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See my piece "Child of Crisis" under Resilience in the 2026 Winter issue.

So thrilled that disaster can produce art.

Nancy W.

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From the Editor

Women Holding Things: an Appreciation by Margaret E. Wagner

Fiction

Sheila Kinsella, Zoe

Gill James, Grace and Simon

Denise Osso, Likes to Talk Politics, Loves to Read Poetry

Marilis Demirel, Raw Oysters

Susan Thomas, The Occupation of Magdalen House

Ann Boaden, Felicity Dying

NonFiction

Mary Dingee Fillmore, The Story I Had to Write

Miriam Mandel Levi, The Hedge

Karen Beatty, Messaging Plants

Louise A. Dolan, Diamonds in the Universe

Anne Kaier, A Window Outside the Wall

Constance Garcia-Barrio, Vivid Vengeance

Guest Column

iRant by Mary-Lou Weisman, Guest Columnist

Poetry

"Guardian of the Creole Groove": The Poetry of Mona Lisa Saloy
By Cynthia Hogue, Poetry Editor

Black Creole Chronicles: Poems
by Mona Lisa Saloy

Art

"My Story/Their Story": The Art of Marilyn Church
By Greta Berman, Art Editor

Music

Editor's Music Picks
By Gena Raps, Music Editor

Short Takes

WTF Is It with This Weather?
Introduction by Jean Zorn, Publisher
Prose and Poetry by Armen Bacon, Denise Beck-Clark, Ann Birch, Martha Bordwell, Phyllis Brotherton, Anna Gall, Gail Ghai, Tobey Hiller, Debra Kaufman, Lois Kiely, Janet McCann, Laurie Rosen, Merryn Rutledge, Roberta Schultz, Stephanie Shafran, Judith Shapiro, Kathryn Taylor, Eileen Trauth, Georgette Unis, Kresha Richman Warnock, windflower
Music by Gena Raps

Persimmon Tree Forum

Challenges of Climate Change
Our Readers Comment

Illustrations by Lisa Braxton, Sally Buffington, Suzanne Cottrell, Kelly DuMar, Helen Fitzgerald, Marilyn Johnston, Niraja Lorenz, Linda Murphy Marshall, Judith R. Robinson, Eleanor Rubin, Marcella Peralta Simon, Merry Song, Sarah Sutro, Indu Varma

Submit your poetry, fiction, nonfiction, Short Takes and comments to Persimmon Tree.

Subscribe to Persimmon Tree. (It's free!)

Advertise in Persimmon Tree.

Donate to Persimmon Tree.

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Women Holding Things: an Appreciation by Margaret E. Wagner Sheila Kinsella, Zoe Gill James, Grace and Simon Denise Osso, Likes to Talk Politics, Loves to Read Poetry Marilis Demirel, Raw Oysters Susan Thomas, The Occupation of Magdalen House Ann Boaden, Felicity Dying Mary Dingee Fillmore, The Story I Had to Write Miriam Mandel Levi, The Hedge Karen Beatty, Messaging Plants Louise A.

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Dave King closed out his fall Engines of Narrative workshop by reading: Danse Russe, a poem by William Carlos Williams 

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Dave King closed out his fall Engines of Narrative workshop by reading: Danse Russe, a poem by William Carlos Williams 

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Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams | Poetry Foundation

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For Deborah, who asked: "Everything Shifts. Allow."  from the summer 2025 edition of Ploughshares. Rho Weber Mack--aka Anonymous

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For Deborah, who asked: "Everything Shifts. Allow."  from the summer 2025 edition of Ploughshares. Rho Weber Mack--aka Anonymous

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You can be amused by the inside peak at the proofing process.

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The "Look Inside" feature lets you browse a book virtually. 

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The "Look Inside" feature lets you browse a book virtually. 

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Read a sample: “The Thin Door (The Thin Door and Other Stories)”

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My novel Crossing the Bar Road made the shortlist!

Very pleased!

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CRAFT First Chapters Contest 2025 - CRAFT

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CRAFT 2025 First Chapters Contest $2,800 Awarded Guest Judge: Alejandro Heredia June 8, 2025 – August 10, 2025 Thank you to all who submitted work to the CRAFT 2025 First Chapters Contest. We are delighted to publish the winners in…

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 contest for workshop scholarship w Pam Houston, Marie Fuhrman, Paul Lisicky

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 contest for workshop scholarship w Pam Houston, Marie Fuhrman, Paul Lisicky

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I’ve never won one of these, but i find the marching orders (prompts) for the contests provoke good writing. (And I usually dislike prompts!) - Cliff

https://mailchi.mp/writingxwriters/writing-contest-win-free-workshop-tuition-13249811?e=5660d035ac

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Hello All--I am doing a reading tomorrow in Kingston, NY if you are in the area it would be lovely to see you at CPW.  Emily R.

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Hello All--I am doing a reading tomorrow in Kingston, NY if you are in the area it would be lovely to see you at CPW.  Emily R.

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You asked, so here it is: the cover art for THE THIN DOOR, out soon.

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You asked, so here it is: the cover art for THE THIN DOOR, out soon.

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Designed in Greece by Turkish book designer Baris Sehri. The ARC/print proof will be available for advance readers and review in a few quick weeks.

More details here www.webermack.com

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An article about Starling Lawrence on editing novels, itself a great piece of writing... I could feel the voice of Starling shown in it.   

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An article about Starling Lawrence on editing novels, itself a great piece of writing... I could feel the voice of Starling shown in it.   

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Opinion | These editor's notes are poison. I learned from every drop.

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Working with Starling Lawrence, who died last month, was a bracing course in a vanishing art.

