News & Events | Page 208 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Write Like a Shark: an Interview with Lauren Groff

September 6, 2015 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews LAUREN GROFF

Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, as well as the enviably acclaimed short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Her forthcoming novel Fates and Furies will be published by in September by Riverhead. Lauren and S. Tremaine Nelson connected over Skype for a few minutes, inexplicably without sound, communicating with primitive hand gestures and unrecognizable symbols, until they agreed to give up on that futuristic technology and connect the old-fashioned way, over the phone. They spoke for about an hour, covering a variety of topics like tailgating, running, reading, and, of course, writing.

A Boat Ride in Colombia

September 5, 2015 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

It’s a small boat with no ladder and so we board by wading into the water, grabbing hold of the edge and pulling ourselves up. Passengers help each other heave themselves forward; a couple older women get lifted like children. Unlike the boat that brought us here, there is no manifest, no recording of passport numbers, no printed tickets—but there is space—kind of—and life jackets, and the men who work on this boat have agreed to take us back to the main port for a reasonable price. The other boats—the one that brought us here and the larger, shinier ones that look more like the ones that brought us here—are full, and it is three thirty, a half hour past the time we have been told all of the boats will be gone.

Outer Space as Utopia: Wendy S. Walters on the American Real and Surreal

September 5, 2015 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews WENDY S. WALTERS

Wendy S. Walters’ work blends poetry, nonfiction cultural commentary, and playful lyric essay to excavate deeply rooted themes of race, identity, and belonging in America. She has published two books of poems: Troy, Michigan (2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009), and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005). Walters is active in the literary world, as a founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem, New York, a contributing editor at The Iowa Review, and an Associate Professor of creative writing and literature at the Eugene Lang College of The New School University in the city of New York.

Notes on Crises

September 4, 2015 Essays

By SAHIBA GILL

apartment buildings

I walked to my apartment in Kathmandu the day after the earthquake. From the news on my iPhone, I had seen that the palace squares had fallen. But when I left the tents where I had slept the night before, I found the flowerpots were still poised upright on the third-story windowsills and on the roof walls at the shop across the lane. The sidewalk had cracked along the water line. The garden walls had collapsed, and it was hot. But those flowers had not moved; they were as they had been. They caught the light. I had envied the plants. In the months I lived in Kathmandu, I had developed the impulse to notice them behind the dust I kicked up in the road as I passed them. That afternoon, there was not any dust because there was no traffic, not even a motorbike, although my landlord had taken her scooter out; she must have been buying emergency rice.

Ask a Local: Elizabeth Enslin, Wallowa County, OR

September 3, 2015 Interviews

With ELIZABETH ENSLIN

Your name: Elizabeth Enslin

Current town: I live in Wallowa County, Oregon, five miles from the near ghost town of Flora and 45 miles from a town with amenities: Enterprise.

How long have you lived here: I’m a fourth generation Oregonian and have lived full-time in this northeastern corner of the state for about two years now.

August Reads: Pacific Coast Highway

August 29, 2015 Dispatches

By JANE CAMPBELL

I was not allowed to walk or ride my bike along the highway without an adult. “Blonde hair and blue eyes,” my grandma would tell me. “Just the kind they’d want to steal.” As though at any moment, I could be taken and sold for profit like a chunk of copper wire.

“They’re not gonna steal me, Grandma,” I would tell her. “I’m too mouthy.”

August 2015 Poetry Feature

August 28, 2015 Poetry

This month we are welcoming newcomer Maurice Emerson Decaul (whose work will also appear in Issue 10 this fall) and welcoming back Tess Taylor, Luisa A. Igloria, Cliff Forshaw, and Valerie Duff.

August Reads: Ask a Local: Kent Wascom, Covington, LA

August 27, 2015 Interviews

With KENT WASCOM

For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume September 1.

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Your name: Kent Wascom

Current city or town: Covington, Louisiana.

How long have you lived here? My parents grew up here: I drew my first breath across the lake in New Orleans and spent my first six years down the interstate in Slidell before spending the majority of my youth in Pensacola, Florida. So in many ways Covington and the area have existed for me as a sort of imaginative heritage for all my life. Boots on the ground, though, 1.4 years.

August Reads: Trespassing in Leechburg

August 26, 2015 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume on September 1.

cloudy road

We drive on a gray day in October, a scenic four-hour drive from my new home in Baltimore to my old home in Leechburg, a small steel town in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, where I lived from ages 8 through 15—the longest stretch of childhood I spent in one location. Though it’s a place I’ve often gone back to in my fiction, I haven’t returned in person in over 15 years. The trip is reconnaissance and romance: scene gathering for a novel and a chance to explore my memory with M.

August Reads: I Believe New Yorkers

August 24, 2015 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

For the month of August we are revisiting some of our favorite content from the past year. Publication of new work will resume on September 1.

“I believe New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.”

– Dylan Thomas

In my first months in New York City I rode in the back of taxicabs through Central Park thinking, “When will this sink in? When will it feel like I know where I am.” I didn’t think I was dreaming – rather, I felt the whole city was dreaming with me inside of it, a poppy-field illusion, a drug trip induced by hidden valves releasing an experimental hallucinogen. The city needed to pinch itself awake, collectively, and climb out of the hollow to find out what was really going on.

“I stopped at Lexington Avenue,” wrote Joan Didion of her arrival in the city, “and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.” You arrive, you reach the mirage, and you wait for it to clear.