All posts tagged: March 2025

Podcast: Michael David Lukas on “More to the Story”

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Transcript: Michael David Lukas

Michael David Lukas speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “More to the Story,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Michael talks about his writing process for the essay, which began when a dark family mystery moved him to research a side of his family he’d never learned much about. He also discusses the revision stages of the piece, which included adding in details of the other side of the family—his mother’s parents—who were Holocaust survivors. We also talk about his time as a nightshift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and the new novel project he’s working on now.

Podcast: Michael David Lukas on “More to the Story”
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March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

Poems by CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE

Having made both poetry and fiction contributions to TC, the multitalented Catherine-Esther Cowie returns to us this month with highlights from her debut poetry collection Heirloom, forthcoming from Carcanet Press on April 24, 2025.

cover of HEIRLOOM

Publisher’s Note

Moving from colonial to post-colonial St. Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics, and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny, and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.

Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegize and celebrate her subjects. 

 

Table of Contents

  • Mother: Frankenstein
  • A Bedtime Prayer
  • The War
  • Haunting

 

Mother: Frankenstein

Raise the dead. The cross-stitched

face. Her eye-less eye. My long

longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered

hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments.

            To exist at all. A comfort.

A gutting. String her up then,

figurine on the cot mobile.

And I am the restless infant transfixed.

Her full skirt, a plume of white feathers,

            blots out the light.

 

A Bedtime Prayer

We ate the fruit Lord,

boiled and buttered we ate.

Thought nothing of it.

 

It was pleasing to the eye.

Filled our mouths, our bellies.

 

It was the fruit of a breadfruit tree.

A tree as old as the first city.

 

How it grew taller than the house.

Those monstrous leaves.

 

Its roots echoing— cracks in the walls.

Its shadow falling through the back door, the corridor,

lengthening towards the front—

 

Ghost of our first father,

ghost begetting ghosts,

our lives thinned into his weakness,

his terror.

 

But we were fed, fed, fed.

                        *

Lord, you have cast us off,

left us to starve,

 

Sent that girl.

 

Girl born with a veiled face,

a caul, calling.

 

How did she find the axe?

 

She wouldn’t eat the fruit,

refused its sweetness,

 

weight of our father,

the first city.

 

Lord, she went down to the garden,

an axe flowering in her hand.

 

It was you Lord, the bouden blan

chirping in her ear.

 

What cruel instructions?

 

Didn’t we do your will,

kept a remembrance—

the tree,

our father,

 

we were hungry, Lord.

 

The tree fell into the house.

 

The War

                  St. Lucia, 194-

A disturbed hour, the sky loud

with the memory of assault.

But still, it’s Sunday, the trees shake

like shac-shacs in the breeze,

and the sea goes on and on

with its lullaby like it has never

given cover to the enemy.

 

It is Sunday,

and we go on with our lovemaking.

I refuse to hush, let my pleasure rise

against the weary tones

in the thin-walled rooms like ours,

it was yesterday, only yesterday,

another body washed ashore…

 

Forever and forever,

death our only guarantee.

Haven’t I died already,

years ago, on a kitchen floor,

under the weight of a different man,

my girlhood shot through,

I learnt the body as machine—

dead heart, dead pubis.

 

It is Sunday,

I teem with life like the flies

swarming the torpedoed ships

in the harbour.

 

Haunting 

We frighten the children.

 

My hair ragged in red cloth,

I speak a language they don’t understand,

 

their ears tuned to English, tuned

to American cartoons.

 

And Leda, Gwanmanman Leda runs

cracks up the walls,

through the centre of our dinner plates.

 

It’s their own fault, you know,

they won’t stay in their rooms.

 

How she endures, endures,

Gwanmanman Leda. Leda.

 

Even after I married,

after she died, she endures.

Tanbou mwen.

Jab mwen.

 

But the children,

the children.

They stare.

Regard me strangely, sadly.

There will be no walk to the park today.

No jump rope high.

Only their rooms.

They will stay in their rooms.

 

Alé, alé. I chase.

They hide behind a wall. Spy.

 

I must clean my house like I cleaned Leda’s room.

 

Scrubbing. A form of memory.

A song. Trojan horse for my own blues.

 

Keeper of the madness.

The mad. Leda.

Mwen faché.

I was only a child,

only a child

made for play,

not the washing of soiled sheets,

of shit-stained walls,

of an old woman.

 

But the children,

how they stare.

Their blink-less eyes.

Pouty lips.

Why won’t they go into their rooms?

Leave me to Leda.

 

We are a pair.

She, because of her bad head.

Mal tèt. And I,

because I was a child.

Small. Piti.

Crushable.

Like a roach.

 

The mad and the little,

The mad and the little,

Give them a tickle,

Then a prickle.

 

Leda, stop your singing.

 

And I must stop this fool parade.

This arm muscling towards memory—

 

You’ve made it up,

Isn’t that what they said?

