1.
We know that they are coming, but we don’t know when. The glass is smeared with brown dust, and some have complained. We may have been among the complainers.
The first sign is the hand mop dropped down from a higher floor. Dangles there, on the other side of the window pane, like a body part. Next a bucket tilted with supplies—more cloths, squeegees—and a cluster of bottles filled with fluid heavily knocking each other.
A few minutes’ walk from our village—down one hill and up another—is an old convent that’s been converted into an albergo, a rustic inn. Its name is Giardino della Luna, or Garden of the Moon—an oblique reference to Lunigiana, this hill-and-dale region at the northern tip of Tuscany, which is studded with little medieval villages and their churches, convents, and castles.
When we first moved to Ludington we spent days on the beach wandering along the sandy shores that stretched north to Manistee, south to Pentwater. Even in winter, when all the Fudgies (as tourists are known up north) had left town, having migrated to points south, we got out and hiked the hard-packed frozen beach, which provided a firm footing rather than the summer’s soft, fatiguing sand. But we had to cut against the strong gusts off Lake Michigan, and sometimes it was all we could do to walk upright, gripping our woolen caps over our red, nearly frostbitten ears. We spit grains of sand out and hunkered down, pushing against the wind.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews DON SHARE
S. Tremaine Nelson first saw Don Share’s name not on the masthead of Poetry, where Share is the Senior Editor, nor in the online annals of The Paris Review Daily, where his poems have recently appeared, but on Twitter, where he once responded to one of Nelson’s favorite Stéphane Mallarmé quotes. After Share’s work was published in Issue No. 01 of The Common, Nelson reached out to him via email to discuss place, space, and the new sphere of internet communication.
*
SN: Where were you born and raised?
DS: Born in Ohio, but raised in Memphis. Frost was born in San Francisco, so if he’s considered to be a New Englander then maybe I can say I’m a Memphian!
SN: Have you lived outside the United States for an extended period of time?
DS: Yes, I lived in Denmark as a child.
SN: Can you talk about the role of “place” in your poems?
DS: Place is everything in my poems. It’s a bit like that Tom Waits song, “Anywhere I Lay My Head.” Wherever I am, that’s what my poems call home.
Although I usually use this column to highlight exemplary writing about place, this month I’d like to bring attention to some of the many beautiful photo essays I’ve stumbled across in the past few months. With the popularity of slide shows on the web, it’s easy to take extraordinary photography for granted, but every once in a while, when I stop to think about what I am able witness on my laptop screen, I am blown away. An extreme example is Slate’s recent round-up of the year’s best images in astronomy. Here you’ll find photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter interspersed with earth-bound shots of the Northern Lights.
During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Essays.”
Looking back on a year of dispatches, I’m proud to report that we’ve had essays from five continents. I heard from writers in places both famous and obscure, as well as some remote areas that were unknown to me. More than once, I found myself zooming in on Google maps, trying to get a glimpse of the locations described. My hope is that some of this year’s dispatches inspired the same curiosity in you. Here are a few highlights from throughout the year, ones you may have missed the first time the around:
Samantha Ender confronts a snake in Rwanda;
Aaron Gilbreath forages for vintage bottles in the Californian desert;
Noreen McAuliffe dissects fish in Mongolia;
Elizabeth Abbott inspects a war zone in Balad Ruz, Iraq;
and finally, Julian Hoffman finds a birding bridge between Greece’s Prespa Lakes and Ottawa, Canada.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons
The Common is pleased to be a part of the Amherst College Press. Learn more about the Amherst College Press here.
During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Reviews.”
Read Melinda Misener’s review of Townie by Andre Dubus III, here, and Sarah Malone’s review of NW by Zadie Smith, here.
In “A View from the Cheap Seats”, Elizabeth Byrne talks sports; in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Hannah Gersen reflects on the transience of place, asking, “Is Geography Destiny?”
Photo from The Library of Congress
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.
Celebrating 15 Years