With CAITLIN HORROCKS
Your name: Caitlin Horrocks
Current city or town: Grand Rapids, Michigan
How long have you lived here? Almost seven years
By CHRIS KELSEY
Each day during my week in Yokohama I played a game with Yoshida and Tanaka. They were responsible for the cleanliness of rooms on at least the 14th floor of a towering, fan-shaped, waterfront hotel. I was there for a geotechnical engineering conference.
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 06 contributors Paula Bohince and Joshua Mehigan read and discuss Bohince’s “The Nature of a Hedge” and Mehigan’s “How Strange, How Sweet.”
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 08 contributors Sarah Smarsh and Jonathan Moody read and discuss Smarsh’s essay “Death of the Farm Family” and Moody’s poem “Dear 2Pac.”
In Aqaba City, on the Red Sea, between the stretches of swanky apartments and big names hotels is a tiny squeeze of shore called Shatt Ghandoor (Ghandoor Beach). On Fridays and holidays, Ghandoor is a picnic ground, amusement park, beach, and public bath all in one.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews MURRAY FARISH
Murray Farish’s short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Epoch, Roanoke Review, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives with his wife and two sons in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches writing and literature at Webster University. Inappropriate Behavior is his debut short story collection. Murray answered the following questions via email.
I’ve just begun my second week in Baltimore, and already I’ve caught myself with long-term intentions. I’ve hurried through the usual rituals of relocation: I’ve registered my car, and I’ve picked up a driver’s license and library card, an application for a voter registration card, and a collection of guidebooks and maps of the city. But more than that, there’s the way I feel, walking around most nights, slipping into the rhythm of my neighborhood as if I am taking in the details of a stranger who will soon be family, as if it will some day be important for me to know the angles of the fire escapes climbing against red brick buildings or the shape of coiled electrical wires strung along the side of a bridge. It’s an embarrassing feeling—denser and less urgent than infatuation, but shyer and more fragile than love. I’m overeager, ready to attach myself with the guileless certainty of a teenager.
When a boat dies, you usually have two choices: pay hundreds of dollars to have it hauled away, or let it molder and sink into some secluded corner of the yard. A quick tour of my wife’s parents’ town on the South Shore of Massachusetts, where I moored my boat, would suggest that the latter is the norm: those husks and dark prows entombed in plain sight beside rotting cordwood, abandoned swing-sets. Last year, when I discovered that the oaken keel of my sailboat had rotted irreparably, I embarked on my first experiment with time-lapse photography. I rented for twenty dollars a “reciprocating saw”—the contractor’s principal instrument of demolition—known as a Sawzall. After positioning my iPad on a kitchen chair in the driveway of my in-laws’ home, then unraveling forty yards of extension cord from the garage, I plugged in the nasty tool—part torpedo, part robotic swordfish—and grimly laid into the carapace of the little boat over which I had worried and fussed for almost ten years.
I’ve come to a club called the Rose Bar with friends.
The place is perched on an outcropping of rocks overlooking the stormy Atlantic Ocean in Casablanca. On the patio, which opens to the sky, sticky drops of rain fall from the dark and sparkle in the club’s slutty pink and blue lights. Glass retaining walls block the spray from the waves that crash against the rocks below.
Book by FRANCINE PROSE
Reviewed by
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.