Stare…
—Walker Evans’ advice to young artists
So here’s a board-and-batten house—
a wall of planks with ragged ends
behind the windows’ splitting sills—
By MAX FREEMAN
Virgil got his tattoo in Megara
Around the time he knew that his great poem
Must be destroyed. A reckless decision.
By RICO GATSON
Introduction by David E. Little
What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
They say there’s nothing harder than hitting a fastball. In America, clichés on the difficulty of sports abound. But how to describe the challenges of art?
The luxe door had cost them everything. Oak, with wooden lace. It gave the impression there was more behind it than:
By SUSAN STRAIGHT
When my youngest daughter began her freshman year of high school, I said casually to her, “Do you ever see Christian?”
She gave me an incredulous and dismissive look. She replied, “Why would I see him? He doesn’t go here. He’s probably not in school at all. He probably fried his brain dying his hair all those colors.”
And then she was done. She talked about something else. But I kept picturing him. Forever to me he will be the boy who called my child a nigger and spat on her when she was ten.
With ANGELA PALM
Your name: Angela Palm
Current city or town: Burlington, Vermont
How long have you lived here: Five years
Bid for a chance to win a postcard from your favorite author, handwritten for you or a person of your choice. A wonderful keepsake, just in time for the holidays.
All proceeds will go toward The Common‘s programs. These include publishing emerging writers, mentoring students in our Literary Publishing Internship Program, and connecting with students around the world through The Common in the Classroom.
Explore the auction here: http://bit.ly/TheCommonPostcardAuction2016. Bidding opens on Monday, November 7th.
In celebration of the release of Issue 12, October’s Friday Reads recommendations come from four of our Issue 12 contributors—poets, essayists, storytellers. As you might then expect, the breadth of their reading stretches wide: stories set in California on the brink of apocalypse or a bizarre state-sponsored research lab; poems rewoven eerily from dark fairy tales, or mixed from myth and history. If you hurry, you might just have time to read them all before Issue 12 hits your mailbox.
Recommended:
The Anathemata by David Jones, In an I by Popahna Brandes, Gold Fame Citrusby Claire Vaye Watkins, and The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith.
By KURT CASWELL
Right now in heaven, Tolstoy is playing with his dumbbells, even those little rounded weights he kept in his study at Yasnaya Polyana have come up with him into the cloud-city of the afterlife. In the spring of 2016, I toured his old house and the estate on which he lived, walked out through the green trees and the precision mosquitoes to his burial mound, a grass covered box-shaped hill on the ground where the great man went in. But why was he great, when so much of his life was spent—that little account of time we all bank on—in little rooms sitting in a chair made for children, propped up on a pillow, his waning eyesight pulling his face in ever closer to the page?
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Celebrating 15 Years