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Country Craft: The Writer’s Knife
by Stuart Phillips The spring earth thawed and yielded eight slabs of New York Bluestone from my front yard, remnants of an 1820s walkway from when neighbors visited neighbors. Sixteen hundred pounds, looking for a new home. I decided to use them for steps in the little slope by our grapevines. Although well-traveled it is…
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WHY I AM NOT (and am)
by Jane Hammons Decades ago, when I was earning a teaching credential at UC Berkeley, I was assigned a class of graduating high school seniors who were not going to graduate unless they passed a writing proficiency exam. Students from many backgrounds and dispositions filled this classroom: the school bully; depressed students unable to complete…
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Maurice Carlos Ruffin on Heavy Things
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin One of the biggest influences on my writing is weightlifting. Why am I somewhat embarrassed to admit this to a readership of very smart people? It may be because some of us were bullied by bigger kids back in grade school. Or maybe it’s the stereotype that writers, readers, and other…
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Say Hi
by Shome Dasgupta I have three guitars but I don’t know how to play any of them—or rather I can play three chords and I like to joke and say that I can play one chord for each guitar. I don’t have any musical talent—I can’t play any instruments, I can’t sing, and I lack…
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Healthy Habits: Starting to Stick
by Valerie Peralta In the early months of the pandemic, I indulged in BOGO ice cream deals. Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy and Half Baked one week. Häagen-Dazs Rum Tres Leches and White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle the next. Talenti’s Caramel Apple Pie and Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup the week after that. At half the price,…
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Altered Earths: On Genre, Worldbuilding, and Multiplicity
by S.E. Hartz My old journals mark the moment when I decided, in tenth grade, that I would be not a writer but a scientist. I was two selves already by that time, one writing maudlin poetry in the wings of the high school auditorium during theater rehearsals, the other delving deep into diagrams of…
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Soundscapes: Story as a Place to Dwell
by Erin Calabria It is a grey afternoon in Germany. It is almost always a grey afternoon in Germany, and my ears are buried in headphones, as they so often are these days, because there is nowhere to go right now, and no way to get there. So instead, I’m scrolling through voice memos, teleporting…
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The Fractured Mirror: The Tree and the Well at the Center of Folklore
by Edward Karshner My daughter, Alex, was five years old when I took her home for the first time. Home meaning the homeplace, a narrow road through a hollow called Spud Run. My origin place, settled by my great-grandparents, who I know only through stories. As we drove through the hills and hollows of southeastern…
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TV Time: “The One Where I Ugly Cry”
by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez Watching TV keeps me soft. It helps me block out the commotion from the outside world and quiets the noise inside my head. On a daily basis, I overthink everything and dwell in the past while giving myself anxiety about what I haven’t accomplished today. My positionalities, as the oldest daughter…