Mal tèt, bad head.

 

No one ever hit you. Mantè.

Isn’t that what they said?

 

But Leda, Leda,

my sweet Leda.

Mad monument.

Rogue memory.

 

But we must think of the children.

They cry for us, Mommy, Mommy.

 

 

Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St. Lucia to a Trinidadian father and a St. Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. Cowie is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom
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A Tomato Behind a Glass Cage

By SARAH WU

As a senior, I am still figuring out jobs and Things That Are After College. So when I have the opportunity to meet alumni from my college working in the sustainability field, I decide to go. Our group of students journeys to Boston, and when we get off the bus, the icy snow pinches our tender cheeks and exposed hands.

A Tomato Behind a Glass Cage
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What We’re Reading: March 2025

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

In this special edition of the column, JAY BOSS RUBIN shares a mini review of ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’s Theft, freshly released on Tuesday, March 18. JEANNE BONNER follows him with a novel that bears witness to the modern world from a very different angle, at the close of Nazi rule in France. 

 

cover of theft

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft; recommended by TC Online Contributor Jay Boss Rubin

The new novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft, is his first since he received the phone call informing him he’d been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Its titular theft is open to interpretation. The plot turns decisively on an accusation of stealing. Many references to historical thievery are woven into the narrative. But the book’s most unforgettable thefts may be the central characters’ encroachments—those committed and those just contemplated—on one another’s dignity.   

Karim is born in Pemba and Fauzia is from Unguja, two of the islands that make up Zanzibar. Badar is from a roadside village on the mainland, a few hours inland from Dar es Salaam. They enter the story from separate directions, all three coming of age in Tanzania at the turn of the 21st century. Swiftly, they become entangled with one another via relationships of indebtedness and servitude, attachment and attraction. Karim’s world is upended by a series of losses: his father and grandmother both pass away; his mother moves out of the family home, and then she moves even further. Badar is dropped off, with little explanation, at a house in the city where he is to clean and assist with the cooking. Fauzia is a gifted student with a history of seizures; they’ve subsided, but they might be passed on genetically. Gurnah’s central characters are often those cast about by forces beyond their control, perhaps because he was, as well. Gurnah left home in the aftermath of the Zanzibar Revolution, when he was just eighteen, and has resided mostly in England ever since.

Theft contains in abundance much of what Gurnah has mastered across his eleven novels. His characteristic multilingualism is evident from the opening pages. Never predictable, Spanish is introduced in the text before Swahili, by way of a Zanzibari revolutionary just returned from Cuba. Swahili arrives in the next paragraph, along with its accompanying gloss: “Don’t try to fool me. Usinidanganye.”

Like its predecessors, Theft contains layers of submerged history. The European colonial layer is among them, but it isn’t the defining layer. “The Tamarind Hotel was on the narrow street near the old ivory workshop, round the corner from the former residence of the French consul,” a middle chapter begins. “The consul had lived there a long time ago, in the time when the Omani sultans still dealt independently with foreign governments, among them the British, the French, the Germans, and the United States of America. Later in the century,” Gurnah adds cheekily, “the British took over the sultan’s affairs in order to advance progress and civilization.”

Gurnah depicts his characters’ changing stations in life via their dwellings. When Karim’s mother, Raya, escapes her oppressive first husband, she moves with Karim back to her parents’ apartment: two “gloomy rooms,” “airless cells” on the first floor of a shared, sour-smelling house. When Raya remarries and moves in with an upwardly mobile pharmacist in Dar, Karim shifts over to his half-brother’s place. His new home is “small, narrow,” but Karim has his own quarters, finally, and space for quiet reflection: “The sun came round in the afternoon and planted a slowly moving square of light on the side wall, revealing the grainy texture of the lime whitewash.”

Along with gorgeous description, Gurnah distills incredibly complex subjects into single sentences. On the phenomenon of East African children growing up with multiple female caregivers: “It was not so unusual for that to happen, for an aunt or a grandmother to become the mother figure, or for a child to grow up with a sense of having more than one such figure.” On why guilt-ridden, overwhelmingly white Americans travel to Tanzania to study and volunteer (according to Fauzia’s friend Hawa): “Americans only come here to learn Kiswahili so they can understand how to get on with their Black people who of course only speak English.”

In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable, reads the epigraph to Theft. It’s a quote from Joseph Conrad, a writer Gurnah has admired. Some critics have suggested Gurnah’s Paradise is an attempt to rewrite Heart of Darkness. Gurnah rejects this, as does scholar James Hodapp. Paradise, with its embedded Swahili travelogues, “creates for itself a localized self-referential African literary genealogy, not dependent on European canonical texts,” he argues. A question more relevant to Theft is why Gurnah chose this particular quote. Why would such a remarkable author introduce what is perhaps his most remarkable work yet with what could be interpreted as a cautionary note on remarkableness?

