News & Events | Page 246 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Pause

January 27, 2014 Essays, In House

We met friends north of Seattle, then drove to catch the ferry to Orcas Island and talked about Washington’s bikini baristas. It would be another three hours before the ferry left, so we walked through cars and trucks parked in lanes straight as garden rows to the snack shop and overpaid for sandwiches, a banana, soda. You sat on the asphalt behind a Chevy Tahoe, petting a pit bull someone had tied to the trailer hitch, and I took your picture.

Conversation and knowing there was no option but to wait made time pass easily. When the boat departed, we sat on the observation deck and cruised west into the pale sun and gray gauzy clouds, toward forested islands rising black from the sea. It was cold.

The Common in the (Eternal) City

January 27, 2014 News and Events

Event Date:

Wednesday, May 21, 2014 – 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Location:

Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYU

Join The Common for postcard readings, cocktails/ aperitivos, music, and dancing inspired by a night in Italy!

A Year in Dispatches Reading, AWP 2014, Seattle

January 25, 2014 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, February 27, 2014 – 5:30pm – 8:00pm

Location:

McMenamins Six Arms Pub

Join us for a reading (and for drinks!) celebrating work published in The Common‘s Dispatches column this past year; our featured writers will include Katherine Hill, Ira Sukrungruang, Margot Schlipp, Kurt Caswell, Brandi Katherine Herrera, Jeff Muse, and Hannah Gersen. These poems and essays take us coast to coast with their unique evocation of place.

January 2014 Poetry Feature

January 23, 2014 Poetry, Translation

TADEUSZ DĄBROWSKI

Editor’s Note:

In October I had the pleasure of hearing the young Polish poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski read his poems in a bilingual performance at Atomic Books in Maryland, a stop on his recent tour of the United States. TC readers will no doubt join me in appreciation of his poems, which are simultaneously deeply moving and surprisingly comic. Hopefully you will also relish my aggressive effort to deliver his work to you. As soon as the reading was done I pursued him to the sidewalk, where I procured a promise that he would send us poems to publish. His word’s as good as his work: we’re offering four of his poems here, and three more will follow in the print issue.

Dabrowski is only thirty-four but has already published eight books of poetry; the list of his prizes is longer than the ingredients for plum pudding. His work has been translated around the world—into twenty languages—and his readership continues to grow. Another German collection is due out very soon, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ second volume of English translations is well underway—these poems come from that. He’s drawn high praise from Adam Zagajewski in his homeland, and in the US his Anglophone debut, Black Square, was hailed by Timothy Donnelly as a “brilliant, unforgettable book.” We welcome his work to our pages with sincere excitement.

Tour Guide

January 22, 2014 Dispatches

By NINA PURO

Details Concerning the Individual Denizens and Their Residences

In New Mexico, days end with soaking the frijoles for tomorrow. They start with a lump of bacon grease sizzling in a cast-iron pan, with chipping a chunk of green chilé from one of the blocks in the freezer. People like food that hurts them as they eat it. Even the cocoa has chilé in it and a Spanish name and must be beaten to a froth.

Bed-Stuy – Buy or Die?

January 21, 2014 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

Grafitti

As I approached the corner of Throop Avenue and Van Buren Street in early summer 2013, I couldn’t help but notice the giant “Murder – $50,000 Reward” sign that loomed over the intersection, emblazoned with the photo of a dead businessman. The New York City neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, I’d heard, was still a little “rough,” but the sign was unlike anything I’d seen outside of Wild West movies. Almost comically, the image was plastered with a blood-red ‘Solved’ caption, as though calling out a fatuous warning: attention, would-be Bed-Stuy murderers – you might, eventually, be caught.

On Fumes

January 15, 2014 Dispatches

By CHRIS KELSEY

Often, Jim left for work at 5:30 am. I’d hear the old Volvo growl to life, struggle into the snowy lane, and twitter and squeal as it slowly picked up speed on the icy street going away.

NEA Art Works Grant (2014)

January 15, 2014 News and Events

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded The Common a 2014 Art Works Grant in the magazine’s first year of eligibility.

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.