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Want to also mention the poet Frank X Walker, and this poem https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1700315/backside-of-my-old-kentucky-home

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Want to also mention the poet Frank X Walker, and this poem https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1700315/backside-of-my-old-kentucky-home

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And before I forget again to mention,  I recommend this incisive long essay by Mary Beard https://www.google.com/books/edition/Women_Power/-Jc9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT6&printsec=frontcover

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And before I forget again to mention,  I recommend this incisive long essay by Mary Beard https://www.google.com/books/edition/Women_Power/-Jc9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT6&printsec=frontcover

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And this poem by Frank X Walker... in the spirit of feminists and Elizabeth's curation of feminist writers and history for the 24-H flow series this year  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1704296/harriet

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And this poem by Frank X Walker... in the spirit of feminists and Elizabeth's curation of feminist writers and history for the 24-H flow series this year  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1704296/harriet

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Want to get away? Residencies in nice places

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Want to get away? Residencies in nice places

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https://www.writingxwriters.org/residencies

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Residencies are open to fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, poets, screenwriters and playwriters. Lodging is provided free of charge, however residents are responsible for their own meals, transportation and personal needs while at the residency.

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Has anyone read this?

An English friend of mine is wondering what American readers make of it.

I haven't read it but if you have, your comments would be appreciated by my friend. (And me)

Thanks in advance

Kathy

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Two stories from my latest collection, Adventures with a 100-year-Old Mother: Inventing a Life are up and live on Sad Girl Diaries Magazine. 

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Two stories from my latest collection, Adventures with a 100-year-Old Mother: Inventing a Life are up and live on Sad Girl Diaries Magazine. 

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Adventures with a 100-Year-Old Mother: Inventing a Life | Emily Rubin

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Part 1: Raggedy Ann: Death and the Doll She was sitting slumped over in the rocking chair, staring. The soundtrack is a profundo heartbeat tapping into my fear of the threat lurking in the shadows. I am an audience of one in the theater of my mother's home.

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I mentioned this, Marcia Golub's Child Downstairs, and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Delivery in the 5/29/25 Zoom and follow up comments. The Golub and Lahiri are posted below. - Dan

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This was also given as an example in the padlet exchange on time shifts. It appears in the collection "The Empty Family".

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This was cited as an example in the Craft Convo tablet discussion of time shifts.

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NYC writers, apply by May 31 to the Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship -- it's a huge deal if you get it!

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NYC writers, apply by May 31 to the Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship -- it's a huge deal if you get it!

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The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowships | The Center for Fiction

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The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship program offers grants, editorial mentorship, and other opportunities to early-career New York City-based practitioners who are at a critical moment in their development as fiction writers

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--Eliz G

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By continuing to browse or by clicking “Accept All Cookies,” you agree to first- and third-party cookies being stored on your device to enhance functionality of our site and to help us analyze our site traffic.

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Emily Rubin's new gig is with Light, which is having having a contest for writing about restoring trust in public health

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Emily Rubin's new gig is with Light, which is having having a contest for writing about restoring trust in public health

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Contest

Building healthier communities, working for a better tomorrow, and ensuring the well-being for all begins with trust. Trust is a cornerstone of public health, influencing an individual's willingness to seek and maintain care, follow medical advice, engage in advocacy and preventative measures, participate in sustainable practices, and improve individual and community health, ultimately impacting health promotion, disease prevention, mental wellbeing, sustainable change, and the like.

Creativity-through art, letters, stories, and poetry-offers building trust with public health. It can be used to reimagine, transform, and understand how we all collectively shape the public health we want, allowing us to explore the narratives, including adversities and aspirations, which enhance our relationship with public health and its systems.

Trust in public health can be accomplished with trust-building solutions across generations, including ideas addressing hurdles, ideas identifying potential solutions, ideas that are genuine, ideas that foster connections in inclusive ways, and ideas that are impactful and resonate with all. Creative outlets can serve as the bridge between us all-individuals, communities, and health professionals and scientists alike-fostering understanding and connection in ways that statistics and policies alone cannot achieve.

What builds and restores trust? Is it empathy, love, accountability, and genuine communication? What fosters mistrust in public health? Is it a lack of transparency, failure to communicate well, limited diverse voices? Creative expression can help us unpack these questions and envision solutions.

Using art, letters, stories, and poetry, tell us: how might we build public health systems that are trustworthy?

Through creativity, whether as an individual, public health professional, or community member or leader, we can reimagine how public health engages with individuals, communities, and professionals, addressing issues like medical mistrust, systemic inequities, and misinformation.

Let creativity lead the way-because trust, once built, once restored, or once reimagined together, can transform the health of individuals, communities, and the world.

Note: At this time, submissions will only be accepted if written in English. Submissions should not have been previously published and should be properly formatted with little to no grammatical errors. Submissions will be accepted via Submittable. Please do not include any identifying information in your uploaded file.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guidelines: Although AI represents a new and powerful tool, at LIGHT, we strive to maintain a magazine rooted in community and personal narratives. In other words, AI can be used as a tool, but it should not be the primary creator of your submission.
Entries into the LIGHT open call that utilize AI must:

not exceed 10% utilization as determined by AI detection software

credit and make explicit the use of AI in the submission

Authors of submissions that utilize AI and fail to meet both requirements will be notified, and their submission will be withdrawn from consideration. Please review this blog post for more information regarding our AI guidelines.

The deadline for all submissions in each category is Thursday, May 1, 2025, by 11:59pm CST. All submissions should follow LIGHT guidelines on Submittable and the specified judging criteria.

- Open call launch: February 1, 2025

- Open call deadline: May 1, 2025

- Review and judging: May 2025

- Finalist notifications by: June 2025

- Expected magazine release: January 2026

LIGHT awards three prizes: 1st place: $500, 2nd place: $375, and 3rd place: $125. The top three submissions in each of our four categories (art, letters, poems, and stories) receive a prize. The top contestants in each category will be notified early June 2024 and will be featured in the fourth issue of our magazine. All submissions will receive consideration for publication in the magazine dependent on the number and quality of submissions. Prizes for each category are as follows:

Prizes for each category are as follows:

We believe stories are a guide. They are always with us. As teachers, they evoke a feeling, leading us, helping us the reader to discover, to explore the public in public health. So, what is your story about health, about the public and their health? We all have stories in us. We want to learn about your careful observation of reality in public health and not just the negative aspects. We want to hear your stories that are existential or unique, and of course your positive stories. The PEN-3 (Positive, Existential, Negative) Prize in Storytelling is modeled after the PEN-3 cultural model developed by Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa who suggested that public health should not only focus on things that are negative but also things that are unique and things that are great. We want your PEN-3 stories to light up our public's health, to center the public in health. Our top story will win $500. The second-place winner will win $375, and the third-place winner will win $125.
Airhihenbuwa CO. Perspectives on AIDS in Africa: strategies for prevention and control. AIDS Educ Prev. 1989;1(1):57-69.

