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Christmas in India

December 21, 2011 Dispatches

Dispatches will be taking a two-week holiday break and will resume publishing on Wednesday, January 11th. Until then, please enjoy this seasonal dispatch about a Christmas vacation gone wrong…

I always say that I fell in love with my husband at Kinko’s. Charged with printing blown up photographs for the annual fundraiser for the afterschool program where we both worked, I arrived to pick them up only to find the pictures grainy and only half of the job completed. While I panicked that I’d be fired and was ready to scream at the woman at the counter, Terence calmly, but firmly explained what needed to be done and the urgency with which it had to be completed. We’d been dating for less than two months, but in that moment I thought, this is the person I need by my side. Three years later, we were engaged. For our Christmas affianced, we booked a trip overseas, eager to show our independence, and maybe even create a new tradition apart from our families. On December 22, 2009, we arrived to New Delhi, India. Our plan was to spend a few days there, and then on Christmas Eve we would take a train to Agra so that we could see the Taj Mahal on Christmas Day. From there, we’d travel through Rajasthan and eventually fly to Mumbai.

Bittersweet

December 14, 2011 Dispatches

By G. HARVEY SHEPARD

Every time I eat a watermelon I remember that day. It was the dry season, when the rust-red floodwaters of Quebrada Fierro or “Iron Creek” subside to a lazy trickle, exposing wide, meandering beaches near its mouth on the upper Manu River in southern Peru. I was with a group of Matsigenka men and boys, we had spent the past few hours under a feverish noon sun portaging boat, motor, and gear to circumvent a stubborn Dipteryx trunk, impervious as tempered glass, that blocked dry season passage along the creek. It was the summer of 1995 and I was taking Hiram, a dear Matsigenka friend who called me “brother”, to meet up with a film crew camped out at the research station of Cocha Cashu down river. I was helping Hiram’s community negotiate for an upcoming shoot. Cheronto, who came from a rival community nearer the station, was the best boat pilot in the region. He was taking us down the river to close the negotiations.

Bennington Roadshow in Brooklyn

December 8, 2011 News and Events

Event Date:

Tuesday, January 17, 2012 – 7:30pm – 9:30pm

Location:

The Invisible Dog

51 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11201

Issue 02 contributor Phillip Lopate and nine grads of Bennington College’s MFA program in Creative Writing (including Dispatches contributor Julia Lichtblau and editor Jennifer Acker) will read at Brooklyn’s Invisible Dog Art Center, an exhibition/performance space in Cobble Hill, on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 7:30-9:30 pm. Wine and book sales will follow. The event is one of an evolving roadshow of readings by established and emerging writers from the Bennington program.

“Commons” at Bennington College

Discovering Houghton: Views of Newton’s Secret Garden

December 8, 2011 News and Events

Event Date:

Tuesday, January 10, 2012 – 7:00pm – 8:30pm

Location:

Newton Free Library, Newton Center, MA

An event at Newton Free Library, in Newton Center, MA, at Houghton Garden, the subject of contributions to Issue 02 from Daniel Jackson and Sarah Luria.

The Macon Motel

December 7, 2011 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

I’d leave as early as I could and head north, straight up US 51 for three hours. Just a few years before, I was living in the same small Illinois town that my great-great-great grandfather, Hezekiah Gill, had come to from Tennessee, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Then he turned around and fought for the Union, surviving the battles through Kentucky, Mississippi, his own native Tennessee, and on to Atlanta. But he returned back to Illinois, and it was there in that tiny village that my family stayed for the next 130 years.

Review: Cutting for Stone

December 6, 2011 Reviews

Book by ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Reviewed by MANISHA SHARMA

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese’s debut novel, is nothing less than an epic in prose. The long narrative, setting, characters, conflicts, and quotations that read as invocations all set out to prove this. It begins with the lines from Gitanjali, the celebrated poetry collection of the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore

“The Last Nail in the Coffin”: Ilan Stavans Interviews John Sayles

December 5, 2011 Interviews

“Not just a place, but a place in its time, has a character. That character affects who people are. In a movie it certainly affects the way that you shoot.”

Today we are thrilled to feature an original, exclusive interview between The Common contributor Ilan Stavans and filmmaker and writer John Sayles. Stavans and Sayles discuss the differences between fiction writing and filmmaking, the challenges and comfort of writing historical fiction, and the importance of place in both book and movies. Sayles recently published A Moment in the Sun (McSweeney’s, 2011) and directed the newly released Amigo (Variance Films, 2011).

CÉILIDH

November 30, 2011 Dispatches

By SIOBHAN HARVEY

Morning

Outside, autumn turns over
as the beat of a bodhran
Winter’s coming, winter’s coming, winter’s coming

Morning builds. Like a reel,
the first heat arrives, and with it,
leaves fall, dead bees, a cortege.

The slowstep into church is accompanied
by an organist and weeping in the pews.
Later, a feast, a céilidh. Far off, bells toll.

Walking the Ground at Sand Creek

November 23, 2011 Dispatches

By KURT CASWELL

South of Hugo, Colorado on Highway 287, the land is wiped clean, the prairie grasses and flowers of spring cut to the root by cattle, their shining white teeth. Dung, dark stains on the land running the fencelines, remnants of progress, the way we produce meat in this country. It cannot have rained in many days. These hard-pan flats, the leading edge of the Great Plains east off the Rockies, turn a dust devil against the horizon to the south.

Night. Transformations. Brooklyn.

November 20, 2011 Studio

By ANTON KISSELGOFF

As night descends, the city’s fabric, examined at eye level, no longer exists as a continuum. Now a collection of autonomous constructs artificially created by various light sources, each structure possesses the mysteries that are hidden by day. My nightwalks around Brooklyn are focused on finding the fragments that form a different sense of place, almost unfamiliar, one that borders on the imaginary and disappears with the first light of day.