When I was growing up, my family was in Long Beach regularly visiting my aunt Carol and uncle Rocco, friends of my parents who lived blocks from the ocean. My memory insists that it was always summer when we were there: barbecues, somebody’s birthday. And the Fourth of July parties, all-day affairs the adults would spend on the stoop eating burgers and macaroni salad while us kids—myself, my older brother, Carol and Rocco’s son, Matt, some neighborhood kids—played basketball in the street.
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Terese Svoboda and Ralph Sneeden read and discuss their pieces “Dutch Joe” and “Stepping Off.”
T. K. DALTON interviews JILLIAN WEISE
Jillian Weise is the author of the novel The Colony (2010) and the poetry collections The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007) and The Book of Goodbyes (2013), the latter of which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Book by HANNAH GERSEN
Reviewed by
The publisher of Hannah Gersen’s first novel, Home Field, is marketing the book as a cross between two TV shows about teens, Friday Night Lights and My So-Called Life. My So-Called Life, an angst-ridden and artsy TV show about teenagers in the 90s, is a better comparison than Friday Night Lights, which is about a high school football-crazy small town. But the teen-pop culture comparisons don’t do justice to this empathic literary novel’s reach into emotional depths that will resonate with seasoned readers, who appreciate how complicated even an ordinary life can get.
Yes, Home Field is set in an isolated town, Willowboro in western Maryland, that’s reminiscent of FNL’s Dillon, Texas. And yes, Dean, the main character of Gersen’s novel is a football coach, but he quits coaching football in the fourth chapter because his wife, Nicole, has committed suicide, and his family is unraveling. Gersen chips away at her characters’ façades like a miner removing layers of rock. The novel alternates between Dean’s perspective and that of his stepdaughter, Stephanie, but also follows Dean’s two young son’s Robbie, eleven, and Bry, eight, as they attempt to understand what happened to their mother.
One Wednesday morning late in the rainy season of 1964, I sat at the open window of my room overlooking the tiny hill town of Kunchha, where I lived. I was watching huge clouds expand overhead, upward and outward across the blue Himalayan sky. I knew that by noon the temperature and the humidity would rise proportionately. Those cumulonimbus clouds are the largest, most magnificent and dramatic of the nimbuses, and experience told me that they were the harbingers of a rainstorm that would blow in around tea time.
By SUSAN HARLAN
Today was on fire. I drove under a mountain on fire, the sun red in winter trees.
The cars on the two-lane highway stopped to watch the sun and smoke. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the traffic usually just stops for bears, which you might see far off, a black rustle in leaves or branches, or not at all.
JULIA LICHTBLAU interviews FATOU KEÏTA
On a recent trip to Côte d’Ivoire, I walked into the Librairie de France, the crowded, chaotic bookstore on the Plateau, the downtown business district of Abidjan, and asked for books by Fatou KeÏta. They directed me upstairs, where I found most of a bookcase filled by the popular Ivoirian writer’s works. Fatou Keita has written 25 books for children and two novels, including Rebelle (Rebel), about a young West African woman who escapes genital excision, which remains common, despite efforts to eradicate the practice. According to a 2013 World Bank report, “To Be a Woman in Côte d’Ivoire,” 14% percentage of Ivoirian girls under 14 have experienced infibulation, the most traumatizing form of genital excision.
Translated by MICHELLE HARTMAN
New York, Spring 2000
When I first got together with Hilda, I used to enjoy contemplating her reflection in the mirror for hours. I would intentionally take her to cafés and other places filled with mirrors. I’d look at her features in the mirror more than I’d gaze at her directly, as if purposely creating a distance between the physical being that was ostensibly her and her reflection, because a person’s mirror image reveals more of who they really are; it reveals, in fact, the inner self, and to look upon that, as gratifying as it is, requires extraordinary courage.
Book by TUSIATA AVAI; ANNE KENNEDY
Reviewed by
I first encountered Tusiata Avia’s work at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia just after she published her first book, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt. Her mocking voice, sometimes full of mimicry, sometimes searingly sarcastic, often aims at neocolonialism and globalization. Samoan/Palagi, Avia’s mother is descended from the Europeans who first colonized New Zealand and her father, a stunt man, was among the first wave of Samoan immigrants to New Zealand in the 1950s. For seven years before Avia’s second book arrived—Bloodclot, about Nafanua, the Samoan goddess of war, who leaves the underworld to wander the earth as a half-caste girl—she traveled from Siberia to Sudan and read or performed her work in places like Moscow, Jerusalem and Vienna. Last year Avia was poet-in-residence with Simon Armitage at the International Poetry Studies Institute in Australia. This year Wild Dogs Under My Skin was adapted as a theater event for six women and received rave reviews. The recipient of a Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency, the Ursula Bethel Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury, a residency at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies in Christchurch, she won the 2013 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Truly an international poet with an indigenous Pacifika frame of reference, in Fale Aitu | Spirit House, Avia writes with a visceral, political, spare and passionate authority of someone who has seen the world.
By MAX FREEMAN, OSTAP KIN, and ANNA BADKHEN
November’s Friday Reads features selections from three Issue 12 contributors: poet Max Freeman, translator Ostap Kin, and essayist Anna Badkhen. All three are reading and recommending poetry this month, verses of otherness, foreigness, complexity, and intelligence. In this month, in this year — when the easy, the soundbitey, and the distorted seem to dominate us — we’re happy to endorse these thoughtful recommendations.
Recommended:
Chord by Rick Barot, Orchard Lamps by Ivan Drach, Garden Time by W.S. Merwin, and Dark Archives by Andre Bradley.
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Celebrating 15 Years