We believe poetry is not a luxury. They put to words what we feel within and dare make real or bring into action, our fears, our pain, our power. They also probe the present, clarify the past, and enlighten the future. They help transform silence into action, engaging both emotionally and intellectually. We believe poetry can be used to shape the public's health. Not as luxury as Audre Lorde once mentioned, but to scrutinize our lives, to bring change, to bring hope to lives long forgotten and excluded in public health. Poetry Is Not a Luxury Prize is based on Audre's Lorde invitation to use poetry as a vital necessity of our existence, our hopes, our dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then an idea, then action. So, poetry is not a luxury for us. It is a life and death affair that we believe can be used to light up the public's health, to center the public in health. Our top poem will win $500. The second-place winner will win $375, and the third-place winner will win $125.
Lorde A. Poetry Is Not A Luxury. Osnabrück: Druck- & Verlagscooperative; 1993.

We believe poetry is not a luxury. They put to words what we feel within and dare make real or bring into action, our fears, our pain, our power. They also probe the present, clarify the past, and enlighten the future. They help transform silence into action, engaging both emotionally and intellectually. We believe poetry can be used to shape the public's health. Not as luxury as Audre Lorde once mentioned, but to scrutinize our lives, to bring change, to bring hope to lives long forgotten and excluded in public health. Poetry Is Not a Luxury Prize is based on Audre's Lorde invitation to use poetry as a vital necessity of our existence, our hopes, our dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then an idea, then action. So, poetry is not a luxury for us. It is a life and death affair that we believe can be used to light up the public's health, to center the public in health. Our top poem will win $500. The second-place winner will win $375, and the third-place winner will win $125.
Lorde A. Poetry Is Not A Luxury. Osnabrück: Druck- & Verlagscooperative; 1993.

Submissions will be reviewed by three to five independent judges. Judging criteria will include the following using a collaborative style of judging:

Is the submission transformative? Does the submission offer a new way to rethink a public health issue?

Is the submission clearly expressed, narrated, or represented? Is the submission understandable?

Originality and creativity in expression

Does the submission show creative thinking? Does the submission stand out as unique and original?

How well would the submission resonate with the public? Would the public find interest in the content?

Relevance to public health

Does the submission connect to the public health issue? How much significance does the submission offer to the public health field?

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Contest Building healthier communities, working for a better tomorrow, and ensuring the well-being for all begins with trust . Trust is a cornerstone of public health, influencing an individual's willingness to seek and maintain care, follow medical advice, engage in advocacy and preventative measures, participate in sustainable practices, and improve individual and community health, ultimately impacting health promotion, disease prevention, mental wellbeing, sustainable change, and the like.

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Every 15th of the month, a 53 word flash publication contest

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Every 15th of the month, a 53 word flash publication contest

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This year, our vacations (or staycations) may look different. But we can dream, can't we? Imagine: sunrise on the shore, miles of cool sand, shells endlessly polished by the tide. Strangely collectible, these bony souvenirs: proof, in every color, that there's always room to grow. Or is it "there's no place like home"?
Write a 53-word story about a shell
Guidelines

Our judges for the 53-Word Story Contest are the editors of Press 53 and Prime Number Magazine. Our winner for July will receive a copy of House of the Ancients and Other Stories by Clifford Garstang, co-founding editor of Prime Number Magazine, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this month. The winning story for July will be published, along with the author's photo and 53-word bio, in Issue 181 of Prime Number Magazine on October 1, 2020.
Please note: the deadline is the 21st day of the month. Stories received after the deadline will not be considered.
-Your story must be 53 words -no more, no less-titles are not included in the word count. Stories not meeting this rule will be disqualified. Send only stories; poetry with line breaks will not be considered. Hyphenated words count as one word.

-1 submission per person. Since this is a free contest, there are no age restrictions.

-Email your submission directly to 53wordstory@gmail.com by midnight Eastern Standard Time the 21st day of the month. The winning story will be announced the first day of the following month along with a new prompt for the next contest.

-No attachments, please. Paste your story into the body of your email. Stories sent as attachments, or images embedded in the email, will not be considered.

-Titles are not included in the word count. If your story is not titled, we will create a title for publication.

-By entering this contest the author grants Press 53 First Serial Rights to publish the story in Prime Number Magazine. All rights revert to the author upon publication.

-Note: Be careful of word count. Hyphenated words count as one word.

-Suggestion: Think of the prompt metaphorically, rather than literally. Be original. Surprise us! Oh, and have fun!

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This year, our vacations (or staycations) may look different. But we can dream, can't we? Imagine: sunrise on the shore, miles of cool sand, shells endlessly polished by the tide. Strangely collectible, these bony souvenirs: proof, in every color, that there's always room to grow. Or is it "there's no place like home"?

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A new post, because I can't find the page for meetings in the wild

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A new post, because I can't find the page for meetings in the wild

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Emily Rubin and Vicki Madden in a surprise meetup in Catskill NY at a writing workshop with Elissa Schappell.

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Fence: Ottoline Book Prize Manuscript Submissions

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Fence: Ottoline Book Prize Manuscript Submissions

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The Ottoline Book Prize is open, once again - we look forward to reading your manuscripts! The window is open from March 1st (today) through May 31st, or when we reach the 700 submission 'cap.'

Why do we have a limit on manuscript submissions? Allowing more in within a single window would compromise our editorial integrity.

During our most recent Ottoline reading period, Jason and I chose two manuscripts to publish, one by Amanda Deutch (forthcoming in Fall/Winter 2025), and another by Stella Santamaría (forthcoming Fall/Winter 2026). We are now on a two-year cycle for the submissions window opening to publication, which was one of our goals for Fence Books.

