News & Events | Page 34 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Wonder

June 28, 2023 Dispatches

A black bear faces the camera close-up and head-on. Its eyes glow white. The image was taken in black-and-white night vision. The frame indicates that it was captured at 12:34 AM on September 26, 2019. The upper-right corner indicates the temperature and moon phase.

British Columbia, Canada

In the mornings, I like to follow our border collie on his nose-to-the-ground rounds: out to the creek at the edge of our land; up to the vegetable garden near the foothills; across the back yard. Sometimes, the hair on the back of his neck stands up.

Our farm land in southern British Columbia borders a mountainous wilderness. My husband and I find curiosities on our property all the time: peaches picked from our trees; tunnels under our fences; grape cluster stems, cleaned of berries. Now and then, feeding our fascination with the unknown: strips of grass, chiseled out of the lawn, coiled like jelly rolls. What roams around here at night after we turn out the lights?

Join Weekly Writes Summer 2023: Accountable You

June 23, 2023 News, News and Events

→ Signups for Weekly Writes Summer 2023 are now closed. To register your interest in hearing about our next WW program in January, please fill out this form.

Weekly Writes is a ten-week program designed to help you create original place-based writing, beginning July 24.

We’re offering both poetry AND prose, in two separate programs. What do you want to prioritize this summer? Pick the program, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a weekly dose of writing inspiration (and accountability) in your inbox!

Let Me Open the Window: Valeria Luiselli in conversation with Jennifer Acker at LitFest 2023

June 22, 2023 Interviews

After thirty-six hours of travel, VALERIA LUISELLI arrived at Amherst College LitFest on a freezing Saturday night just in time to speak with The Common’s editor-in-chief JENNIFER ACKER. Their conversation explored the capacity of memory to shape geography, the relationship between language and home, and the architecture of a book. Luiselli also spoke with honesty and ardor about her research in and around the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and her experience as a legal translator for refugees, experiences informing her acclaimed novel Lost Children Archive. This interview is an edited and condensed version of the live conversation; read more about LitFest, and watch a video of the full conversation online.

City of Leaves

June 21, 2023 Essays

By MELLISA PASCALE

“Clouds are like cotton candy,” Obasan says. “I could reach up and grab a piece.” At this, she pretends to pluck a cloud out of the wide summer sky and drop it into her mouth.

We’re in the beach chairs in the backyard, afternoon heat washing over us. After a pause, Obasan continues, “My grandfather, he was a fisherman. And he used the clouds to tell what kind of fish he would catch that day.”

I point up at a grey mass that’s about to block the sun and ask, “What does that cloud say?”

Obasan says, “That one’s too big. Too dark. But sometimes, he would look up at a cloud, and it would be a big sardine day…”

Showing Up: A Review

June 20, 2023 Reviews

Film by KELLY REICHARDT

Review by HANNAH GERSEN

The art critic Jerry Saltz peppers his Twitter feed with advice to artists. Recently, he wrote: “Artists: Every single second you spend on being jealous of someone else is a complete waste of life.” Reading it, I thought of Lizzy, the sculptor at the center of Kelly Reichardt’s new film. Showing Up is a dry comedy that is a love letter to anyone who finds time to make art while holding down a day job and trying not to let anxieties—which might arrive in the form of jealousy, resentment, or self-loathing—get the best of them. What makes this story unusual is that it focuses on an artist in mid-career, someone who has honed her talent and is respected by her peers, but who is not famous or conventionally successful. I can think of a lot of movies about artists at the beginning or end of their careers, charting the exciting rise or the tragic crash-and-burn, but there aren’t many filmmakers who can find the drama in the daily life of an artist diligently doing the work.

Podcast: Gerardo Sámano Córdova on “Iceberg, Mine”

June 16, 2023 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Google Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Gerardo Sámano Córdova Podcast

Gerardo Sámano Córdova speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Iceberg, Mine,” which appears in The Common’s fall 2022 issue. Gerardo talks about combining the real and the surreal in this story, and using both to show the power of a brief moment of connection. He also discusses the risks and rewards of writing about the fantastical, the process of finding balance through revision, and his debut novel Monstrilio, which is out now from Zando. The novel is about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes.

To My Ghost :: Float

June 14, 2023 Dispatches

By SEBASTIAN MERRILL

South Bristol, Maine. Pictured is a large body of water with small waves. Blue skies are above and land can be seen in the distance.

Little Thrumcap Island, South Bristol, Maine

Creativity as the Opposite of Violence: Makenna Goodman Interviews JoAnne McFarland

June 12, 2023 Interviews

JOANNE McFARLAND is an artist, poet, and curator whose work centers on the intersection of language and visual representation. Her newest collection, Pullman (Grid Books, 2023), is a brilliant and singular exploration of form and artistic disciplines that examines themes of labor, creativity, eroticism, and love, engaging and interacting with events in the American past as they relate to the state of being human today. By exploring the history of the Pullman car porters of the late 19th-century railroads, McFarland’s poems and integrative collages explore historical sources, entries from the Black Almanac of 1972, lyrics created by McFarland’s own father—a songwriter for Aretha Franklin—and vintage French magazines. In this interview, MAKENNA GOODMAN connected with McFarland about Pullman and the broader scope of her artistic work. McFarland asks us to consider our relationship to the erotic, to our delight, to the sensual experience of being alive, to our drive to make music from a moan, to adhere ripped pages into re-imagined dresses, to reconsider the past as a way out of pain.

Friday Reads: June 2023

June 9, 2023 Reviews

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Welcome to the June round of Friday Reads! Are you hoping to read more this summer? Do you have a favorite shady spot in a backyard or park, but no book to share it with? Read on for exciting recommendations from our contributors. Find stories that reach beyond the scope of normative human experience, essays about writing and writers, and hybrid memoir on music and survival.

Welcome to the Department of Unanswered Prayers

June 6, 2023 Fiction, Translation

By NORMAN ERIKSON PASARIBU
Translated from the Indonesian by TIFFANY TSAO

From Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated by Tiffany Tsao. Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Feminist Press.

Welcome to the Department of Unanswered Prayers! Here’s your ID. When it’s time to go home, put your badge in your bag and leave the bag in your car. Rather than tossing it in some drawer, I mean, or chucking it somewhere inside your room. Don’t worry. No one will steal it. And don’t forget to bring it tomorrow and the day after and all the days after that. You’ll need it to get past security and to access the main entrance, the department, the sub-departments, the letter storage facility, and the archive. It happens every now and then—someone forgets their badge and has to go home to retrieve it. What a waste of time and money. Remember, every minute you’re late will incur a corresponding reduction in your heavenly salary. Each minute you’re late also incurs a 0.33-point penalty, to be subtracted from your end-of-year point total. Don’t let it get so dire that you can’t redeem them for the leave you’re entitled to every fourth year, because if you’re short even a fraction of a point, you’re still short a fraction of a point.