To be denied the ability to determine one’s fate and fulfill one’s potential is sometimes a societal theft, sometimes an imperial one, sometimes both. But ambition that holds no regard for others is also a theft—a self-inflicted one. Along with the collateral damage it causes, it diminishes the dignity and eats away at the humanity of the shortsighted striver. Much more remarkable than conventional success, Gurnah suggests, are kindness, humility and the ability to endure.   

 

cover of the propagandist

Cecile Desprairies’ The Propagandist (trans. Natasha Lehrer); recommended by TC Online Contributor Jeanne Bonner.

Over the past two years as I completed my translation of Edith Bruck’s first short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End, I have been feverishly reading books about the World War II era. Bruck is a Hungarian-born Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, and I wanted to immerse myself in the oeuvre and world of my author. Luckily, I haven’t confined myself to any geographical boundary, or else I would have never found The Propagandist, written by Cecile Desprairies and translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer.

The Propagandist is an intriguing and sometimes shocking autobiographical novel about Vichy France. Desprairies reveals the anti-Semitic sentiment that seethed in France long before the Nazis arrived. Although she is a historian, she has a novelist’s eye for enchanting, if often chilling, characters: namely her mother, whom she refers to as Lucie to dispel the feeling that you’re reading a memoir. Lucie was a collaborationist who went to work for the Germans and, now that she is deceased, Desprairies also feels free to reveal intimate details about her mother’s first husband, Friedrich, who died young. Though the book is perhaps only nominally fiction, Desprairies has a novelist’s eye for real-life conflict and regret that’s cinematic in its sweep and depth: her mother essentially conducted the rest of her life as though still married to Friedrich, even though she was married to her second husband, the author’s father, for decades. During the period of the Occupation after the Germans invaded France, she and Friedrich were dedicated to converting France to Nazi ideology. At one point, Lucie, the titular propagandist, works on an exhibit whose aim “was to demonstrate … that ‘the Jew’ was always an interloper acting against the country’s interests.”

When reading about World War II, we often relegate it to the remote past. What’s shocking in The Propagandist is the revelation that Lucie and others of Desprairies’ closest relatives lived for decades after the end of the war pining for Vichy France. As the war came to a close, her family was seized with panic: “Unluckily for all of the Cinderellas, midnight was about to chime. In 1944 ‘the bastards’ entered Paris like a swarm of locusts and brought the —the good times, in other words—to an end.” When was the last time you read a book about World War II that referred to the Allies as “the bastards”?

Lehrer’s translation is skillful, especially in how she preserved bits of the original French text, juxtaposing those sections against their English translations. It reinforces the Gallic origin of this tale but without sacrificing the fresh, accessible quality of the English translation.

The Propagandist is ultimately a book about memory, specifically not forgetting. It’s appropriate to briefly mention a poetry anthology I’ve been reading that seeks to “gather works of poetic witness to the sufferings and struggles of the twentieth century.” The book, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché, is so comprehensive and ambitious that works are divided by conflict, which includes the Armenian genocide, the Indo-Pakistani wars and the Apartheid regime in South Africa, among others. It features poems by Edith Bruck, but one line that burrowed instantly into my heart came instead from a poem by Abba Kovner:

Sorrow already on his clothes
Like an eternal crease.

What We’re Reading: March 2025
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Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

Poems by S. VIJAYALAKSHMI, KUTTI REVATHI, and PUTHIYAMAADHAVI

Translated by THILA VARGHESE 

A farm in Tamil Nadu, India

A farm in Tamil Nadu, India. Photo by Flickr user Emily Abrams.

 

Mullai Nilam (The forest and pastoral region)

Forest Fire
By Vijayalakshmi

My forest is on fire,
and a solar sphere explodes within.
There is fire everywhere,
both inside and outside.
Unaware of the intensity of the fire,
they maintain silence
like the serenity of a corpse.
From the burning fire
bursts out a waterfall tainted in red.
All over the shores have bloomed
the flaming lilies of motherhood.
Even when they smell blood
in those flowers,
they feign ignorance
and dig out the root
roasted in the forest fire embers.
Of the tiny birds that have fallen dead,
their tongues relish the taste of meat
of those cooked to perfection.
They are searching for animals
to turn them into meals,
pretending as if they didn’t hear
their lamentations
in the burning forest.
They raise their cups
filled with dark crimson fluid
from the river
that flows like a red streak
and say ‘cheers’ to one another.
The voices
of the lover,
husband,
grandfather,
father,
great-grandfather,
brother,
friend and comrade,
are all heard
in the second round of ‘cheers.’