Please also check out Jennifer Nelson's On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, still hot-off-the-press! We selected this book as the winner of the 2024 Ottoline Prize.

You'll see all of the how-to's and more below; click anywhere in them, and you will be taken to the Fence submittable page. Note that the reading fee includes a two-issue subscription or renewal to

We look forward to reading your manuscripts.

Warmth and solidarity,

Emily Wallis Hughes

Editorial Co-Director of magazine & Fence Books

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Ottoline Book Prize Now Accepting Submissions

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The Ottoline Book Prize is open, once again - we look forward to reading your manuscripts! The window is open from March 1st (today) through May 31st, or when we reach the 700 submission 'cap.' Why do we have a limit on manuscript submissions? Allowing more in within a single window would compromise our editorial integrity.

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Recommended Readings for "good" sex writing

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Recommended Readings for "good" sex writing

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I attended a great online craft class last night hosted by Story Studio out of Chicago taught by Sarah Terez Rosenblum. She sent a follow-up email this morning with a list of readings if we wanted examples of "good" sex writing. I thought you might benefit from this information too. YMMV. :)

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Terez Rosenblum - Good Sex Writing Recommendations

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I've posted this because it may come up in DK's Feb. 10 convo on pacing. - Dan

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“Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff _ The New Yorker

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LRB on Christa Wolf's Retelling of the Medea Myth - Thank you, Elizabeth Gaffney, for adding this novel to the 24-H Room Flow Reading Series! 

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LRB on Christa Wolf's Retelling of the Medea Myth - Thank you, Elizabeth Gaffney, for adding this novel to the 24-H Room Flow Reading Series! 

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Helen King · That Stupid Pelt: Wolf’s retelling of Medea

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Recent interpretations of Medea have tended to focus on issues of gender and race, portraying her either as a feminist challenging Jason’s misogyny, or as a freedom fighter on behalf of the oppressed Colchian immigrants in Corinth. In what remains the best-known version of her myth, the one created by Euripides in 431 BC, her actions turn out to be as violent and tyrannical as those of her oppressors, as she kills her own children in a quest for revenge. Modern productions have tried to provide a reading of the play that makes sense of her appalling crime.

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Cliff Stanley posts: Game on folks. Meetup/hang (IRL) at Brooklyn Inn (Hoyt/Bergen) 1/28 (Tuesday) ~7:30pm. I will try to be there early and snag table in side room. Hope some of you can make it. (At least a few have given thumbs up but will I tell? Naah.)

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Cliff Stanley posts: Game on folks. Meetup/hang (IRL) at Brooklyn Inn (Hoyt/Bergen) 1/28 (Tuesday) ~7:30pm. I will try to be there early and snag table in side room. Hope some of you can make it. (At least a few have given thumbs up but will I tell? Naah.)

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From Cliff Stanley IRL: Possible meetup at Brooklyn Inn 1/28 (proposed  by me in whatsapp group chat) still in likely-but-not-definite status given several “maybes” but no “definites.” Maybe not an ideal date and maybe proposed with insufficient notice? If you know you are “yes” or even “very likely” maybe post here or message on whatsapp? Thanks! (And if this doesn’t work, I will propose again on next NY trip with more notice. Finally, if in Bay Area, don’t hesitate to be in touch!)-Cliff

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From Cliff Stanley IRL: Possible meetup at Brooklyn Inn 1/28 (proposed  by me in whatsapp group chat) still in likely-but-not-definite status given several “maybes” but no “definites.” Maybe not an ideal date and maybe proposed with insufficient notice? If you know you are “yes” or even “very likely” maybe post here or message on whatsapp? Thanks! (And if this doesn’t work, I will propose again on next NY trip with more notice. Finally, if in Bay Area, don’t hesitate to be in touch!)-Cliff

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Whoops sorry posted in wrong column. Will repost in announcements. -Cliff

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Whoops sorry posted in wrong column. Will repost in announcements. -Cliff

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From Cliff Stanley: Possible meetup at Brooklyn Inn 1/28 (proposed by me in whatsapp group chat) still in likely-but-not-definite status given several “maybes” but no “definites.” Maybe not an ideal date and maybe proposed with insufficient notice? If you know you are “yes” or even “very likely” maybe post here or message on whatsapp? Thanks! (And if this doesn’t work, I will propose again on next NY trip with more notice. Finally, if in Bay Area, don’t hesitate to be in touch!)-Cliff

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Story published on "Bull." Thanks Ben Drevlow, editor! Mauro Altamura

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Plus Popeye (The Ross Family) | MrBullBull

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6 UK small presses that consider unsolicited submissions

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This means you can submit a manuscript on your own, without a literary agent.

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If you want to get early access, sign up to be on her mailing list. It's clairekeeganfictionclinic@gmail.com

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Isabella Hammad was mentioned in the 12/12 Craft Convo....

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Isabella Hammad was mentioned in the 12/12 Craft Convo....

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Isabella Hammad - Recognizing the Stranger

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Here's a story from my latest writing endeavor. Thank you Humans of the World.org

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That's really odd , I thought. My mother was ahead of me on the moving stairs unaware of my condition. I snapped like a string on an overplayed cranky violin. From restrained screech within, I tried covering my dismay by letting out a tuba roar. "Whoooa! That was something!"

Nothing flowered, nothing pink. No pink ! We left with the nightgown. It was on sale.

At home, the answer to all this turmoil was a small unimpressive stain. Two more days of bandaid-size seepage, then nothing for months. The whole incident was suspect. Did I actually have my period, or enter into my time of being , as my mother called it? Maybe it was the result of the 25-mile rides I was doing three times a week in preparation for a cycling trip to the White Mountains. I rode with the fury of a banshee a boy's ten-speed Tour de France. It had a hard leather seat. Months went by with no staining. This sent my mother into a panicked consultation with Dr. G, the pediatrician, who surmised it was my high level of physical activity that suppressed the menses--long-distance biking, running, and ocean swim training. For me, this was a triumph. I had taken control over the change being forced upon me and willed it never to return so I could pursue my athletic fantasy of playing second base on the all-boys Junior League Baseball Team. The Grumman Rockets would have won the championship if I had been on the team. In 1970, there was no Title 9, so girls were not allowed to play on the boys' teams. I also could not to take woodworking or car mechanics in school. My mother was concerned about my dead-end kid camaraderie with the boys, but I was of the opinion girls needed to be tough in the face of the double standards imposed on our chromosomal composition. On the street, I played baseball, touch football, or hockey every night, depending on the season. During those games, I was an equal or imagined I was and could throw a football or baseball, like a girl. Perhaps I was infected by the double standard rules as well. Why would anyone want to throw with a wilted wrist? No power or control on that.

