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All posts tagged: 2021

The Poet’s Languages: A Conversation between Ilan Stavans and Haoran Tong

August 17, 2021 Interviews

A conversation between ILAN STAVANS and HAORAN TONG

Does a poet benefit from knowing more than one language? In what way do translingual poets approach their craft differently than their monolingual counterparts? Should translingual poets be understood as “self-translators”? Is translingualism a form of rebellion? How do we make home in, across, and between languages?

These topics are part of the following conversation between Ilan Stavans and Haoran Tong. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin America and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the author of the award-winning, book-length poem The Wall (2018) and the translator into English of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda and into Spanish of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, among others. Chinese poet Haoran Tong is a student at Amherst College. The conversation took place electronically in Amherst and Wellfleet, Massachusetts, from June 25 to July 10, 2021.

Podcast: Emma Sloley on “The Cassandras”

August 13, 2021 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Emma Sloley speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Cassandras,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Sloley talks about writing a story based on the fear of men women are taught to have from a young age. She also discusses her decision to include a sort of Greek chorus in the story, apocalyptic isolation in her novel Disaster’s Children, and how travel writing has changed in the age of Instagram.

Traffic on the FDR

August 11, 2021 Dispatches

By OLIVE AMDUR

“Places remember what people forget.”
– Richard Powers

Instead of speaking, we eat peanuts in the Holland Tunnel: the unshelled, lightly roasted kind from the bulk section of our grocery store. With one hand on the steering wheel, my father takes handfuls from the top, since all the salt falls to the bottom, and my mother digs for those. Outside, the tunnel tiles blur as our Subaru speeds beneath the river and all the buried foundations of New York.

Friday Reads: August 2021

August 6, 2021 Reviews

Curated by ELLY HONG

For our August round of Friday Reads, we spoke to three alums of The Common’s Literary Publishing Internship. Their recommendations delve into trauma, failure, and purposelessness, but all include notes of hope.

On Accumulation

August 4, 2021 Essays

By OLIVE AMDUR

The wall above the desk in my childhood bedroom is covered in sticky notes, index cards, and fading color photographs. They are haphazardly layered, held up by torn pieces of Scotch tape and pushpins at odd angles. Each time I sit, spinning in my blue, cat-clawed desk chair, I reread and remember.

My first college English professor told us everyone should keep a commonplace book: somewhere to put words, ideas, and sentences we want to hold. He said it was a way to mark the passage of time and the changes of our minds. I was intrigued by the idea, but aware it was the sort of thing I’d begin and then forget in the bustling adjustment of no longer being at home. So I wrote down the word—commonplace—but started nothing then.

Podcast: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri on “The Good Donkey”

July 30, 2021 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Talia Lakshmi Kolluri speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Good Donkey,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Kolluri talks about writing fiction from the perspectives of different animals, and where the inspiration for those stories comes from. She also discusses how being mixed race can complicate conversations about race and identity in the U.S., how books and literature are making space for those conversations, and how she balances writing with a full-time job as an attorney.

July 2021 Poetry Feature: Burlin Barr

July 29, 2021 Poetry

By BURLIN BARR

Table of Contents:

Repairing Holes in Concrete Walls
Eruptive debris of very small size
Wolf Tree

Repairing Holes in Concrete Walls

The furnace always was

too hot, having been

converted from one mode of operation

to something else entirely;

its source of power mysterious, improvisatory;

changing: it looked like a tree

Mangled

July 21, 2021 Fiction

By DARINA SIKMASHVILI

Saturday night I’m at the kitchen window listening to my neighbors fight. Theirs is the only light on, pungent and pouring out onto the fire escape, illuminating a coffee can. I’ve counted five cigarette butts so far.

“I can’t keep doing this, bro,” the girl shouts. Glass shatters thick against a wall in their apartment. “I can’t keep doing and doing this.”

The kettle screeches and out goes the mug in my hand and the spoiled red wine all over the windowsill and all over me. Who knows why I’ve set water to boil. A jilted habit of steeping tea to sleep when I had patience with myself. A phantom limb.

There’s a sprint of shouts, one voice trampling another, and then a long, feral cry. My cat when I was a kid yowled like that when she pawed at a mouse trap. We freed her and she crawled into my mother’s dresser where she stayed for weeks and weeks, burrowing into her fear. The world became a mouse trap.

Staring Through a Slit

July 20, 2021 Studio

Text and images by ALAA TAWALBEH

After drawing the collection of dark faces in charcoal, Alaa was provoked to give them a story, so he used the same charcoal sticks to form words. The words were written after the drawings, so the faces can still have different stories. These drawings and more from the same collection will be displayed in Alaa’s second solo exhibition, forthcoming in September 2021 in Amman, alongside works in watercolor.

At Rukban refugee camp, your only source of entertainment is sitting on the cold floor and staring at a slit in your tent. It flaps open with each gust of wind and cold drops of rain land on your face, just like the broken window in your old house.

The raindrops are black. They say it is the soot from a faraway city. Some say it’s from your city, Aleppo. Maybe some of it has come from the building you once lived in.

Podcast: Ravi Shankar on “The Five-Room Box”

July 16, 2021 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Ravi Shankar speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “The Five-Room Box,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Shankar talks about constructing this essay on identity, family, and fitting in from an excerpt of his memoir, Correctional, about his time spent in prison. He also discusses how that time changed the course of his academic work, what it’s like to transition from poet to prose-writer, and the privilege and profiling Asian-Americans experience as the ‘model minority.’