News & Events | Page 4 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Ars Poetica: Getaway Car

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

Telekinesis stories are the girliest stories because they don’t stop
at The Body. They say your borders are so made up. Girlhood is more
than ovaries tossing replica moons at the feet of The Moon.
Our home address is a syntax that serpentines like a mouse
attempting to cross, unperceived, the grandest of ballrooms.
That’s us, always leaping into the getaway car of daydream,
lit up lavender & tangerine. We are dancing with our mouths
like no one is listening because no one is listening but us.
It’s the wild freedom of silly gooseness, feathers to cushion being told
you’re useless, repeatedly, while still being used for everything. It’s waiting
in the waiting room’s washed-out light thinking I am
an exhausted mine. No matter how much care you pour into it,
The Body’s narrative is betrayal. This expirational thing.
Do you really want us to end there?

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the author of Girl in a Bear Suit and works as the program and outreach coordinator for The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. Originally from Braintree, Massachusetts, she now lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, with her family. For more, find her at www.jenjabailyblackburn.com.

Every Other Weekend

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

Winner of the 2025 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

By CARSON WOLFE

The morning after I had woken to him
holding his flashlight beneath my bedsheets,

I told him I felt too sick to go to school.
It’s always confused me, why I chose

to stay in his house another full day,
waiting for my mother to finish work.

Like any other, we played chess
just like he’d taught me, and he let me win.

Something broken and unnameable
hanging between us—perhaps it is me,

writing this poem, watching myself
shrink as a ten-year-old, watching him

sacrifice another pawn. From this angle,
it occurs to me, after all these years,

that he knew I was going to tell.
And now I am afraid for that little girl.

How much easier it all could have been
had I tripped at the top of the stairs.

It must have crossed his mind
as those silent hours came to a close.

He didn’t reach over the gear stick
to rub my thigh on the drive home,

only stared out at the barriers
as we crossed Barton Bridge.

I always believed him
to be pathetic, a coward of a man,

but we pulled up outside my mum’s house
and he opened the door, let me out.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Carson Wolfe is a Mancunian poet and the grand prize winner of the 2025 DISQUIET International Literary Prize. Their work has appeared with Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, and Rattle, amongst others. Their new book Coin Laundry at Midnight is forthcoming with Button Poetry in spring 2026.

Body Stories: On Miscarriage and Cancer

October 27, 2025 Essays, Issue 30, Issue 30 Essays

By REBECCA WORBY

My mother and stepmother got breast cancer six months apart. I realize, since only one of them is my blood relative, it doesn’t mean, you know—

Mid-summer, mid-pelvic exam, I am in the middle of this sentence when pain whooshes through me. I make a noise of surprise.

Faction of None

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By TAMAS DOBOZY

The videos of Christmas dinner were for Mom, or so Pete said. His gift, honoring the hours she’d spent preparing the meals. But he couldn’t fool me—or her. He filmed the dinners because it got him out of eating what she cooked: the tofurkey he hated, the beet salad that made him gag, the quinoa that sparkled like a plateful of sand. Pete would rather have starved than eaten food he didn’t like, which was most food, staying skinny as a nail with the hunger he preferred, as if craving was better than sustenance, desire superior to satisfaction, and want itself his personal god.

The Melnikov House

October 27, 2025 Essays, Issue 30, Issue 30 Essays

By MARTHA COOLEY

In 1927, a Russian architect named Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov built an astonishing home in Moscow for himself and his wife, son, and daughter. Using affordable materials (building supplies were scarce), Melnikov and his son pitched in alongside several hired laborers to frame and erect the house. A photo taken at completion shows the owner—a slender man dressed in a suit, spats, and top hat—standing proudly in front of his home, with his wife (sporting a plaid coat and matching hat) at his side.

Polka

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

By ROBERT CORDING

They could have danced straight out
of a Brueghel painting into our basement,
partially finished in fake wood paneling
and a dropped ceiling that still left
some plumbing exposed—

Podcast: Sarah Smarsh on “Bone of the Bone”

October 24, 2025 Audio, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

Transcript: Sarah Smarsh

National Book Award finalist SARAH SMARSH speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common’s fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama’s best books of the year list.

Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class, out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she’s working on next.

October 2025 Poetry Feature: From DEAR DIANE: LETTERS FOR A REVOLUTIONARY

October 23, 2025 Poetry

By TINA CANE

Photo of Tina Cane by Cormac Crump

On DEAR DIANE: LETTERS FOR A REVOLUTIONARY
Between May 1968 and December 1971, poet Diane Di Prima wrote a poetry collection comprised of sixty-three “Revolutionary Letters.” Several years ago, I purchased a rare set of the first thirty-four of Di Prima’s letter poems—typed on long sheets of construction paper, stapled, and hand-corrected in ballpoint pen. Bought as a celebratory gift for myself, after having been awarded a fellowship, it’s a humble yet fierce extravagance. While the booklet appears sturdy, its yellowed pages are somewhat delicate. I rarely handle it—too worried about spilling coffee, or having someone in my house mistake the unassuming bundle for recycling. Most of the time, my sheath of Di Prima poems sits in my bookcase, atop a row of books by Marguerite Duras.

Dispatch from Red Lake, Croatia

October 22, 2025 Dispatches

By MARIA B. OLUJIC

Photo courtesy of author

Red Lake, Croatia

“Why are they so persistent in trying to explore the unknowable?”
~Comment from a villager, following the latest Red Lake expedition

Save the Date: 2025 Author Postcard Auction

October 17, 2025 News and Events

I feel like the only person still sending postcards, but a pantheon of best-selling authors is taking up the practice for a good cause.”

—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

This holiday season, you could hear from one of your favorite authors—or have them write a missive to the book nerd on your gift list—all thanks to The Common. Authors will write and send postcards in time for the holidays, which in the past have featured personal anecdotes, original poems, and even doodles, making them a perfect gift for readers.

Bidding opens November 10!

This one-of-a-kind online auction, as featured by The Washington Post’s Book Club newsletter and BookRiot, gives book lovers around the world the opportunity to bid on handwritten, personalized postcards from their favorite writers (plus a few actors and musicians too!). The postcards make great gifts for the literature-lovers in your life. Winning bids are tax-deductible donations. Our eleventh annual Author Postcard Auction runs from November 10 to December 1. We’ll link our auction site for bidding as soon as it’s open!