Touring History

By MARIAN CROTTY 

lights and palm trees

Disposable ponchos and white tennis shoes, cotton ­beach dresses worn without bras, sunglasses dangling from nylon cords, and a way of walking that is, in spite of the gray sky and the drizzling rain, ponderous. On a whole, they are younger than I expected, larger, and much more interested in cover bands. Almost all of them are couples. 

Touring History
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Why I Love the MFA

BY JAMES FRANCO

James Franco
I love MFA programs, because they are a purified space where the love of art is nourished.

*

This is an essayistic love poem written to MFA programs. It is a form that I learned from my mentor, Frank Bidart. Frank is a poet, but he is also a lover of film, acting, theater, music, pop-culture, Hollywood history, food, and sex.

Frank is old and doesn’t have sex anymore. At least I don’t think he does. But his poems are full of deep life, and sexual connotations.

Why I Love the MFA
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A Textile Guide to the Highlands of the Chiapas

By ROLF YNGVE

All around the Parque Central of San Cristóbal de Las Casas there were women in traditional dress. Sometimes they were standing in line. Sometimes they clustered together looking inward at each other. One of them standing in a long line of similarly dressed women told me, “We are here for the government.” There was a uniformed guard who seemed to be looking after them. He told me they had been bused to the city for the government.

A Textile Guide to the Highlands of the Chiapas
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On the Emergence of Native American Literature: An Interview with Ron Welburn

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews RON WELBURN

Ron Welburn

Ron Welburn is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches American Literature, Native American Literature, and American Studies. His ancestors include Gingaskin and Assateague from the Delmarva Peninsula, Cherokee, Lenape, and African American. Professor Welburn received a B.A. in both Psychology and English from Lincoln University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University.His research and teaching interests include ethnohistory of eastern Native America, cultural studies, and jazz studies. S. Tremaine Nelson spoke with Ron over the phone about poetry, New York City, and two authors whom they both very much admire, Ralph Ellison and Leslie Marmon Silko. Ron’s poems “Seeing in the Dark” and “When You Know a Hard Sky” appear in Issue 06 of The Common.  

On the Emergence of Native American Literature: An Interview with Ron Welburn
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Review: In the Low Houses

Book by HEATHER DOBBINS
Reviewed by SARAH WETZEL

In the Low Houses

Most of us have been damaged or done damage to someone we love. Perhaps we fell into an affair, abused alcohol or drugs, or turned our backs on commitment. Who has not awakened at three a.m. to find the grinning demon of shame at the foot of the bed? If we are honest, we acknowledge our fears and dependencies, discern our selfishness and jealousies.If we are lucky, we forgive and find some sort of redemption, hopefully without spending too many nights with our mouths to a half-empty bottle of bourbon. In Memphis poet Heather Dobbins’ first full-length collection of poetry, In the Low Houses, published this year by Aldrich Press, there is a bottle of bourbon. Also marriage, infidelity, and death. There are graves, literal and metaphorical, and if, as T.S. Eliot suggested, our only superiority to the past is that we can contain it and be enlarged by it, there is something good growing in Tennessee.

Review: In the Low Houses
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On the Subway: the Comfort of Fingers Entwined

By MASHA HAMILTON

My mother’s last remaining sibling is dying, and quickly, it now seems. I received the call last night from my mom and exchanged emails this morning with my cousin but didn’t really have time to think about it until the subway ride in from Brooklyn to Grand Central this morning.She is walking, still, and planning a trip to the San Diego beach in June (it keeps Eros alive, my uncle once told me with a wink, and in a case of too-much-information to share with a niece) but one eye won’t quite open and her speech isn’t coming out correctly and the body of my aunt Stana seems to be collapsing, her skin folding over itself, in response to the cancer.

On the Subway: the Comfort of Fingers Entwined
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Searching the In-Between: Flight MH370 and the Emotional Landscape of the Missing

By MELODY NIXON

clouds

Charlie Kaufman imagines a plane crash at the beginning of his semi-autobiographical film Adaptation; he envisions himself nonplussed while the passengers around him scream and fight each other for oxygen masks. I always imagine frantically writing an invariably optimistic goodbye note to my family as my plane descends – reassuring them, falsely or not, depending on the day, that I enjoyed what life I had. Almost anyone who’s flown in an aircraft has played a similar “What if we all die?” scenario in their minds, even if just half-consciously while watching the safety demonstration.

Searching the In-Between: Flight MH370 and the Emotional Landscape of the Missing
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Waiting for My Milk During the Polar Vortex, I Channel William Blake

By AMY MONTICELLO

Sweet joy, sweet joy, I hum against the kitten cry of my newborn daughter, three days old, who directs her distress at my dry nipple. Home today from the hospital and no milk yet in my breasts. Since the doctors cut her out of me, she has been living on fat reserves and a few drops of the sticky, yellow colostrum I squeeze from my body into her rooting mouth. Baby wolf trying to howl, no sound coming out. Baby polar bear burrowing into white, substance-less snow.

Waiting for My Milk During the Polar Vortex, I Channel William Blake
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