Joni Mitchell's lyrics help me, I think I'm falling in love again were Julia's theme song. The boyfriends appeared and disappeared like traffic snarls on the Long Island Expressway, tossing their bodies at her the same way we threw quarters in the collection baskets at the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges for our escapes from Long Island. She worked as a teaching assistant in a nursery school, so on school breaks with several joints rolled at the ready in the glove box, we would drive to Cobleskill, Ithaca, or Rochester wherever the boyfriends were attending college.

Emily Rubin's debut novel, Stalina (2011 HMH/Mariner/Lake Union), was a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest. She is the recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writer Award, a finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her fiction and essays have been published in Red Rock Review, Confrontation, NY Observer, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Smart Set, HAPPY, and All the Restaurants in New York by John Donohue among others. She is the founder of Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that started in the East Village and takes place in laundromats around the country.

That's really odd , I thought. My mother was ahead of me on the moving stairs unaware of my condition. I snapped like a string on an overplayed cranky violin. From restrained screech within, I tried covering my dismay by letting out a tuba roar. "Whoooa! That was something!"

Nothing flowered, nothing pink. No pink ! We left with the nightgown. It was on sale.

At home, the answer to all this turmoil was a small unimpressive stain. Two more days of bandaid-size seepage, then nothing for months. The whole incident was suspect. Did I actually have my period, or enter into my time of being , as my mother called it? Maybe it was the result of the 25-mile rides I was doing three times a week in preparation for a cycling trip to the White Mountains. I rode with the fury of a banshee a boy's ten-speed Tour de France. It had a hard leather seat. Months went by with no staining. This sent my mother into a panicked consultation with Dr. G, the pediatrician, who surmised it was my high level of physical activity that suppressed the menses--long-distance biking, running, and ocean swim training. For me, this was a triumph. I had taken control over the change being forced upon me and willed it never to return so I could pursue my athletic fantasy of playing second base on the all-boys Junior League Baseball Team. The Grumman Rockets would have won the championship if I had been on the team. In 1970, there was no Title 9, so girls were not allowed to play on the boys' teams. I also could not to take woodworking or car mechanics in school. My mother was concerned about my dead-end kid camaraderie with the boys, but I was of the opinion girls needed to be tough in the face of the double standards imposed on our chromosomal composition. On the street, I played baseball, touch football, or hockey every night, depending on the season. During those games, I was an equal or imagined I was and could throw a football or baseball, like a girl. Perhaps I was infected by the double standard rules as well. Why would anyone want to throw with a wilted wrist? No power or control on that.

Joni Mitchell's lyrics help me, I think I'm falling in love again were Julia's theme song. The boyfriends appeared and disappeared like traffic snarls on the Long Island Expressway, tossing their bodies at her the same way we threw quarters in the collection baskets at the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges for our escapes from Long Island. She worked as a teaching assistant in a nursery school, so on school breaks with several joints rolled at the ready in the glove box, we would drive to Cobleskill, Ithaca, or Rochester wherever the boyfriends were attending college.

Emily Rubin's debut novel, Stalina (2011 HMH/Mariner/Lake Union), was a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest. She is the recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writer Award, a finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her fiction and essays have been published in Red Rock Review, Confrontation, NY Observer, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Smart Set, HAPPY, and All the Restaurants in New York by John Donohue among others. She is the founder of Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that started in the East Village and takes place in laundromats around the country.

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For Love of Mom and Contraceptives. An excerpt from: Adventures with a 100-year-old Mother: 10 Stories for 10 Decades - Emily Rubin

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Hi Mom, how was your day? Oh, fine. I went to the cardiologist. How was that? She can program my pacemaker for another three years. That will get you to 105. Oh, (laughs) I don't think I'll be around that long. The way you are going, you may very well be around.

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Tin House Debut Novel Submission Period, Two Days in January.

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Tin House Debut Novel Submission Period, Two Days in January.

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OVERVIEW: Three times per year, Tin House offers a two-day submission period for writers to submit their work. Eligible writers must not currently have an agent, and must not have previously published a book (chapbooks are okay). Per our schedule below, we accept works of fiction and poetry, both originally in English and in translation […]

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Zadie Smith connecting Goebbles and Musk …

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Zadie Smith connecting Goebbles and Musk …

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An iOS app featuring exclusive shows, narrated articles and more. Currently available for New York Times news subscribers.

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Writing in the face of authoritarianism 

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Writing in the face of authoritarianism 

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I’m reading this now, and it’s a reminder of the importance of continuing to write even when your world seems hopeless.

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Indy Press Tips from Brendan Gillen, sent after his reading on 10/17/24

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Indy Press Tips from Brendan Gillen, sent after his reading on 10/17/24

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Presses

https://www.clashbooks.com/

https://www.unnamedpress.com/

https://coffeehousepress.org/

https://threeroomspress.com/

https://fourwaybooks.com/site/

https://713books.com/

https://www.autumnhouse.org/

https://redhen.org/book/

https://www.perseabooks.com/

Press/literary journal resources:

-https://www.chillsubs.com/browse/magazines

-https://authorspublish.com/

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Han Kang: ‘I was looking for answers to fundamental questions, then I realised so is every writer’

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The South Korean novelist on the death of her sister, the transformative power of writing – and how migraines helped

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All are invited to join A Public Space's upcoming benefit on 10/29/2024 in NYC!

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All are invited to join A Public Space's upcoming benefit on 10/29/2024 in NYC!