 

Neithal Nilam (The seashore and coastal region)

Salty Tears
By Kutti Revathi

She who has turned into a sea
is totally oblivious
to her longings and sobbing
rising up as thousands of waves
in her tears.
Even in saltwater,
she cultivates immortal plants.
In her silent world,
she lets the life forms that are unaware
of the exterior world roam freely.
Crashing against the rocks
and pounding on them,
her hands drag into the sea
her offspring,
who yearn to reach the shoreline,
and send them to play in its depths.
Denying all her treasures and colours, 
she spreads out her hands
and claims she has nothing.
She keeps going tirelessly
with no sleep or rest.
She, who has become intensely salty,
gives birth, day after day,
to the sun that rises
turning her into blood,
horses, and all eight directions.

 

Marutha Nilam (The agricultural and plains region) 

Marutham*
By Puthiyamaadhavi

You are meditating;
I close the door
and sprinkle peace
all over the room.

You are exercising;
I wait with a towel
to wipe off your sweat.

You apply cologne on you
after showering;
I wait by the door
until you come down the stairs
wearing wrinkle-free clothes.

The light fragrance
that grazes you
wafts in the air
and gives me goosebumps.

The smell of the child’s diarrhea,
the vomited milk,
the curry that smears on me
as I hastily scoop up the gravy,
and the odour of sweat,
all of them dissolve on my body
in a split second.

As I stack up the periodicals
you’ve read and left untidy,
the pictures of smiling women
with beautiful, trim bodies
disappear inside their folds,
little by little.

*Marutham is one of the ancient land divisions described in Tamil Sangam literature that is said to date back between the 1st to 4th centuries. Marutham refers to the agricultural and plains region, in which the drive for ownership of land and property is reported to have played a major role in advancing the dominant role of men, thereby creating a power imbalance between partners back then. Gender inequality continues in modern days as well.

 

These translations were done with the support of the 2024 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program.

 

Vijayalakshmi, a teacher by profession, is actively engaged in the Tamil literary field, penning poetry and articles on literary, social, and environmental issues. An ardent feminist, Vijayalakshmi continues to contribute poems, short stories, and essays to Tamil publications, and has to her credit four published books of poetry, one book of short stories, and two collections of essays. A recipient of literary awards, Vijayalakshmi has also compiled and translated Afghan Landai poems into Tamil (through English). 

Kutti Revathi, a Siddha doctor (Indigenous Tamil Medicine) by profession, is the author of 21 books of poetry, 6 short story collections and 3 essay collections and a novel in Tamil. A former editor of the feminist magazine Panikudam, Kutti Revathi is also a documentary and feature film director. With a focus on body politics, Kutti Revathi’s poetry challenges the traditional norms related to women’s identity and autonomy within the Indian context. A recipient of literary awards, Kutti Revathi continues to engage in discourse on power imbalance and resistance in a patriarchal social setup. She is also currently spearheading the website on the history of Tamil Music, “Karunamirthasagaram”, for the Oscar winning composer A.R. Rahman.

Puthiyamaadhavi, a retired bank officer, is the author of seven poetry books, six short story collections, three novels and six non-fiction books. A recipient of literary awards, Puthiyamaadhavi brings attention to contemporary sociopolitical issues and women’s place in society through her writings. Committed to feminist ideologies, Puthiyamaadhavi actively participates in literary forums to raise awareness of social issues arising from gender imbalance.

Thila Varghese is a writer and translator in London, Ontario, where she works part-time as a writing advisor at Western University in Canada. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in international journals and magazines. Thila’s translation entry was a finalist in the inaugural 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Her translation of Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer into Tamil was published in India in 2023. Thila was awarded a Mentorship in Poetry from a South Asian language with Khairani Barokka as part of ALTA’s 2024 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program in partnership with the SALT Project. Her translation entry received a First-Time Entrant Commendation in the 2024 Stephen Spender Prize for translation of poetry.

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam
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LitFest 2025: Recapping A Milestone Celebration

With guest talks from physician Dr. Anthony Fauci and actor Jeffrey Wright, student and alumni readings, and a birthday party for The Common, this year’s 10th-anniversary LitFest was a celebratory occasion. From February 28 to March 2, 2025, attendees flocked to sold-out events in Amherst College’s Johnson Chapel, went behind the scenes with award-winning writers like Percival Everett, read poetry in the shadow of Emily Dickinson’s house, and celebrated the life and legacy of Amherst’s literary community. 

Read on for a gallery of selected images and videos from LitFest 2025, and view all the event recordings here.


The Common’s 15th Birthday Party!

Acker and Elliott address a crowded foyer from the staircase.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Acker and Amherst College President Michael Elliott raise a toast to The Common.

One highlight of the busy weekend was a champagne toast honoring The Common’s 15th year in print. Complete with cakes decorated as some of our iconic issue covers, the gathering celebrated The Common’s growth over the past decade-and-a-half into the thriving hub for international and emerging literary voices that it is today. 

A spread showcasing the magazine greeted guests as they arrived.

Each of the magazine’s 28 (and counting!) issues features an object from one of its stories or essays on the cover.

The Common’s 15th anniversary tote bags, designed by one of our interns and featuring sketches of objects from our issue covers, were on full display.

