It was March 2023, and I was alone in Wellington. The creative writing class I’d traveled there to teach had ended. Antipodean summer was ending too, night falling earlier, rain dripping from the lemonwood trees, the gray surface of the harbor whipped and wrinkled by a wind that roared ceaselessly through the Cook Strait.
By HOLLY WILSON
Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG
Molly is a badass. Obvious, isn’t it, from the novel’s title? Kittentits. That’s her, Molly. She’s a motherless white ten-year-old kid, living in Calumet City, Michigan. It’s 1992, and she’s obsessed with attending the Chicago World’s Fair, about to open downtown.
Before she gets there, Molly comes to idolize a woman who tried to kill her conjoined twin; runs away from home to Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville; meets an elderly polio patient living inside an iron lung who gives séances; and befriends an African-American ghost boy and artist, Demarcus. Together, Molly and Demarcus hatch a plan of necromancy to commune with the ghosts of their dead mothers. They camp out at the Fair for weeks, waiting for New Year’s Eve to perform the ritual.
By SARAH CARSON
Genessee County, Michigan
On the night hike through what Wikipedia calls the picturesque 383-acres of the For-Mar Nature Preserve and Arboretum, a man in ISO rated cold-weather cargo pants plays barred owl calls from YouTube, then recruits a kid with a headlamp to hold a Bluetooth speaker to a dogwood tree. I imagine the owls shake their heads in their hollow, that somewhere else in the dark of fallen branches, salamanders yawn, a doe wishes her fawn would settle.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Following his 60th class reunion at Amherst College in 2017, Harlan Underhill scripted a virtual diary in poetry, communicating over 200 entries to several fortunate classmates. The poems illuminate both immediate and past experiences and observations, memories both cherished and painful. These two poems are drawn from that collection.
Isle Royale National Park
The powerboat clips Scofield point and breaks away from my cabin toward the more serious waters of Lake Superior. My guide, Tom, cranes his neck to view the shore as if he’s never seen it before, though he knows these bends and inlets well. We pass the outer islands—Rabbit, Caribou, Cemetery—which lift like teeth from the blue-green water. The motor quiets as we turn inward and thread the eye of Moskey Basin, toward docks and wooden nets, remnants of a long-gone fishing industry cast along the shoreline.
By LATOYA FAULK
When we identify respect (coming from the root word meaning “to look at”) as one of the dimensions of love, then it becomes clear that looking at ourselves and others means seeing the depths of who we are. Looking into the depths, we often come face-to-face with emotional trauma and woundedness. Throughout our history, African Americans have pounded energy into the struggle to achieve material well-being and status, in part to deny the impact of emotional woundedness. Truthfully, it is easier to acquire material comfort than to acquire love.
—From Salvation: Black People and Love, by bell hooks
Home is not just a house; it’s this yearning for a place where you’re safe, [a place where] nobody’s going to hurt you.
—Toni Morrison, in conversation with Claudia Brodsky at Cornell University on March 7, 2013
By DAVID ROMPF
It’s mid-January, and I’ve come to northern Michigan to see a frozen river layered with fresh snow. On winter days, a long time ago, a young woman skated across this river to be with the man she would eventually marry. She lived in Hancock, a town draped on hills opposite my vantage point in Houghton, which sits on highland and spills, like its sister, to the Portage River. Her beau lived on the Houghton side and worked in a hotel with cupolas and a grand ballroom, two blocks up from where I stand observing the expanse of ice. I can’t understand how she skated after a snowfall, or in bitter wind and blizzard whiteouts.
By AVERY FARMER
Elbel Field, 2018.
Like an orgy—or a fight. Legs collide with legs; strangers struggle around each other, into each other. A collective gasp clutches them all together. One, shirtless, leads the ball down the field, stumbles, and loses control of it. Now the ball leads him and leads his opponent into him. The two collide without a sound, the crash dampened by their flesh. Everybody stops to watch them battle for the ball. When it spills free, the first man gains control and rolls it across an invisible line between two heaps of t-shirts. Half the players cry in ecstasy. Half sigh in frustration. For a few seconds before this, nobody breathed at all.
A handmade dress passed down
from your mother finds space
in the cedar chest at the foot
of the bed. The chest, a relic
of your father’s, bore a new
When we first moved to Ludington we spent days on the beach wandering along the sandy shores that stretched north to Manistee, south to Pentwater. Even in winter, when all the Fudgies (as tourists are known up north) had left town, having migrated to points south, we got out and hiked the hard-packed frozen beach, which provided a firm footing rather than the summer’s soft, fatiguing sand. But we had to cut against the strong gusts off Lake Michigan, and sometimes it was all we could do to walk upright, gripping our woolen caps over our red, nearly frostbitten ears. We spit grains of sand out and hunkered down, pushing against the wind.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.