News & Events | Page 269 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Homage to a Failed Venture: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

May 13, 2013 Essays, In House

If Washingtonians have a patron saint, it’s the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice, a famous defender of civil liberties, Douglas was a committed environmentalist, who wanted to be remembered for leaving the earth more beautiful.

In February, Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute dubbed the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area Number One in the U.S. for traffic. Local drivers fritter away on average sixty-seven hours and thirty-two gallons of gasoline a year in traffic.

I was born in Washington and spent a good part of my childhood in the area. Though I haven’t lived there in years, each time I go “home,” I feel grateful to Justice Douglas for preventing my favorite Washington place, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, from becoming just another congested highway.

Silent Art Auction: Sold & Available Works

May 12, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, May 9, 2013 – 1:00am – Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 9:00pm

Location:

Online

Thank you to the VIP attendees of this year’s Silent Art Acution and congratulations to the winners!

To view the original prints, photographs, rare books, and other gorgeous artworks and read about our remarkable artists on the The Common in the City 2103 Silent Art Auction webpage.

From the 17th Floor: Second Look

May 10, 2013 Essays, Issue 05 Essays

By JENNIFER ACKER

I’ve been watching the Qasr al Hosn. Watching it since I arrived in August. The boarded-up block below my office window withholds this oldest structure in Abu Dhabi—the whitewashed fort—and the arch-studded building of the Cultural Foundation. The block has so much potential, but for months, nothing’s happened. Or, I’ll see a kick up of dust and realize it was the wind.

Stanley Street

May 9, 2013 Dispatches

By MICHAEL BOURNE

On the walk to Central Station I struggled to obey simple gravity. My limbs felt weightless, my feet didn’t feel at all. With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea.

Landfall

May 8, 2013 Dispatches

By TARA DEAL

It has the name of a bug and sounds so ugly, like nonsense, but Morpion is real, a sliver of the slightest fantasy island in the Caribbean. One small circle, perfectly uninhabited, with a single palm tree stuck in its ice-cream-colored sand. No waves to speak of, though there is some soft lapping of warm water. A lullaby at the end of the journey.

On Mixtapes, Philly, and a Papillon: An Interview with Marie-Helene Bertino

May 7, 2013 Interviews

ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews MARIE-HELENE BERTINO

Marie-Helene Bertino published her debut collection of short stories, Safe As Houses, in 2012. It won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and was long listed for the Story Prize, and for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She hails from Philadelphia (where Zinzi Clemmons is also from and currently lives) and resides in Brooklyn. Bertino served for six years as the Associate Editor of One Story. Bertino and Clemmons corresponded via email about their hometown and the writing process.

Zinzi Clemmons (ZC): In nearly everything I’ve read about you, you mention that you’re from Philadelphia. I counted two stories in your book, Safe As Houses, explicitly set in the city: “North Of” and “Great, Wondrous.” Most people’s relationships to their hometowns are complicated. How would you describe your feelings toward your home city?

Marie-Helene Bertino (MHB): Philadelphia is a difficult city to explain. There is some seriously dark beauty there, and some serious dysfunction. I think the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is an example of Philly at its best, taking what it is specifically good at — its tenacious, stubborn spirit, and the courage to take risks — to stamp the city with gorgeous murals. These murals have become the city’s complexion. You can’t go far without seeing one, and I mean from Center City to West Philly to where I grew up, in the Northeast. No other city I’ve visited looks like that. It is specific to the spirit of Philly.

Review: Her Familiars

May 6, 2013 Reviews

Book by JANE SATTERFIELD
Reviewed by CAITLIN DOYLE

Throughout her impressive body of work, which includes three collections of poetry and a memoir, Jane Satterfield explores the roles of place and gender in human identity. Born in England and raised in America, she probes what it means to reconcile the legacies of intertwined lineages. Satterfield complicates her inquiry into cultural inheritance by emphasizing female experience. In her first poetry book, Shepherdess with an Automatic, she described her youthful adventures during the 1980s; “going to clubs” in “boots with zip-laces to accelerate the kill” (in contrast to1950s housewives “decked out” like “living dolls”). Her Familiars, Satterfield’s most recent collection, takes us further back in time, to the 1970s. We glimpse her as a girl scout, part of a “troop of girls kitted out in jumpers, cable knee socks, & small green berets,” living “blissful on suburban streets” while “choppers stuttered over Saigon.” Both books, as well as her second poetry collection Assignation at Vanishing Point, combine coming-of-age material with adulthood examinations of love, sex, child rearing, historical influence, and literary ambition. In Her Familiars, Satterfield widens her range of subject matter, tones, and aesthetic approaches, mining the territory between domestic and public life in striking new ways.

Discontinuous City

May 3, 2013 Essays

By SCOTT GEIGER

Two weeks ago today, I woke up reading an email that Watertown was closed. The Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown police departments had sealed a perimeter. No entrance, no exit. The office was closed. I had started working for a landscape architecture practice in Watertown that Monday, the morning of the Marathon. After three months on the city’s outskirts, writing full-time, at last I had started traveling around Boston and Cambridge. The Lockdown froze the city in its novelty for me.

Eight Belles

May 1, 2013 Dispatches

By CATHERINE JAGOE

The second-place horse in the 2008 Kentucky Derby, Eight

Belles, collapsed with shattered front fetlocks just after

crossing the finish line. She was euthanized on the track.

Maygold

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

By VIRGINIA REEVES

The first pest to make itself known in the orchard was the stinkbug, malevolent and focused. It worked at the sap in the fruit, sucking the water from the flesh, leaving behind gnarls and distortions—catfacing, Mona heard it called, though the injured peaches she plucked from her  trees’ branches looked nothing like a cat’s face, but more a woman’s, withered by sun.