News & Events | Page 153 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Welcome to the Future

July 6, 2018 Essays

By lunchtime, Beijing had reached 102 degrees and our four-year old twins were hungry. We’d spent the morning exploring the shadeless Yonghegong Lama temple and now sought out the refuge of the simple vegetarian buffet nearby where my vegetarian husband and I had had a transcendent meal on our last trip six years before. To our dismay, it had been, according to a nearby security guard, demolished. One of our twins emitted hangry squeals, the other went boneless. The air was dense with humidity and pollution. On our way to the temple from the subway stop at the top of Yonghegong Street, we’d passed another, fancier-looking, vegetarian restaurant and so we elbowed our way all the way back up the narrow corridor of manic Buddhist commercialism thick with incense and the calls of hawkers selling religious tchotchkes and crowds of midday worshippers and tourists; we drowned in sweat.

Dream Ladders

July 4, 2018 Dispatches

By MATTHEW SCHULTZ

Israel and Palestine

The story of the Immovable Ladder is this: it was left on a balcony of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem by a careless mason in 1750 and has sat there ever since. The six orders of monks, in whose ruthless stewardship the church is kept, have divided the church into blocks of turf, which they guard with fervor, and sometimes with fists. It’s unclear to which sect the balcony (and by extension, the ladder) belongs. Any attempt to answer that question would be a threat to the delicate status quo that keeps the monkish violence at bay. And so the ladder sits. Undisturbed.

June 2018 Poetry Feature

June 29, 2018 Poetry

New poems by our contributors: NATHALIE HANDAL and STEVE KISTULENTZ

NATHALIE HANDAL

Lettera Lirica, Jerusalem

Because I see the shape
of your shadow in every city

Because you are on the edge
of every body of water

Because your language is tilted
towards the world

but you’ve kept some sentences
well-hidden

Because some words together
can frighten loneliness

like the lagoon moving aside
for the sea

Ask a Local: Elizabyth A. Hiscox, Gunnison, Colorado

June 28, 2018 Interviews

With ELIZABYTH A. HISCOX

Your name: Elizabyth A. Hiscox

Current city or town: Gunnison, Colorado

How long have you lived here: Four years (not yet a local by local standards)

Three words to describe the climate: Bright (year-round), frigid (in Winter), oxygen-deprived (great track & field team).

Best time of year to visit? Pick your outdoor poison/potion and it can be a year-round spot.

Non-Native

June 20, 2018 Dispatches

By CATE LYCURGUS

Tolowa Dunes State Park, California

Sandy showed us how. She placed the shovel’s tip a few inches from a tuft’s base. Angled the handle back a bit, just enough to loosen the grass before she lowered, hand-pulling. This way, she explained, down to the source. Awards went to the biggest pile, longest root (you cannot burn grass off the dunes; the network just shoots back again), cleanest area too. Tawny tips waved in small breeze from the lagoon, off the lip of sea. But the grass is pretty, C said, and somebody murmured, agreeing. He traced the rake in arcs, looking down, but couldn’t swirl it far. European beachgrass (Ammophila arenaria) grows in clumps from rhizomes that spread four meters each year, so it’s no surprise beachgrass defines large stretches of Pacific coast. Pretty till you get a spine in your glove, E admitted, wincing. Until you get down close.

Paris, April 7, 2018 Saturday

June 13, 2018 Dispatches

By GREGORY CURTIS

Paris, France

I found a book by Georges Perec called Tentatived’épuisement d’un lieu Parisien, or An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris. I like Perec very much. He loved word games and wrote crossword puzzles, and very often invented challenges for himself in his writing. In 1969 he wrote a book—La Disparition—in which the letter “e” does not appear. It was translated into English, also with no “e’s” but since the literal translation—The Disappearance—has three “e’s”, the English title is A Void. In 1972 Perec wrote Les Revenents, in which “e” is the only vowel in the book. Perec died of cancer in 1982 when he was only forty-six.

Join Us for Weekly Writes, Volume I

June 8, 2018 News and Events

Weekly Writes is a ten-week program designed to help you create original place-based fiction and nonfiction.

Volume I launched on July 1, 2018. Volume II coming soon!

Sign up for Volume 1 is now closed. The $15 fee includes one free, expedited submission after program completion.

The Cloak Room

June 6, 2018 Dispatches

By MARIA TERRONE

St. Joan of Arc classroom and cloakroom revisited, 2018

Queens, New York

The very sound of it was foreign to our ears. Who wore cloaks? Vampires. Stealthy spies with hidden daggers. And men in top hats who appeared in movies and old-fashioned story books. Certainly no one we knew as first-graders at St. Joan of Arc—except, perhaps, for the nuns whose sleeveless black capes swirled in their hurried winter walks through the schoolyard to the convent. But their habits covered every inch of skin up to their necks; even their brows were partially obscured by fabric stiff as cardboard and white as their bony hands—the only other flesh exposed. So, on second thought, we couldn’t really say we “knew” the nuns when their very bodies were concealed and their lives outside the classroom a mystery.

Ask a Local: Anjum Hasan, Bangalore, India

May 31, 2018 Interviews

With ANJUM HASAN

Your name: Anjum Hasan

Current city or town: Bangalore

How long have you lived here: Twenty years

Three words to describe the climate: Mostly quite pleasant

Best time of year to visit? October to March

The Common @ the National Book Foundation’s Why Reading Matters Conference

May 25, 2018 News and Events

Are you an educator? Do you work with students? Join us as The Common editors present at The National Book Foundation’s third annual Why Reading Matters conference on June 7 at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker and Associate Editor and Director of The Common in the Classroom Elizabeth Witte will be joined by Katherine Hill, a TC contributor and Assistant Professor of English at Adelphi University, for a panel discussion: Reaching from There to Here: broadening student perspectives through place-focused literature.

Check out more details on the conference here. TC readers receive a 15% discount on registration with the code: NBFFRIEND