Everett smiling holding a TC tote bag.

Later in the weekend, Everett led a masterclass for Amherst College students on the craft of fiction.

Jefferson smiling with a TC tote bag on his shoulder.

In a panel discussion about American Fiction, Jefferson gushed about the influence of Everett’s Erasure on the film.

 
Percival Everett, author of James and other acclaimed novels, was a fan of The Common’s new merch, as was Cord Jefferson, writer and director of American Fiction!

Wright smiling holding a TC tote bag, flanked by two TC interns.

Wright, who starred in American Fiction, fielded countless photo requests from fans over the course of the night.

 
In between rounds of drinks and hors d’oeuvres, TC interns also got a chance to chat with renowned creatives about their craft, like actor and Amherst College alumnus Jeffrey Wright.
 

The Common’s full-time staff and student interns are, from left to right: Literary Editorial Fellow Sam Spratford, Editorial Assistants Alma Clark, Kei Lim, and Aidan Cooper, and Managing Editor Emily Everett (back); Editor-in-Chief Jen Acker, and Editorial Assistants Sarah Wu, Sophie Durbin, and Siani Ammons (front).

 


Readings from The Common’s Interns and Amherst College Alumni

On Saturday, March 1, Editorial Assistants at The Common read excerpts from their prose and poetry alongside Amherst College alumni who had recently published their first book. The reading was followed by a brief conversation with the alumni, who offered advice for current students.

Sam Spratford ’24 (Literary Editorial Fellow) gave introductory remarks, followed by readings from Kei Lim ’25 (David Applefield ’78 Fellow), Sarah Wu ’25, Alma Clark ’25, and Aidan Cooper ’26.


 Conversations With Dr. Anthony Fauci and Teju Cole

Cole signing one of his novels for a fan.

Tremor uses non-linear narration as it follows the life of Tunde, a West African man teaching photography in New England.

 
LitFest 2025 featured three sold-out events in Amherst’s Johnson Chapel. One of them, a Q&A with photography critic, novelist, and multidisciplinary scholar and professor Teju Cole, was moderated by The Common’s very own Jennifer Acker. Teju shared his perspective on autofiction in the context of his most recent novel, Tremor, and his signature intermingling of photography and prose in his myriad essays and criticism. (Cole’s first experiment with pairing text and images was published in The Common in 2015.)
 
Acker addressing the crowd from a podium with large purple banners behind her reading "LitFest" and "Amherst College".

Acker likened Fauci’s efforts to unite the public via science to The Common‘s mission to build global literary community.

 

Perhaps the most anticipated event of LitFest 2025 was a talk by Dr. Anthony Fauci about his career in public service, as told in his new memoir, On Call. In her opening remarks, Jennifer Acker reflected on the significance of his visit to LitFest:

”One of my motives for developing LitFest at Amherst was a desire to bring people together, to build a bulwark against forces that push us apart. Since Covid, we have unfortunately become more broken as a society, but when I think back to those days of 2020, 2021, and 2022, while I remember the isolation, I also remember communal, uplifting moments that stand out like stars against an otherwise black night sky. And one of those moments was watching and listening to Dr. Tony Fauci […] When Dr. Fauci took the microphone, we uttered a collective sigh of relief. We thought ‘Here’s someone who’s going to tell it to us straight.’”

Fauci shaking Murphy's hand at the end of the Q&A.

Fauci spoke about how his upbringing in an Italian Catholic family in Brooklyn profoundly shaped his worldview.

 

Dr. Fauci both took to and left the stage with prolonged standing ovations from the audience. You can view his full conversation with TC Board Member Cullen Murphy ’74 here.


Thank you to Amherst College and all who made this milestone LitFest such a memorable one! The Common is delighted to have now officially kicked off our 15th anniversary year. Stay tuned for more celebrations in the coming months.

LitFest 2025: Recapping A Milestone Celebration
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Bungalow Boogie Countdown

By REBECCA BAUMANN

A watercolor illustration of a Spanish-style, white-stucco bungalow. The house is short, with an almost flat roof and symmetrical windows on the facade. It is framed by bright green landscaping in the front, and, behind, by palm fronds.

“untitled,” watercolor, by Cuyler McDonald. Image courtesy of author.

 

Ten 

We claw-dance between the folding walls. 

 “Are we sinking?” I ask. 

 Our backs flatten into herringbone patterns against the floorboards. Oil from our noses stains the adobe ceiling. 

“We’re doing the boogie!” he says. 

He waggles a finger that can no longer stretch up. I laugh-cry. I listen to the house moan.  “Do you hear me creaking?” 

My ribcage smushes into a desert plateau. 

“It’s not us. It’s only the wooden boards, I’m sure,” he says.

