News & Events | Page 17 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Museum Ice (Extended Dance Mix)

June 13, 2024 Fiction

Anna was slow to do the math. B saw it instantly—what might be left after everything else melted away. White captions flickered in the dim exhibit hall.

B had turned thirteen that fall, ready to join Anna on a trip that was part research, part treat and adventure, the first time they had left the country together, alone. A few days in Rosario (a university lecture, an interview with a playwright), the long bus to Buenos Aires. Invited to contribute to the itinerary, B asked to see glaciers; Anna booked a half-day trek across the ice.

Passengers all around them had clapped when they landed in El Calafate. “That’s so sweet,” B said, joining in. Anna clapped, too, hoping it was thanks, not bald relief. The tiny airport was rapidly navigated. Advertisements lined the baggage claim, placed to catch a teenager’s eye. “They have an ice bar at the ice museum,” B said. “Can we go? There’s a free shuttle from the tourist office.”

Para-

June 12, 2024 Dispatches

By MARY LEAUNA CHRISTENSEN

Image of a wooded mountain range with gray clouds in the sky and green grass below.

Photo courtesy of author.

Cherokee, NC and Phoenix, AZ

As a child, I watched horror movie after horror movie. An attempt to make myself brave or to make others think I was. And now, I fear I’m manipulative because how much can a person really change. Bones and weight and cartilage can only be altered to certain degrees.

When it comes to film, body horror disturbs me the most. Things that happen to a person’s body without their permission. And sometimes they don’t notice until their bodies are so acted upon that they are grotesque, twisted, so completely othered with pain they are no longer sovereign, but colonized by something outside of themselves.

Nadryw | Feeling Language

June 11, 2024 Essays, Translation

By JONË ZHITIA
Translated from the German by LEANNE LOCKWOOD CVETAN

Piece appears below in English and the original German.

Translator’s note:

This essay, presented here in its entirety, won the 2022 Wortmeldung prize awarded by the Crespo Foundation, and, to me, is the thousand words expressed by the picture of the immigrant soul. The submission theme was: “Ships at anchor, cars in parking lots, but I am the one who has no home. How can flight, exile, and homelessness be put into words?”

Return to One’s Roots, Return to a Person, Return to Oneself: Vika Mujumdar Interviews Susana Praver-Pérez

June 10, 2024 Interviews

Susana Praver-Pérez’s work, moving fluidly between English and Spanish, from Puerto Rico to California and New York, is a moving meditation on how place shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. Praver-Pérez’s debut collection Hurricanes, Love Affairs, and Other Disasters, and recent collection, Return Against the Flow, reckon with how we make a place home, considering with care and generosity the landscape of Puerto Rico and its impact on her selfhood. In lyrical, narrative poems, Praver-Pérez examines how geography is defined by its landscape and people. Through the narrativization of lived experience and the intertextual poetry of others, Praver-Pérez’s collection, Return Against the Flow is a necessary documentation of the way language shifts across landscape and time.

In this interview, VIKA MUJUMDAR and SUSANA PRAVER-PÉREZ discuss place and geography, the shifting influences of language, and the transitory nature of diasporic belonging.

Fee-Free Submission Period

June 1, 2024 News and Events

Inspired by the mission and role of the town common, an egalitarian gathering place, The Common aims to foster the global exchange of diverse ideas and experiences. As such, we welcome and encourage submissions from writers who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, LGBTQIA+-identifying, immigrant, international, low-income, and/or otherwise from communities underrepresented in U.S. literary magazines and journals.

In an effort to remove barriers to access, The Common will open for fee-free submissions for two weeks, from June 17–July 1. Outside of that time, submitters with any financial hardship can contact us at info@thecommononline.org for a fee waiver.

Podcast: Mayada Ibrahim on “Symphony of the South”

May 31, 2024 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Mayada Ibrahim

Mayada Ibrahim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her translation of “Symphony of the South,” a short story by Tahir Annour that appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing in Arabic from Chad, South Sudan, and Eritrea. Mayada talks about the process of translating this piece, including working with the author and TC Arabic Fiction Editor Hisham Bustani. She also discusses gravitating toward translation as a way to reintegrate Arabic into her life, after years of studying and learning in English. Her translation of Forgive Me, a novel set in Zanzibar and co-translated with her father, will be out in the UK this year.

