News & Events | Page 225 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Stewardship

November 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 08, Issue 08 Fiction, Issues

It’s easy to forget you once had control. That you stopped making decisions for yourself. Part of that’s getting older, and I’ve gotten older—not much, but some. It’s what comes with settling down and making some sort of life and having children. And that’s something. We all know that. But then there’s the bad part of it, when you speak up just to realize that you haven’t got any say, that your words stay lodged in your mind, stuck in your throat. That they are altogether gone, like birds migrated for the winter and never come back. Worse than that, you wake up and find out that somebody else was forming your words for you all along. That was me for the longest of times. My best years that I lost when I was silent and tepid and living in the woods. I want to tell of how I got out of that forest. I want to tell about how I came to the clearing whole and intact and feeling good.

Clouds

November 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 08, Issue 08 Fiction, Translation

By ANTONIO TABUCCHI

Translated by MARTHA COOLEY and ANTONIO ROMANI

— You stay here in the shade all day, said the young girl, don’t you like going in the water?

The man gave a vague nod that could have meant yes or no, but said nothing.

—Can I use tu with you?, asked the girl.

—If I’m not mistaken, you just did, the man said and smiled.

Reichelt’s Parachute

November 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 08, Issue 08 Fiction, Issues

By IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE

His name was Gustave Eiffel, and he built his giant French tower because it was impossible—that is what everyone said—to build something so tall. They said the tower would topple under its own weight. Or the wind would blow, the metal would bend, and the rivets would snap. The tower would plunge into the city.

The Common Statement

November 1, 2014 Essays, Issue 08, Issue 08 Essays

By JENNIFER ACKER

To get anywhere from the borgo—the walled-in cluster of medieval houses and skinny lanes connecting the castle, the church, and a tiny grassy square—one must go steeply downhill and then steeply up. Each morning, I choose a different high point from which to take in the magnetic hills of this corner of Lunigiana in northwest Tuscany, where friends have made a part-time home. Once I saw a handful of seniors out for a stroll, and I often say hello to a man in his eighties whose dog takes him out for jaunts, very slowly due to his heart trouble, but otherwise I encounter no one.

The Overachieving Underachiever: An Interview with Benjamin Anastas

November 1, 2014 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews BENJAMIN ANASTAS

Benjamin Anastas

Benjamin Anastas is the author of Too Good to be True, a memoir described by The New York Times as “smart and honest and searching,” and “so plaintive and raw it will leave most writers… with heart palpitations.” He has written two novels, An Underachiever’s Diary, and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, as well as multiple reviews and essays, one of which, “Boys with a Synth,” is published in Issue 06 of The Common. Melody Nixon talked with Anastas about his skepticism for social media, the role of the writer in society, and memoir as fiction’s “whiny and embarrassing stepchild.”

Burial at Shanidar

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By ELIZABETH HAZEN

Pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves suggests that Neanderthals, too, buried flowers with their dead.

The pollen could be mere coincidence—
traces left by a prehistoric rat
that ate flowers near the grave—but we prefer

The Origamist

November 1, 2014 Issue 08, Issue 08 Poetry, Poetry

By DANIEL TOBIN

The Cat’s Eye Nebula—one could begin
there as a way of showing how being
folds in upon itself, always to form
new configurations. That’s where we’re from,