, site of the decisive battle in World War I, which resulted in the deaths of over 700,000 French and German soldiers. When did your interest in Verdun (the place and the battle) begin? And when did you think to yourself, There may be a novel here.

The Reading Life: There is No “Purpose” (and Perhaps No “Progress”) in Nature: On Reading Oliver Sacks’ Letters

October 9, 2025 Essays

By ILAN STAVANS

The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
―Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a letter of February 20, 1997, to a humorist, Oliver Sacks says that one of his favorite words is APOCOPE. “I love its sound, its explosiveness (as do some of my Tourettic friends—for whom it becomes a 4-syllable verbal tic which can be impacted or imploded into a tenth of a second) and the fact that it compresses 4 vowels and 4 syllables into a mere seven letters.” This is the type of response I adore: succinct, passionate, informed, all around a single, transient word. The quote appears in Dr. Sacks’ Letters (Knopf, 2024, 726 pages), edited by his long-time assistant and researcher Kate Edgar. Notice the length of the volume: it is massive, even though, as Edgar mentions, it only comprises about a tenth of all of the letters Dr. Sacks wrote; he was an inveterate, compulsive logophile who wrote nonstop on napkins, pads, notebooks, and anything else within reach. (W. H. Auden, an early champion and long-time friend of Sacks, addressed him in print with the honorific “Dr.”; I gladly follow it here.)

“During the Drought,” “Sestina, Mount Mitchill,” “Dragonflies”

October 8, 2025 Dispatches

By LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
The Jersey Shore, NJ, USA

During the Drought

During the drought, we traded water
for wine. Let our plants wither, stopped

doing laundry. Learned to shudder
at the smell of fire. Hoped

it was just some asshole with a chiminea. Every
impostor cloud was suspect: steam rising

Knives, Tongues

October 2, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By SIMONÉ GOLDSCHMIDT-LECHNER

Translated from the German by MELODY MAKEDA LEDWON

Translator’s Note

“I need you to translate my book. You’re the person I would ask,” Simoné said to me as we sat on a panel about intersectionality and translation at the Translationale Berlin in the winter of 2023. We laughed briefly at how she had managed to weave this translation proposal into her response to a question about challenges in the German translation industry. Honored, intrigued, a bit nervous, I accepted.

Messer, Zungen, written primarily in German, explores how the erasure of Black people and people of color from the culture of remembrance within the Cape Coloured community in South Africa, also known as Camissa, is intimately tied to their displacement from ancestral lands and historic communal sites. Resisting racial violence, reclaiming memory, history and language therefore involves both returning to lost places and being resilient in hostile spaces. I found the role of language in this context particularly fascinating. The characters speak, remember, and experience their worlds in multiple languages, including Sesotho, English and Afrikaans, creating a mosaic of languages. In my initial draft of “Choir” and “Motherness,” I focused on how to recreate this rich tapestry of language in translation. As I began to revise, and consult with SGL and several colleagues, I concluded that it was most important to respect the characters’ language choices. Above all, I sought to capture the commonplace reality of multilingual worlds and communities. SGL adeptly portrays these realities in her novel without explaining them or making them more palatable to an imagined external audience. In contrast to the original, where passages written in English stand out, in the translation they seamlessly blend into the main language of the text, resulting in a new language mosaic.

—Melody Makeda Ledwon

On the Shores of Baileys Harbor

October 1, 2025 Dispatches

By BEN TAMBURRI

Photo courtesy of author

Baileys Harbor, WI

Baileys Harbor has always felt like a place that is eternally old, eternally in the past. It is a destination for quiet summers on the Wisconsin peninsula, where the insignia of range lights and lighthouses decorate the bathroom of every home, and Dala horses wreath the doors. It was the place of my youth, even if it was only for a week each year. As a kid, when my family visited, I felt at home among the retired condo-dwellers.

September 2025 Poetry Feature: Earth Water Fire Poems, a Conversation

September 25, 2025 Poetry

Poems and sculptures by LISA ASAGI

This is a conversation with whales, clay, and poetry.

A wonderment with whales began in a childhood alivened by the early days of the Save the Whales movement and stories from my father of mysterious encounters on overnight boating trips. This fascination resurfaced seven years ago when I found myself working with my hands—clay sculpture and stand-up paddling led to long overdue reconnections with both earth and sea. Research deepened my curiosity: before the centuries of whaling, very different kinds of relationships existed between whales and humans. Here in the 21st century, what’s possible? These pieces are part of an ongoing series of rememberings, imaginings, longings, and offerings.

— Lisa Asagi

The Garden of the Gods

September 24, 2025 Dispatches

By ELI RODRIGUEZ FIELDER

Two children kneel on a large rock surface. Large grey boulders and a forest of trees are visible in the distance.

Photo courtesy of author

Herod, Illinois

There are two Gardens of the Gods, but the one in Southern Illinois fit our budget. On the drive down from Iowa City, we listen to podcasts about Norse and Greek mythology to fill the twins’ heads with ideas of magic, with the hope that they might complain less about the hiking. From their car seats, they point out farms with broken corn stalks and a Burger King, making the argument that we must still be in Iowa. Even though we’ve traveled six hours, their six-year-old brains haven’t yet connected time and distance. But I’ve been in the Midwest long enough to know the difference between the farms around a college town and farms around a farming town. And if I wasn’t wisened to it, the signage would teach me soon enough. Traveling through rest stops and restaurants puts us on edge. We make the outline of an average family with a couple of feral kids, if people don’t linger too long in their gaze.

What We’re Reading: September 2025

September 19, 2025 Reviews

Curated by KEI LIM

This month’s picks span extraordinary circumstances, yet tug at the rather ordinary, or perhaps most relatable, of emotions. AFTON MONTGOMERY recommends an investigative nonfiction book that interrogates people’s relationships to forever chemicals, VICTORIA KELLY recommends the 2024 Booker Prize Winner that abandons plot and follows a 24-hour period of astronauts orbiting Earth, and MONIKA CASSEL recommends a docupoetics collection that weaves the emotional aftermath of the Vietnam War with the defiance of women throughout history and literature.

Raspberries

September 17, 2025 Fiction

By PHOEBE HYDE

The family are in the kitchen waiting to eat as the enemy soldiers approach the house. It’s already dark, and the man and child are restless at the table, waiting for the woman to pronounce the eggs set. She’s an excellent and exacting cook who will not be rushed. As the soldiers step onto the porch outside, the grandmother distracts the child with a joke: what did the rooster say to the wolf? and in the pause before the punchline, the first knock on the door falls—boom—and explodes—boomboomboomboom!

The Reading Life: The Acrobat

September 11, 2025 Essays

By JIM SHEPARD

The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.

I always thought that one of the quieter sadnesses of my father’s life—and there were plenty of noisy ones, even given that everyone, myself included, acknowledged that he was a delight to be around—was his relationship to his own education and to reading itself. Shep—everyone including his kids and his wife called him Shep—only got as far as high school before World War II intervened, and then worked at Sikorsky Aircraft, a company that built helicopters, after returning home. He’d flown ground attack missions in Burma as a dorsal turret gunner in a B-25 and resupply missions as a cargo officer in a C-47 through the Himalayas to China, and the latter missions, referred to as going ‘over the hump’ in flyboy speak, were so lethal that the aircraft and crews suffered a twenty percent loss rate. When he got home, he needed to decompress, what I now realize was his version of PTSD. His account of the seven or eight postwar months in which he just lay around worrying his mother—the details of which always seemed to me to eerily echo Hemingway’s great short story “Soldier’s Home”—always included as a sad self-indictment, “I thought I might read, but I never had the concentration for it.”