All posts tagged: Essay

Cosmopolis, Now

Cosmopolis, Now

November 19, 2013
By SAHIBA GILL
There was a short time, just before I stopped carrying a backpack to school, when I coveted a t-shirt with the words “citizen of the world” on the front. I signed letters for Amnesty International that year, but I never bought the shirt. A few years later, when we tired of the war in Iraq, many pointed out that six of ten young Americans could not locate the country on a map, although half couldn’t find the Empire State either.The war was remote, elsewhere. As far away (farther, even) than Abu Dhabi, where cartoon cat Garfield tries to ship his nemesis—a place galactically distant. When I moved here, I had to look at a map to find out where I was.
Cosmopolis, Now
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Ten Thousand Walks by the Little Pamet River

Ten Thousand Walks by the Little Pamet River

November 12, 2013

By BRENDAN GALVIN

Walking will solve it.

                    — Roman Proverb

river

Spring and fall, winter and summer for more than half my life, I have gone out walking almost daily on a road that edges a vast Cape Cod salt marsh.  This loosens things up before I sit down with my notebook. A stream meanders through the marsh, and where it parallels the road I walk beside it, out to a bay beach parking lot, then down the strand a half mile or so to a stone jetty, one of two that keeps the tide- and wind-mauled sands from closing the entrance to the harbor.

Ten Thousand Walks by the Little Pamet River
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In a City of Cars

In a City of Cars

November 1, 2013

By MARIAN CROTTY 

cars

Before I moved to the United Arab Emirates, I sold the one car I’d ever owned—a four-door Honda, emerald green, white scratches webbed along the doors from the previous owners. I would be gone for just ten months, but the car had an old engine and a dashboard of permanently lit warnings lights, and, every month or so it seemed, a different part broke and needed repairs.

In a City of Cars
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Look At All the Pretty Pictures

Look At All the Pretty Pictures

October 31, 2013 ,
By ELIZABETH WITTE

 

Wallpaper

I’m no horticulturalist. I don’t have a garden. It’s renderings of flowers and plants that make me stop short and stare: a page full of small bits of white and domed yellow, the spindly green branching almost like a seaweed. A field of lines and colors on paper becomes a beautiful, vivid thing that recalls the plant I could see and touch and know, if I dared. But illustration owns its subject; as a deliberate man-made composition, it translates the natural world through mind and body, through a series of human choices and means, into an utterly new form. Nature moves from its vast, fascinating world of complex systems to another, smaller one of confinement and relocation. The illustration isolates and resituates its subject in the rectangular page, the book’s binding.

Look At All the Pretty Pictures
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Nightwalk

Nightwalk

October 22, 2013

By KAREN LATUCHIE

NYC at night

I no longer have a home in New York City; I will always be at home in New York City. I will always love New York City; I no longer like New York City. I am no longer a New Yorker; I will always be a New Yorker.

I write out those sentences (with apologies to Samuel Beckett) like a contorting pledge of allegiance: disillusioned and desirous. Or, as if the clarifying middle-ground will miraculously appear to me if I just keep repeating the polar opposites. Or because there is no middle ground but repetition could lead to a more complex form of understanding than mere acceptance.

Nightwalk
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Where I Don’t Write

Where I Don’t Write

October 17, 2013 ,

By MELODY NIXON

In his autobiographical novel on D.H. Lawrence Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer laments his inability to write the book he wanted because he couldn’t figure out where to live. “One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on [the Lawrence book] was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose—but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere.”

House in black and white

I have the same problem. I’m a migrant and a wanderer, and I’m never really sure where my home is located – in the environment, or inside me? I’ve come to an unsteady way of dealing with this uncertainty, mostly by rolling with it. I’ve also learned that direct, personal experience in the world is essential to my writing. Last summer I wrote my way through a Trans-Siberian train ride from Moscow to Novosibirsk while hanging on to the side of a swaying second-class bunk bed, trying to explain to my babushka compartment-mates that I was working on an historical novel. Last fall I finished off several stories and articles for publication amid showers of asbestos at Art Farm, Nebraska, a cooperative, self-sustaining artists’ colony that is about as close to nature and rusticity as one can get without actually becoming a wild animal. Every day from my desktop I was obliged to sweep away the powder of synthetic insulation and possibly cancerous substances that had rained from the homemade ceiling during the night. As winter approached, we practically burned floorboards for warmth. We wrote and wrote as we huddled around the fireplace.

Where I Don’t Write
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Who’s Writing Real Brooklyn Stories?

October 7, 2013 ,

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Apple-crisp air, periwinkle sky. A world-class day in the Borough of Storytellers. As it does each third Sunday in September, on September 22, the Brooklyn Book Festival took over the esplanade in front of Borough Hall and adjacent buildings in Brooklyn Heights.

Writers are the latest Brooklyn demographic to become a national punch line. Like Jackie Gleason, only skinny. Last year, the festival claimed 40,000 visitors. —They haven’t released this year’s figures, but the joint was packed.

The list of presenters was a mix of Bold-Face Names (Colum McCann, Lois Lowry, Jules Feiffer) and serious up-and-comers. The panels covered a judicious mix of topics, weighted toward the international and multicultural.

Who’s Writing Real Brooklyn Stories?
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Lab of Literary Architecture

Lab of Literary Architecture

September 27, 2013 ,

By SCOTT GEIGER 

Last month I enjoyed following media coverage of an unusual writing workshop and design studio held at Columbia University. Italian architect and writer Matteo Pericoli originated his “Laboratory of Literary Architecture” course in Turin, and brought it to New York this spring as a joint course for students of the School of Writing and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Lab of Literary Architecture
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A Geography of Hurt

September 24, 2013
By ZINZI CLEMMONS
 
I moved back to my parents’ house in Philadelphia just over a year ago, when I found out my mother was dying from cancer. The day I found out was my first day of a part-time job at Columbia University in New York City, where I was a master’s degree candidate. My father called me at the tail end of my lunch break, while I was browsing discounted greeting cards at a gift shop that was going out of business.
A Geography of Hurt
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Chatham Rock

Chatham Rock

September 17, 2013

By MARTA MCDOWELL 

For a gardener, geology is destiny.  My little bit of earth is in a town surrounded on three sides by water. Chatham, New Jersey, sits at an elbow of the Passaic River that forms its northern and eastern boundaries. To the south, the so-called Great Swamp soaks vast acreage. Yet for all of its perimeter liquid, the town is built on rock.

Chatham Rock
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