Bungalow Boogie Countdown
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Finding Hope in Horror: Blake Hammond Interviews Julian Zabalbeascoa

JULIAN ZABALBAEASCOA’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a work of narrative ingenuity and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War and has recently been named a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, and Ploughshares, among other journals. In this interview, BLAKE HAMMOND and Julian Zabalbeascoa discuss writing about your heritage, riffing on your research, and empathizing with evil characters.

Left: Julian Zabalbeascoa's headshot. A bald man with facial hair poses in front of a body of water, looking into the distance.

Right: Blake Hammond's headshot. A man with closely-buzzed hair wearing a Carhartt jacket poses in front of a brick wall, squinting against the sun into the camera.

Blake Hammond: Your story “Igerilaria,” published in The Common in 2021, is about a Basque refugee, the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna attacks, and fascist Spain in the late 20th Century. When did you start writing about the Basque Country? Or has it always been a central aspect of your work? 

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Since the word go, really. And then, with even greater fervor, when I was twenty and studying in the Basque Country in Spain. It was a transformative experience. As the world was opening to me, I was trying to put it on the page. My family is from the Basque Country. My father is from the Spanish side, and my mother’s family is from the French side. And I grew up in a community of Basque immigrants in the Central Valley of California. It’s a common story, I think, but, in my teen years, I was determined to get as far as possible from my hometown. But what did I end up doing? Studying in the Basque Country. Planting myself in the headwaters, the source of it all. From the frying pan into the fire. It was magical though. It was also me trying to make sense of everything—my childhood, what brought my family to America, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape us, etc. I never sit down at the desk as though reclining on the therapist’s couch, but I suppose that’s what I’m unwittingly doing morning after morning on the page. 

BH: You can tell Spain is a huge part of your life because the setting is so central to every chapter, especially for a country as regional as Spain. In a way, the landscape is one of the most constant characters throughout the book. Can you speak more about that regionality and your approach to writing settings and landscapes?

JZ: Few things on this planet stir my soul as much as the mist on the mountains in the Basque Country, on both sides of the border, Spain and France. It’s an ancestral feeling, I’m sure. A sort of pleasurable response that has existed longer than I have. But I also love Spain’s arid landscapes, its high plateaus, the near-forests of twisting olive trees, the stone-scraped mountain peaks found around León, the Arabic influences in architecture down south, all of it. It’s a lifelong love affair for me. So it was bound to find its way into the book. However, my characters are fighting for this land, killing and dying, and risking their moral compasses, so the land would have to be central to how they view and experience the world.

BH: With this ancestral connection, and having spent so much time there, I’m curious about your research for this book. Did any of it come from first-hand accounts you heard while in Spain?

JZ: While I’m an advocate for the powers of the imagination, it would have been very difficult for me to write this book without many of those lived experiences, which included being told anecdotes by people in Spain and the Basque Country that helped give it shape. I did a year of undergrad in the Basque Country in Spain, then attended grad school in Madrid over the course of five summers. Since 1999, I’ve been in Spain and the Basque Country at least once a year, oftentimes more. So many of those experiences, which included focused research with a clear eye of where my characters would wind up, informed the writing of this novel. The thing with research, though, is that if you’re not careful it becomes endless. It is important to step out onto the high wire before you fully test its viability. You should be a little reckless. Meaning, you should give your imagination space to dream. I’m currently studying the Spanish Civil War once again for a class I’m teaching this spring, and I’m coming across a few things I would have loved to include in the novel. This is despite having studied the war for over a decade now. But if I were going to wait to read all that can be read about the Spanish Civil War before putting the first words down, I’d still be stretching my legs behind the starting line.

I never sit down at the desk as though reclining on the therapist’s couch, but I suppose that’s what I’m unwittingly doing morning after morning on the page.”

BH: You do a great job of weaving the historical context for the war, and the political turmoil of the time into this book. How did you create such an authentic sense of urgency from a conflict so far removed from the American consciousness? 

JZ: This follows that idea of research. You want to know your material and be able to internalize it, but then you should forget about much of it. Have you learned your instrument? Great, now start jamming. I knew I didn’t want these narrators to be tour guides for the Spanish Civil War. I didn’t want to bog the reader down with exposition that might deepen their understanding of the conflict but, quite possibly, slow down the narrative. I wanted to put faith in the reader that they’d meet my characters where they were, and that enough context could be created through action. I also had faith that there were recognizable elements in the conflict for today’s American reader. I began this novel in 2011. I wouldn’t have guessed then that the Venn diagram would overlap with America as much as it does now. 

BH: I was interested in your decision to write from the viewpoint of characters on the fascist side of the conflict in some of these chapters. Can you talk more about that? 

JZ: This war affected most everyone in society, so I strove to have diverse voices on the page. That includes fascists. To that, there’s no great sport in putting a character on the page to ridicule them or tear them down. As much as I might disagree with a character’s view of the world, it’s not my job to judge them. Instead, it’s my job as a writer to remain curious, to follow after them, transcribe what they’re telling/showing me, and keep asking questions. We’re not encouraged to show such generosity, especially not online, but I think it’s an integral quality to maintain when you’re at your desk.  