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Tickets available at the APS website: https://apublicspace.org/events/the-2024-deborah-pease-prize

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Music by Adult Rodeo (Stephanie Mankins)

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Music by Adult Rodeo (Stephanie Mankins)

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This song, Buildings, is the first song off our fourth album, called Tough Titty, released in 2003 (or 2004, I can't remember now . . . ha ha)

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Tips to Writing A Good Story, pointers from a 10-year-old, Myim Richman, shared in 2014.

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Tips to Writing A Good Story, pointers from a 10-year-old, Myim Richman, shared in 2014.

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Tips to Writing A Good Story By Myim Richman

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Looking ahead, is this a possible field trip for those in New York? 

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Looking ahead, is this a possible field trip for those in New York? 

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The Dead, 1904 - Irish Repertory Theatre

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REJOICE, THE HOLIDAY HIT RETURNS! Dot Dot Productions, in association with the American Irish Historical Society, presents Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of The Dead, 1904. based on the novella by James Joyce adapted by Paul Muldoon & Jean Hanff Korelitz directed by Ciarán O’Reilly. COMPLETE DETAILS Tickets are currently only available to Irish Rep members. […]

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I learned of this conference, which is open to the public, and wanted to post it here for those who are interested in the short story form. There will be workshops (though not required to attend) as well as plenary talks on Alice Munro, James Alan McPherson, Maori writers from New Zealand, the Irish Short Story in the 21st century. Check out the website for more details on the program! It's sounds like a fascinating conference. As one example I'm especially interested in: Making Elbow Room: Expanding the Range of Black Characters and Black Life in African American Literature.  A Discussion of the Short Stories of James Alan McPherson.  Note: McPherson is the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Thursday, June 19, 2025 - 1:30 - 3:30 pm

The chair of the plenary is Dr. Allen Gee; the participants are ZZ Packer, Diane Hinton Perry, John McCluskey, Jr. and Rachel McPherson (who is the daughter of the author).

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International Conference on the Short Story in English

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Home - International Conference on the Short Story in English - INEC

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The ICSSE 2025 Conference will take place in Ireland’s National Events and Conference Centre (INEC), Killarney, Co. Kerry from 17 - 21 June, 2025. Please note that the
Gleneagle Hotel, our primary accommodation facility, is on this site.

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per our discussion after the 7 am reading this morning . . .

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By Valerie Wingfield, Archives Unit

The General Slocum Disaster occurred on June 15, 1904. This tragedy is much less well known compared to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911, and the Titanic Disaster of April 15, 1912. Perhaps these two shocking events happening within a year focused people's attention elsewhere. But the aftermath of the sinking of the PS Slocum radically altered the German-American community of the Lower East Side forever...

The PS Slocum, built in 1891, was a paddle boat or sidewheel passenger ship. On June 15, 1904, the ship carried 1,358 passengers, plus crew.

Chartered by the St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church for $350.00, the passengers came mostly from the German-American community of the Lower East Side. Excitement and anticipation filled the air - for the passengers, this would be a fun-filled day outside of the city, and as the ship departed, it would be enjoyable to watch the shoreline as the ship made its way out to the North Shore of Long Island.

Most of the passengers were women and children. As the ship made its way up the East River, good times turned bad very quickly. There have been varying accounts of how the fire started, but it spread rapidly within a half hour of leaving dock around 9 a.m. The panic was horrific among the passengers as they faced death by drowning or being burned alive on the ship. It was a safe bet that most of the passengers could not swim, and the period clothing of the day worked against them.

Steamer 'Gen. Slocum' June 15, 1904 above; North Brothers Island, East River, N.Y. below. Image ID: PS_MSS_CD8_109

The Aftermath

For days afterward, bodies would wash ashore. Only 321 passengers survived from a total of 1,358 passengers. The final death count totaled 1,021. The next largest death toll in the United States would come decades later with 2,974 dead from 9/11.

There would be miracle stories of survivors for the lucky few and heartbreak for those who lost loved ones. It was widely reported that Captain William Henry Van Schaick would not bring the ship to shore for insurance reasons. Instead, Van Schaick steered the burning ship to North Brother Island. Van Schaick would testify that gas tanks and lumber yards made landing near 130th Street, close to the Bronx, dangerous.

Testimony and Partial Justice

Testimony that would follow in the days ahead established that there were few safeguards; life vests were rotten, life boats were in the same state, fire drills were non-existent, and the crew was untrained to handle the panic that followed on board the Slocum. Eyewitnesses from the shore could see the boat burning and wondered why the captain did not come to shore. Quickly, Van Schaick and the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company came under the crosshairs of an investigation. Frank A. Barnaby, the President of the company, defended the actions of the captain and the crew.

On January 27, 1906, justice was meted out to Captain Van Schaick by a jury of the United States Circuit Court. He was found guilty of criminal negligence that he had failed to maintain the fire drills required by law. Judge Thomas, the presiding judge, sentenced Van Schaick to 10 years at hard labor. And what happened to the company that owned the ship and the director? The Knickerbocker Steamboat Company and Frank Barnaby escaped justice.

Van Schaick would serve only part of his sentence at Sing Sing prison. He received a pardon (through the efforts of his wife) from President William Howard Taft in 1911.

Burial of the 'unidentified' 'Gen. Slocum' disaster June 15, 1904: Corner Ave. A & 6th St. Image ID: PS_MSS_CD8_106

German-American Community of the Lower East Side

Prior to the Slocum disaster, the German-American community was a vibrant and active neighborhood of the working-class and highly educated. The shock of losing so many loved ones devastated families. Suicides and depression resulted from such a loss and many residents moved away. Other communities were impacted as well. There was a loss of life among the Jewish and Italian communities that had family members aboard the ship.

Remembrance

Standing in Tompkins Square Park is a Tennessee marble obelisk dedicated to the victims of the General Slocum disaster. The fountain was erected in 1906 by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies. Etched into the marble are these words: "They are Earth's purest children, young and fair."

Suggested readings

Note

Most of the photographs were from the Gustav Scholer papers. Gustav Scholer (1851-1928) was a German-American who was an attending coroner during the General Slocum disaster.

