All posts tagged: Essay

Exclusive Video Debut: James Salter on France, a Sport and a Pastime, and “The Erotic In Everyone’s Heart”

Introduced by PAUL YOON

 

September Love

Paul Yoon on James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime

 

September. It seems these luminous days will never end. I first encountered those lines over ten years ago in New York City.  I was living near the United Nations building. It was late evening. I was on the fifth floor of a high-rise and through my windows I could see the sky’s reflection against other windows. I felt lucky to be able to see the image of the sky from my apartment. I felt lucky to be in New York. I believed I had figured things out. Which is to say I was young. I could count the amount of friends I had on one hand and I was happy about that. I enjoyed being alone. I preferred the company of imagination. It was what, in the end, seduced me, more than any person during that time. And for a few nights, what lived with me was the narrative of Phillip Dean and Anne-Marie Costallat, in faraway France, in a world so very different than mine; and yet their story felt, page by page, more alive, more vast, more sensual and more true than my life could ever feel or become. And rather than being depressed by this, I was elated. Joyful. Celebratory. I paced my apartment. I looked out the window at other windows. I went to work and came back and returned to the pages.

Exclusive Video Debut: James Salter on France, a Sport and a Pastime, and “The Erotic In Everyone’s Heart”
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Stolen Bride: A Guatemalan Woman’s Story

By DELIA VELASQUEZ and JULIA LICHTBLAU 

portrait

I met Delia Velasquez in the late 1990s through her daughter, Ericka Rubin, who was a friend of our babysitter. My daughter, Zoë, and son, Gabriel, were adopted from Guatemala, and she and her husband, Alberto, both from Guatemala, were curious to meet us. They had three sons, and we became friends. One blistering July day in 2005, I brought Gabriel over to play. Ericka, Doña Delia, and I sat in their Brooklyn kitchen, talking and cooking, and the subject of marriage came up. I mentioned my grandmother was married at fourteen.     

Stolen Bride: A Guatemalan Woman’s Story
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Why I Write in a Tannery

By JAMIE QUATRO 

If you walk into the building that houses the tiny studio space in which I write – the old Southern Saddlery Factory in Chattanooga – the first thing you’ll see is a wall of framed invoices dating from the late 1800s:

Sold to Mr. Phipps, Bristol Country Club, Bristol, Tennessee:  2 leather utility bags, Brown Elk, $5.00.

Why I Write in a Tannery
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The Common Statement

By JENNIFER ACKER

This summer, for the first time in my life of weather, I walked through a rainstorm: entered, endured, exited. All within one hundred yards of a smooth country road.

Other firsts: bearing out tornado warnings in the basement of Frost Library (twice); a moment of queasy lilting I assumed was in my head but turned out to be a Virginia-originated earthquake; battening hatches (drawing water, securing heavy items in the backyard) against a hurricane. To be truthful, I have experienced earthquakes and hurricanes before, but the former was in Guatemala, where such things are expected; the latter was in the foreign country of childhood in which parents are responsible for taping the windows, and I was allowed to dance in the driveway in my bathing suit in the warm wet eye of the storm.

The Common Statement
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Tottenville Review and its Place of Origin

By SAMANTHA ECKER ANGERAME 

From our friends at Tottenville Review, on its place of origin:

It feels strange to look at an old photo, one taken long before you or your parents were born, and recognize something.  It’s a disconcerting feeling that uproots you from your present life.  Suddenly you find yourself in a faraway place that feels antiquated and remote—but it’s also eerily familiar.  You realize that you once knew it very well.

Tottenville Review and its Place of Origin
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Once Upon a Time

By LAUREN GROFF 

Once upon a time, I believed that writing was the same thing as being a writer. This was before I understood that scribbling a messy sentence in a notebook was not actual writing, a time when I bought gamely into the self-sparked romance of becoming a writer: a life of moonlit walks beside rivers, bare apartments dancing with light, foreign languages drifting through a window full of geraniums. Being a writer meant being somewhere else, anywhere that promised architecture and meaningful encounters with sophisticated natives and a chilly, ascetic version of me pinned like an anchorite to my pages. I knew I could never be a writer in the place where I was born, small, cold Cooperstown with its mysterious lake. Laughable idea, that!

Once Upon a Time
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The Idiomatic Idiosyncrasies of Place

By LINDSAY STERN

 

In Germany, to be drunk is “to be full of stars and hail.”

French teachers urge their students to “seize the moon by the teeth.”

In Russia, the concept “never” calls crustaceans to mind: “when the crayfish sings on the mountain.”

The Idiomatic Idiosyncrasies of Place
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