BH: Was it difficult for you to inhabit those characters, the ones you don’t agree with? To try to remain neutral while getting their voice onto the page? Faustino and Juan are two fascist characters that come to mind, and even though they’re committing unspeakable acts of violence, I felt bad for them. They didn’t feel villainized.

JZ: I was recently in conversation with the writer Sebastian Stockman about my novel, and he referenced this line from the Jean Renoir film The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everybody has their reasons.” Part of the job of the fiction writer is to explore what those reasons might be. To withhold judgment while doing so. I have some strong, possibly even inflexible, political opinions. I likely wouldn’t have written this novel were I not so concerned about the current trajectory of the country and the world. But I’ve learned not to let those convictions drown out whatever my characters are trying to tell me. Otherwise, what would I produce? Something akin to a social media post that might fetch a few likes. But certainly nothing cousinly to literature.

BH: There are some incredibly well-written, yet horrifying, passages of violence and war in this book. But what seemed to connect everything was the theme of family, especially parental and sibling relationships. Was that an intentional throughline, or did it occur as you were writing? 

JZ: It’s amazing how, in fiction, you can out yourself. Even in historical fiction! Half of this novel was written very slowly over more than a decade, while the other half was written all at once, not long after my wife and I learned we’d be having our first child. Becoming a parent was very much on my mind while working on these chapters every morning. It is also representative of the struggle playing out in the book. You have those fighting for a positive vision of tomorrow, who want a better and more just—and therefore a more secure—world for their children to live in. Meanwhile, they’re at war against reactionaries of various stripes, those determined to return the country to a past they can recognize and feel secure in. They likely believe their children will, as well. And so the fight goes on for another day. 

BH: That positive vision of tomorrow gives the book an admirable overtone of hope, which was moving for a story that is also so filled with terror. Out of all this tension between hope and fear, right and left, family and war, what do you want readers to take away from this book?

JZ: In the end, hope. But, along the way, visceral glimpses of the terror? Is that something you can want for the reader (even though life has a surplus of it and dishes it out disproportionately and at random)? If so, first, the terror: Spain’s fate in the 1930’s need not be ours. We still have time. We can give in to the algorithms and the demagogues, blame our fellow citizens for all the ills we feel are before us, and remain constantly outraged, but what will happen then? We’ll ultimately become irrevocably divorced from each other, leading half the country to fully embrace an authoritarian’s agenda. Ours remains a democracy, and a democracy requires us to maintain conversations with those we agree with, those we don’t, and those who’ve tuned out for all sorts of reasons. When we stop talking to one another, when we subscribe wholesale to the us vs. them narrative, when only cultural and ideological hegemony can save the country, then we will begin to hear, as Twain warned, history rhyming. Now for the hope: those fighting in Spain against the fascist-backed Nationalist Movement stood under all sorts of flags. In the novel, I tend to focus on those fighting to defend the Second Republic. The odds were against them from the start. The world’s democracies had abandoned them. Meanwhile, the insurrectionists had the backing of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Despite being outmatched and suffering one loss after another, they maintained hope and continued fighting to realize it in their world. I believe that we are in urgent need of that sort of hope and resiliency.

Few things on this planet stir my soul as much as the mist on the mountains in the Basque Country, on both sides of the border, Spain and France. It’s an ancestral feeling, I’m sure. ”

BH: Many of these chapters have been published as stand-alone short stories, and this book functions as both a novel and a collection of short stories. At what point did you realize that you had a novel on your hands? Were you thinking of it as a collection, or a novel, or just writing?  

JZ: Six of one, half dozen the other. There was a time when I was trying to have the novel be a thing it was not. The Great Basque American Multi-Generational Novel. Once I abandoned that track and focused solely on the Spanish Civil War, I refused to put any guardrails on the novel, the shape it would take, and how it might even be classified. Not pragmatic for the marketplace but necessary to invite some generosity from the muses. So whichever narrator was speaking to me, whichever image wouldn’t leave me alone, whatever the murky subconscious was trying to bring forward, I’d abandon myself to it. I’d glance at the structure the novel was beginning to take, but I tried not to let that dictate much. Just as I’d blindly follow a character to a chapter’s denouement, having faith all the while I was heading…somewhere, the same was the case with the overall structure of the novel. I had faith it would all coalesce into a unified shape. Now, having said that, after all that dreaming on the page was through, my heady waking self shouldered in and began barking orders. Such is the revision process. Gone is the mystic communing with the subconscious or collective unconscious. In comes the cold, calculating, and merciless logician. I also had the immeasurable great fortune to fall in love with an incredible fiction editor: Katie Sticca, the Managing and Fiction Editor of Salamander. The novel wouldn’t be what it is without her careful reads and notes that filled up all the margins.

