Tag: Wind & Root

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • How Should a Writer Be?: Burnt Out on the “Fuel of Darkness”

    by Nick Rees Gardner “I had never wanted to be one person, or even believed that I was one, so I had never considered the true singularity of anyone else.”             – Sheila Heti, How Should a Person be? In her New York Times article “Does Recovery Kill Great Writing,” Leslie Jamison mentions that she…

  • Outsider Perspectives: Home, Hinges, and Halcyons

    by Mandira Pattnaik Before any of our reckoning happens, one must first assimilate. Consider “Home.” Feel about home, feel it under the skin, like the warm rush of blood. Home — the inspiration of poetry, the soil of longing, the destination of all return. Garden, hearth, dwelling, domicile. Ah! It evokes a whole gamut of…

  • Artful Academics: On Relational Confluence

    by Brandy Renee McCann I’m at my desk in the basement of an old brick house on campus reading through transcripts of interviews with older adults. I focus on the text and ignore the Jacob Marley hiss and banging of heated air moving through the ancient pipes in the building. My work is listening for…

  • The Pie Was a Final Draft: Scraps

    by Michaella Thornton It’s a little before 5 a.m. and, instead of lying in bed and wondering why I cannot sleep, I get up. Maybe it’s my anxiety about Omicron and trying to keep my too-young-to-be-vaccinated child safe while navigating single-parent frugality (keep her home, but still pay preschool fees to keep her spot). Maybe…

  • Country Craft: In the Brickyard

    by Stuart Phillips I have a pile of bricks. Actually, I have three piles, painstakingly excavated from the yard of my new house over the past six months. That was never my aim, but I couldn’t move a cluster of hosta next to the porch or level a space for a fire pit in the…

  • Parental Reckonings: Writing in the Silent and Loud Hours

    by Amy Cipolla Barnes “Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night, must you write?” – Rainer Maria Rilke When I was a kid, I didn’t know who Rilke was. I didn’t like sleeping and used my silent hours for reading and scratching down story ideas on paper scraps. It may have been…