May 2024 Poetry Feature: Pissed-Off Ars Poetica Sonnet Crown

May 30, 2024 Poetry

By REBECCA FOUST

1. (Written after the workshop)

Fuck you, if I want to put a bomb in my poem
I’ll put a bomb there, & in the first line.
Granted, I might want a nice reverse neutron bomb
that kills only buildings while sparing our genome
but—unglue the whole status-quo thing,
the canon can-or-can’t do? Fuck yeah, & by
“canon” I mean any rule, whether welded
by time, privilege, or empire, & also by
the newer memes. Anyway, I want the omelet
because of the broken eggs. I want to break glass
into dust, to spindrift it into new form. I want
to melt mortar down into quicklime that burns.
Less piety, please. Any real response to my poem
will do—laugh, cry, yawn—or STFU & go home.

From Sieve: A Preliminary Draft and a Ruin

May 29, 2024 Dispatches

By HILDEGARD HANSEN

Catalonia

The sea has moved inland. Below the rectory on the hill, the fields and villages under the fog. In the first blue of the morning. The bell tower of the church in Lladó surfaces through it. It is a few minutes away by car. In Lladó the fog hangs in the streets, close to the ground. Each building in isolation within it. The old church, the locked doors: wood doors open onto metal doors that are molting their skin. The keyhole the size of an eye.

Review: The Extinction of Irena Rey

May 27, 2024 Reviews

By JENNIFER CROFT
Review by CHRIS JOHN POOLE

At first, the autobiographical roots of The Extinction of Irena Rey seem simple to trace. This is a novel by writer-translator Jennifer Croft, who works in Spanish and Polish; its protagonist is a Spanish writer-translator. This is a novel from the acclaimed translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights; the eponymous Irena Rey is a Polish literary megastar. This is a novel from a staunch advocate for translators’ visibility; its eight main characters are all translators who seek—and perhaps supplant–their elusive muse.

Yet it is the very abundance of extratextual parallels that makes it so difficult to situate Croft within her text. Unlike Croft’s debut Homesick, a hybrid novel-memoir, The Extinction of Irena Rey provides no single stand-in for its author; instead, a network of interlinked characters echo Croft’s own life. From the novel’s tantalising biographical parallels, countless questions arise: is Irena Rey modelled on Tokarczuk or Croft? Is protagonist Emilia a self-insert, or a novel creation? Ultimately, it seems, these characters are hybridisations of Croft and her influences, as within this novel the lines between self and other, like those between truth and fiction, begin to blur.

Friday Reads: Braving the Body

May 24, 2024 Poetry, Reviews

Review by JENNIFER FRANKLIN

Featuring poems by DIANE SEUSS, FRED MARCHANT, JUSTIN WYMER, and BRENDA CÁRDENAS

Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul.” Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) a new anthology edited by Nicole Callihan, Pichchenda Bao, and Jennifer Franklin is a collection of poems that are both embodied and soulful; they spring from the imaginations and lived experiences of 116 brave bodies (including one who is no longer alive after a long battle with cancer). But in Karen Friedland’s exuberant poem, “It Recurred,” the speaker is present, alive, defiant, “At this tender moment, my death is merely theoretical, and life is all I’ll ever know. In Diane Seuss’s hair “the color of a field mouse” the speaker holds space for a painful teenage memory, Jesus “writing / parables in his head” and the body as “a world / of massive disappointments.” and Justin Wymer’s “pill the color of her hair;” JP Howard’s poem mediates on the body as home and the home as sanctuary in an often inhospitable and unsafe world, “this is a safe place for black boys becoming black men” and Fred Marchant’s prescient speaker tells us “thus i announce the world is burning.” But this is also a collection of the body as conduit of pleasure, joy, love, and freedom as when Brenda Cardenas cries, “Perhaps we lick the nape of a lost lover’s / neck, just to remind them we once tangoed / In the blooming garden of their chest.” As Nicole Callihan writes in her introduction, “Absurd, sublime, anxious, and tender—these poems resonate in the very place they were born—the brave body in all its gore and glory.”

—Jennifer Franklin