Support The New York Public Library. Keep Libraries Open!

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The General Slocum Disaster of June 15, 1904

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By Valerie Wingfield, Archives Unit The General Slocum Disaster occurred on June 15, 1904. This tragedy is much less well known compared to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911, and the Titanic Disaster of April 15, 1912. Perhaps these two shocking events happening within a year focused people's attention elsewhere.

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The 2003 Paris Review interview of Andrea Barrett with Elizabeth Gaffney.

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The 2003 Paris Review interview of Andrea Barrett with Elizabeth Gaffney.

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Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 180

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Hi All, The reading of my story Latrine Days, in Albany for Writersread.org and the NYSWritersInst. was recorded. Here it is--Emily R.

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Hi All, The reading of my story Latrine Days, in Albany for Writersread.org and the NYSWritersInst. was recorded. Here it is--Emily R.

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The NYS Writers Institute’s Trolley Journal, Summer 2024

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I was shuffled off to Camp Blueberry Bush to give me a break from the injurious behavior of my older brother Ricky, a depressive fifteen-year-old.

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This is the original version of what was later titled What We Talk About When When We Talk About Love. The Gordon Lish edited version is below.

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Raymond Carver, Beginners _ The New Yorker

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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This is the version of the story that was published in his lifetime.

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Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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Here's the Daniel Mason story, For the Union Dead, that I mentioned in yesterday's convo on echoes. Links to Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead and Alan Tate's Ode to the Confederate Dead are here (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57035/for-the-union-dead) and here (https://poets.org/poem/ode-confederate-dead). - Dan

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Daniel Mason_ 'For the Union Dead,' a Short Story - The Atlantic

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This 1993 story in the New Yorker came up in today's craft convo with Dave. It is now viewed as showing Munro's response to learning of her husband's sexual abuse of her daughter as a child.

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I told a few members about this non-fiction piece I had published in 2019. A memoir-like rumination on Hoffa, mobsters, "The Irishman" and mostly my interaction with them. It's about a 5-10 minute read. Mauro

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Our Boys From Jefferson Street: Reckoning with the Murder of Jimmy Hoffa and a Culture of Tarnished Men

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I had answered a request in the summer of 2017 for “Italian-American extras” for Martin Scorsese’s Netflix production of The Irishman, a film based on the biography of Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran’…

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Here’s a link to my story:

https://ovunquesiamoweb.com/summer-2024/mauro-altamura/

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Maybe this is easier to link to the story.  Mauro https://ovunquesiamoweb.com/summer-2024/mauro-altamura/

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Maybe this is easier to link to the story.  Mauro https://ovunquesiamoweb.com/summer-2024/mauro-altamura/

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Thanks so much to Michelle Messina Reale and Tea Marrocco for including my short story "The Next Hero" in the Summer 2024 issue of Ovunque Siamo. I'm thrilled to be part of this community of writers...

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This is the article on Maclean that Elizabeth mentioned in today's Craft Convo. Maclean is the author of A River Runs through It.

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Norman Maclean Didn’t Publish Much. What He Did Contains Everything _ The New Yorker

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Weeks After Alice Munro’s Death, Daughter Tells of Dark Family Secret

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Andrea Skinner said in the Toronto Star that her stepfather sexually abused her at age 9, and that her mother stayed with him after she learned of it.

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Here is the Mary Gaitskill story that I mentioned at today's craft convo. - Dan

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Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry _ The New Yorker

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When we discussed the Grace Paley story, Living, I mentioned that I'd read her say every story needs money and blood. Here is the quote:

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When we discussed the Grace Paley story, Living, I mentioned that I'd read her say every story needs money and blood. Here is the quote:

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-From Vicki Madden

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While Reading Grace Haley--something by G. Saunders

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While Reading Grace Haley--something by G. Saunders

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When photography arrived in the world, or so I've heard, painting had to reconsider itself. "What can I do that photography can't?" painting asked itself, in its alarmed French accent. "How may I yet be essential?"

The prime quality of literary prose-that is, the thing it does better than any other form (movies, songs, sculpture, tweets, television, you name it)-is voice. A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is about as close as we can get to modelling pure empathy.

Grace Paley is one of the great writers of voice of the last century. There's an experience one has reading a stylist like her that has to do with how rich in truth the phrase-or-sentence-level bursts are and how quickly they follow upon one another. An image or phrase finds you, pleases you with its wit or vividness, shoehorns open your evolving vision of the fictive world, and before that change gets fully processed, here comes another. You find yourself having trouble believing this much wit is washing over you. A world is appearing before you that is richer and stranger than you could possibly have imagined, and that world gains rooms and vistas and complications with every phrase. What you are experiencing is intimate contact with an extraordinary intelligence, which causes the pleasant sensation of one's personality receding and being replaced by the writer's consciousness.

Paley's approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn't so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle. Mere straightforward representation is not her game. In fact, she seems to say, the world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe: what we need is to be reminded to love it, and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.

I'd always thought of Paley as a realist, but immersing myself again in her work, I find that she is actually a thrilling post-modernist, in cahoots with her pal Donald Barthelme to remind us that, yes, there certainly is a World, and there is the Word with which to describe it, and normally World and Word seem like two separate things, but with sufficient authorial attention, World and Word can be made to pop back into their proper relation, which is: unity.

What I mean by this is that, as you read a Paley story, you will find that it is, yes, set in our world (New York City, most often), and that, O.K., it seems concerned with normal-enough things (love, divorce, politics, a day at the park), but then you will start to notice that the language is . . . uncommon. Not quite of this world.

Here is a character in "An Interest in Life," speaking (at a normal-enough kitchen table) of his relation to the Church: "You know . . . we iconoclasts . . . we freethinkers . . . we latter-day Masons . . . we idealists . . . we dreamers . . . we are never far from our nervous old mother, the Church. She is never far from us . . . Wherever we are, we can hear, no matter how faint, her hourly bells, tolling the countryside, reverberating in the cities, bringing in our civilized minds the passionate deed of Mary. Every hour on the hour we are startled with remembrance of what was done for us. FOR US."

