News & Events | Page 243 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Explosive Possibilities: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor on Writing and Kenya

January 14, 2014 Interviews

ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor headshot

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is the recipient of the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “Weight of Whispers.” She is the author of the forthcoming novel, Dust (Knopf, January 2014), an excerpt of which was published in Issue No. 06 of The Common. While in South Africa Zinzi Clemmons talked with Kenyan-based Owuor about “deadlines as flexible soul mates,” lessons in artistic humility, consulting “the passing herdsmen” on the art of reading the landscape, and the up-and-coming literary world of Kenya.

In the Fields

January 13, 2014 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

Ground fog hovers out the back kitchen window, warm air over snow. We set out to walk before coffee. From the home of dear friends, we make our way down the dead-end road to the muddy grass path that leads us to the turn (right) down the rough-cleared way (duck under the fallen tree) to the fields owned by the nearby church and leased to the farmers. In a pair of borrowed rain boots and hooded sweatshirt (in late December), I feel a warm sweat rising.

Two “Luckless Dears” of Ancient Rome

January 10, 2014 Studio

sarcophagus

Today we’re delighted to feature this close-up of a gorgeous recent acquisition by the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Made in Italy of Carrara marble in the third quarter of the 2nd century CE, this ancient Roman sarcophagus features sea nymphs riding on the backs of sea centaurs while cupids fly overhead. It has “exceptional visual impact,” says Pamela Russell, the Mead’s head of education, “due to its impressive scale, lively marine subject, and pleasing symmetrical composition.”

At the Phillips 66

January 8, 2014 Dispatches

By KURT CASWELL

After the wind, a man named Chuck died lying on the ice next to the fuel pump at the Phillips 66 off I-80 on the east side of Rawlins, Wyoming. I helped his friend lift him down from the passenger seat of the pickup, a big man, heavy and round, dressed in heavy Carhart work clothes against the cold. I gentled his head against my chest, holding him under the arms, a rag doll pulled down in the middle, my cheek so close to his, his little moustache, his hairy ears, his jowly neck. He was already dead, no pulse, no breath, his eyes gone out, but the 911 operator asked us to begin chest compressions.

Detroit’s Walls of Spite

January 7, 2014 Essays

By CAROLYN KRAUS

A six-foot-high, foot-thick concrete wall begins at 8 Mile Road, Detroit’s northern border, known as the Line. The wall marches south for half a mile along the property line behind Birwood Street, cuts through a city park, and halts at a dead end street—a network of potholes and buckled asphalt.Driving my children to and from our Northwest Detroit home just south of the Line in the ’80s and ’90s, I used to detour along the Birwood Wall and wonder at its history. I didn’t wonder about the trash and bottle-strewn park that stirred to ominous life at night and, like so many other leering vacancies in the city, had long since ceased to be a place where children could safely play. Like the park, the Birwood Wall had outlived its original purpose. Now, grey, grim, and bare, it haunted the edge of the ghost park. As waves of residents departed Detroit for the whiter, brighter future of the suburbs, as houses and shops fell derelict and tumbled, sturdier features like the wall persisted, emerging into relief like a low tide of relics.

Review: Mañana Means Heaven

January 6, 2014 Reviews

Book by TIM Z. HERNANDEZ
Reviewed by GINA LUJAN BOUBION

Mañana Means Heaven

In October, 1947, Jack Kerouac met a pretty, young Mexican woman named Bea Franco on a bus going from Bakersfield to Los Angeles. She was fleeing an abusive husband; he was gathering notes for what would become On The Road, the defining book of the Beat Generation. For fifteen days, they stuck together, from the streets of East Los Angeles to the cotton and grape fields of California’s Central Valley. In his story, Kerouac devoted twenty-one pages to the affair.

Years later, still unable to find a publisher, Kerouac pitched his chapter about his adventures with Bea as a short story entitled “The Mexican Girl.” It appeared in the Winter, 1955 issue of The Paris Review. Soon after, On the Road was published, and Kerouac achieved overnight fame.

Al-Karadib, Chapter 11, Part II

December 24, 2013 Fiction

By TURKI AL-HAMAD

This is Part II of a two-part series. To read Part I, and an introduction to the work by Pascal Menoret, please click here.

The Colonel’s words weighed on Hisham’s mind. He became confused and hesitant again. This Colonel… He either was sincere and didn’t want to hurt Hisham, or was an expert in psychology. Hisham didn’t know. Could it be possible that all the prisoners were wrong about the Colonel’s intentions? Or was Hisham the naïve one? The Colonel fell silent as ‘Awadh brought tea and coffee. The Colonel lit another cigarette and took an audible slurp from the hot tea, followed by a sigh of pleasure.

December 2013 Poetry Feature

December 23, 2013 Poetry

Celebrate the year’s end with work by powerful younger poets new to our pages: R. A. Villanueva, James Byrne, and Nathaniel Bellows

Al-Karadib, Chapter 11, Part I

December 23, 2013 Fiction

By TURKI AL-HAMAD

Introduction: On Karadib

Pascal Menoret

My first roommate in Riyadh was a French teacher who once tutored an ex-political prisoner. The man was a retired lawyer who had belonged to a Marxist-Leninist network in the sixties, and had been part of a coup attempt against King Faisal. He had been tipped off right before his arrest and had escaped to Paris, where he studied law before coming back to Riyadh much later. Others had less luck.Arrested on intelligence provided by U.S. agents to the Saudi secret police, many of them were tortured or summarily executed. Some were even flown above the Empty Quarter and thrown alive out of helicopters.

The Misadventures of Wenamun

December 19, 2013 Studio

Adapted by ROLF POTTS
Illustrated by CEDAR VAN TASSEL

One enticing thing about travel tales from distant centuries is the way they suggest so many more stories that haven’t been told. While we assume that Marco Polo was a pioneer in his journey to the Far East, for example, we learn from his own narrative that he encountered other Europeans – Germans, Lombards, Frenchmen – in the cities of China. Polo’s contemporary, William of Rubruck, traveled across Asia and found Greek doctors, Ukrainian carpenters, and Parisian goldsmiths working in the Mongolian capital of Karakorum. As intriguing as these thirteenth-century accounts of Marco and William are, imagine a rich trove of unknown travelers’ diaries stretching far deeper into antiquity.