BH: Speaking of your editing process, I was curious about revising a novel with this structure, with each chapter giving us a new voice. Some characters appear and then reappear later, and some only appear once, with Isidro in the center. Was it harder to deepen Isidro’s character? Were there characters who appeared in drafts that you felt deserved their own stories?

JZ: There were some challenges along the way, most certainly. Plenty of reverse engineering. Each narrator will experience a sort of narrative arc in their respective chapters, but throughout all these, there is the character of Isidro, and even Mariana, who experience a larger and longer arc. Isidro has an unquenchable thirst for life, and a deep and constantly present appreciation for the flightiness of time and the brevity of our lives, so some of the narrators might be able to appreciate that we’re following him throughout the novel. But I’m willing to wager that if you asked the other narrators, they’d tell you their experiences constitute the authoritative story of the Spanish Civil War and that Isidro played a small, sometimes meaningful, part in it. The world, as we experience it, tends to feel like it’s spinning around us as its primary axle. So I had to honor that feeling while also, adding new textures to Isidro and Mariana’s storylines. As for the second part of the question, sometimes a character required their own chapter. Xabier’s, Isidro’s brother’schapter was one of the last I wrote, as I felt that people’s thoughts and memories of him made him a touch one-dimensional. He seems to be everybody’s martyr, so he requires his own chapter to demonstrate to the reader that he is just as conflicted and ego-driven as all the rest of us. But by and large, when a character does reappear, they do so as quickly-glimpsed shadows. I’m hoping there’s some fun for readers in identifying them when they brush a scene’s periphery.

BH: What books and authors inspired you as you wrote this novel? 

JZ: The novel was written over thirteen years. So the bibliography would go on for pages. But the two biggies for me when I was carried off on an eight-week writing sprint in which I wrote half this novel, would be the work of Svetlana Alexievich and Irish fiction writ large. I dedicated a couple of chapters to Svetlana Alexievich. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature nine years ago for her oral histories of the Soviet Union and Russia. Anything with her name on it, pick it up. It’s oftentimes brutal. Secondhand Time stands alongside Part IV of 2666 as the most violent and visceral series of pages I’ve ever read. But it’s also shot through with humor and great wisdom and many people who, despite their circumstances, continue putting one foot in front of the other. Her work made me realize I could write a novel populated with voices. Mine has twenty chapters, and each chapter is told by a different narrator. It was Svetlana Alexievich who permitted me to pursue that. As for the Irish, they constitute a large part of what I’ve been reading since 2020. I’ve been beating this drum since that seismic year, but the island of Ireland is producing some of the most exciting and dynamic literature of our times. It’s not even a pound-for-pound thing. They can enter the ring against any country, no matter the size, and have their opponent on the mat before the bell ends the first round.

 

 

Blake Hammond is an MFA student at SNHU’s Mountainview MFA program. His work was a finalist in the Salamander2024 Fiction Contest, and has been published in Mulberry Literary.

Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here was published this November by Two Dollar Radio. Among other journals, his short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Common,Electric Literature, Glimmer Train, Gettysburg Review, One Story, and Ploughshares. He teaches in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. 

Finding Hope in Horror: Blake Hammond Interviews Julian Zabalbeascoa
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The Hare

By ISMAEL RAMOS
Translated by JACOB ROGERS
Piece appears below in English and the original Galician.

Translator’s Note
Translating “The Hare,” by Ismael Ramos, was a perfect encapsulation of the idea that the hardest texts to translate are not necessarily the most maximalist or technical, but the sparest and most pared down. In his narration, Ramos keeps things moving at a brisk pace with gentle, light-footed prose dotted with sparks of lyricism. His dialogue is similarly effective, with sharp, often curt interchanges between the siblings Raúl and Valeria that maintain a tension that thrums under the surface of their car ride. And therein lies the challenge: if it were only a matter of reproducing sentences as lovely as these, that would be one thing; the hard part is that they need to be both lovely and charged with the electrical undercurrent of the unspoken, they need to lean on a word or intention in some places and lay off in others, just as brother and sister push and pull at each other. Or, as Raúl might put it, they metaphorical ping pong, deflecting and attacking and dissimulating.

The Hare
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When I Go to Chicago

By SHELLEY STENHOUSE

A small table set for breakfast: mashed grapefruit, berries, a Raisin Bran box, two spoons, and a short glass of dark liquid. To the right of the place setting is a stack of newspapers, including the Chicago Sun Times.

Chicago, Illinois

things break. The last time, on the last day, the pipes in the kitchen burst and flooded my parents’ blonde wood floor. When I’m up in that 87th floor apartment, I look at the sky’s blank expression. I keep the little square office window open for the sliver of nature. It’s hard to read with Fox News blaring, so I drift from room to room.

Each time before I fly to Chicago, I lose my debit card. This time it leapt out of my raincoat pocket on my way to the grocery store and refused to reappear. I had the new one shipped straight to the Hancock.

When I Go to Chicago
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