January | The Common

All posts tagged: January

Podcast: Leo Ríos on “Lencho”

January 26, 2024 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Transcript: Leo Ríos

Leo Ríos speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Lencho,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio from the immigrant farmworker community. Leo talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores the friendship between two high school seniors in a rural community in California’s Central Valley. Leo also discusses his family’s generations-long history in farm labor, and how a class on reading poetry made him rethink prose writing on the sentence level.

January 2023 Poetry Feature: New Poems by TC Contributors

January 26, 2023 Poetry

New poems by our contributors JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH, BRYCE BERKOWITZ, DEBORAH GORLIN, MATTHEW CAREY SALYER

Table of Contents:

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
—Amygdala Means Almond

Bryce Berkowitz
—The Writers’ Bench in Gapped Couplets

Deborah Gorlin
—The Trouble with Rivers
—Landslide

            Matthew Carey Salyer
                        —The Devil, His Own Self
                        —The Penguin Classics

Effluent of the Affluent

January 18, 2023 Dispatches

By MARY BERGMAN

Sewer Bed Beach, Nantucket, MA

We are losing this place twice over: first to money, and then to sea. There are ways to quantify these losses: only 3,200 bushels of scallops were caught this past winter and more than $2 billion in real estate transactions were recorded last year. My parents aren’t sure where they should be buried; all the graveyards in all the towns we have ever lived will one day be inundated. I imagine horseshoe crabs trolling along the bottom, pausing to read the names etched on headstones.

All over the island, it looms: this is the end of something. I walk along the dune-tops, what’s left of them, at the very end of South Shore Road. Over one shoulder is the Atlantic; endless. Over the other are the sewer beds. A sandy strip separates the two. Second homes are not the only creatures perched precariously on eroding shorelines. Our wastewater treatment facility hangs in the balance.

Finding One’s Way Through Bewilderment: Virginia Konchan interviews Nathan McClain

January 16, 2023 Interviews

In this interview, VIRGINIA KONCHAN talks with NATHAN McCLAIN about his second full-length collection, Previously Owned. Touching on process and craft, literary influence, racial justice, and faith, this rich conversation celebrates the range of McClain’s poetry and the sense of history and place in his work.

January 2023 Poetry Feature

January 13, 2023 Poetry

New poems by our contributors TINA CANE, MYRONN HARDY, and MARC VINCENZ

Table of Contents:

            Tina Cane
                        —You Are Now Interacting as Yourself
                        —The Subject Line

Myronn Hardy
—Among Asters

Marc Vincenz
—An Empire in the Ground

You Are Now Interacting As Yourself
By TINA CANE

Sheila had IHOP     delivered to her apartment     in El Alto, NY
on January 6th     so she could kick back     self-proclaimed terrorist
that she is     and eat pancakes     while watching white supremacists
storm the Capital on T.V.     a coup

Crawl Space

January 12, 2023 Essays

By MELANIE S. SMITH

The basement crawl space is tinged with dread. And a little bit of pride too. Because both my late husband John and my father—and even the firefighter I had to call when it flooded—hated the idea of having to go in. The dimly lit space is only eighteen inches high, a tight spot for a grown man, and full of spider webs. The floor is dirt; overhead is crumbled fiberglass insulation. You climb a ladder and go through a small rough hole in the house’s fieldstone foundation, then crawl about seven feet to reach the valve that supplies water to the outside faucet. This needs to be turned on in spring and off in late fall so the pipes don’t freeze and burst. To get out, you have to crawl backwards and reach a foot through the rough hole, searching blindly for the top step of the ladder. That last six inches is hell on the knees, all sharp rock and crumbling mortar.

Translation: The Wangs’ Other Child

January 5, 2023 Fiction, Translation

Story by MARIO MARTZ

Translated from the Spanish by NINA PERROTTA

Story appears in both English and Spanish

Translator’s Note

One of the first things that struck me about this short story by Mario Martz—and one that I kept in mind as I translated—was the question implicit in the title. Who is the Wangs’ other child?

It seems fairly obvious that the main child, the one who stands in opposition to the titular “other child,” is Mei, the Wangs’ twenty-something daughter, who disappeared while visiting Central America. Mei’s likely murder is what sets the story in motion, prompting the Wangs to move halfway across the world to a country that’s entirely foreign to them.

Steven Tagle on “Notes on Looking Back”

January 28, 2022 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Transcript: Steven Tagle Podcast.

Steven Tagle speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “Notes on Looking Back,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Steven talks about writing this essay, originally in Greek, as a way to explore his love of the language and the experience of learning, speaking, and writing in it. Steven first came to Greece several years ago as a Fulbright Fellow. He discusses his current writing project about borders and migration, and the time he spent visiting and getting to know a family in a refugee camp in Greece. Steven also talks about life in Greece—how friendly and welcoming Greek people can be to outsiders, and how the country weathered the pandemic. When he interned at The Common, Steven spearheaded the magazine’s first podcast series.

Also discussed in this podcast:

An essay with photos in the Los Angeles Review of Books, about a refugee camp in Greece
Steven’s current writing project, funded by a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs: a series of dispatches about Greece as a cultural crossroads

Podcast: Noor Naga on “Who Writes the Arabian Gulf?”

January 14, 2022 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Transcript: Noor Naga Podcast.

Noor Naga speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about co-editing The Common’s first-of-its-kind portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf, which appeared in Issue 22. Noor penned an introduction to the portfolio, titled “Who Writes the Arabian Gulf?”, which explores her experience growing up in the Gulf with no real contemporary literature written for, by, or about that diverse population. Noor discusses her idea to create the portfolio, what she enjoyed about assembling it from submissions, and what themes unite the pieces that became part of it. She also talks about her forthcoming novel from Graywolf Press, and why an earlier novel didn’t find a home in publishing.

Taking the Waters

January 5, 2021 Essays

By MARTHA COOLEY

Sulfur: odor of rotten eggs, matchhead, volcanoes, gunpowder, and Lucifer down there in Hell’s fire and brimstone.

Also the smell that pervades thermal spas. Along with minerals such as sodium chloride, iodine, and calcium, sulfur is a key component of many therapeutic waters. Linked as it is with fire and corrosion, sulfur also has a storied association with the healing of numerous ailments, particularly respiratory and skin-related ones.