Not your normal post-breakfast speech.

Well, yes and no.

Like her hero Isaac Babel, the great Russian writer, Paley understood that just because such language doesn't normally get spoken aloud in the so-called real world, that does not make it unreal, or contrived. On the contrary: language like this is the real language going on in the head of man all the time, whether he can articulate it or not. I find a Shakespearean quality in Paley; the people are very real there on the stage, in their faded coats and crooked hair-bows and so on, but their talking is coming from a higher realm, and it has been elevated like that in order to parse and contemplate the big questions with maximal efficiency.

But all of this is done with a wondrous ear and a love for the vernacular. Have we had another American writer better at celebrating the poetry in which we Americans think, and into which we sometimes erupt? "You see I can crack a little joke because look at this pleasure," for example. Or: "No reason to worry about me, I got a lot of irons in the fire. I get advanced all the time, matter of fact."

Another writer might say, of a group of teachers just pre-Christmas, "They, each of them, were remembering some happy incident from their own childhood holidays, and this made them happy." (Very nice.) Paley says, "They teachers became happier and happier. Their heads were ringing like the bells of childhood." (Boom.) Instead of simply knowing that the teachers were happy pre-Christmas, we are, for that split second, happy teachers, pre-Christmas. (We smell the pine from the crookedly hanging wreath near the bulletin board that will be brown by the time school resumes, in January.) Another writer might have a character tell her mother to keep her opinions about men to herself; Paley has the narrator of "A Woman, Young and Old" advise dear mother to "keep your taste in your own hatch." Which of us, trying to communicate to our sister that we feel she somewhat underestimates the extent of our worldliness, would think to tell her, as Aunt Rose does in "Goodbye and Good Luck," that our "heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that (your) whole married life is a kindergarten." Well, take that, sister.

"You've used me in a bad way. That's not cool. That smells under heaven," Dennis the cab-driver/lover/songwriter says, par crapamundo, in "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute."

Or how about this, from "Ruthy and Edie"? "If you said the word 'city' to Edie, or even the cool adjective 'municipal,' specific children usually sitting at the back of the room appeared before her eyes and refused to answer when she called on them."

This is what I mean by the unity of Word and World: something about the arrangement of the words, read in the context of the story, will not (will no longer) let us experience these sentences as mere words on a page. The words sort of recede as you read them, or, maybe, our attention diverts from their wordness, to the "image" that appears in our head (although "image" is not quite right; it is something else going on up there), and suddenly-are we reading, or living "there" in that fictive moment?

Yes.

All these agitated manic New York voices explaining themselves! You feel the stress and pace and wild aspirations of the city as it was. And is. The city is the energy coming off a million hustling souls who have both forgotten they will die soon and are very actively feeling that, ah God, they most definitely will. So what do they do? They talk. They protest, explain, beg to differ. In Paley you hear America singing, yes, but also: belly-aching, kvetching, teasing, advocating, disowning, politicizing, explaining the states of their bodies, assessing friends, lovers, and their children with both clinical distance and aching love, sometimes in the same sentence. When I think to myself, "What was the world of American adults like, back before I was one, in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies?" my mind turns to Paley's stories. All those desirous, active souls, with one foot in hippiedom/free love (singing crazy songs by bands named the Lepers-formerly the Split Atom, possibly soon WinterMoss), and the other in the Depression, dusty old progressive dreams in their heads (of Guthrie, of the Wobblies), so alive with the tremendous energy that generation expended to make things better ("the vigiling fasting praying in or out / of jail their lightheartedness which floated / about the year's despair"). However, these firebrands were sometimes depressingly human in their desire to wring the most out of life and one another. And now those people are old, going or gone. Paley's stories remind us that our present vitality-our sense of being the first humans ever, and permanent-will, too, someday seem "historical," and will have passed. But, in her particular, larger-than-life way, she also makes these people live forever: particularized receptacles of the eternal.

Any object, any human gesture, contains an infinity of language with which it might be described. But through habituation, or paucity of talent, or lack of originality, most of us, writing, reach for the most workaday speech-tools, and in this way the world is made dull. Here comes Paley: seemingly incapable of a banal sentence, a loose observation, or a distracted fictive moment.

Paley is, for me, a kind of secular saint. What is a saint? Someone particularly attentive to things as they are, and extraordinarily accepting of them. Paley honors every person and thing she creates by presenting it at its best, or at least its liveliest-which may be the same thing.

This quality of simple, accepting, energetic seeing makes Paley's world feel particularly egalitarian. I think of the family, for example, in "A Woman, Young and Old." They seem, well, working-class (in the general mayhem of their lives, and the way their collective eye keeps sliding over to questions of livelihood), but because the Paley-narrator does not hang that sign around their necks, the world they live in seems immense and mutable. Who are these people, and of what social class? Paley won't say, exactly. That would be rude. Also, not interesting. And reductive, and freedom-decreasing. Rather, she just shows them acting and talking and choosing happily enough within their limitations. They have autonomy, agency, desire, a right to their own feelings and flavor of understanding. "Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life," she wrote, in "A Conversation with My Father." This results in a fresh angle on things like "gender" or "class"-to the point of destabilizing them and giving the people trapped inside these constructs liberty, and a voice. In this sense, Paley is a Whitmanesque writer: she loves what she sees, just as it is, and is in favor of it being even more itself. How do we know she loves it? By how precisely she describes it. ("I am right next to the pickle barrel. My pinky is making tiny whirlpools in the brine.") Also, there is an extraordinary quality of freedom in these narratives. Her people do not "merely" behave like people in stories, but they also do not behave "merely" like people in the real world-they behave, satisfyingly, like people in a spectacularly mindful artistic purification of the real. An average writer writes toward a familiar vision, be it shocking or comforting; a genius like Paley creates an entirely new world by leaping from stone to stone, these "stones" being distinct, vivid, fictive moments-vivid in language, vivid in import. The route is not, it seems, planned or pre-vetted, but is continuously creating itself by asking the question, "Where is the life here?" which she answers with an essential sub-question, "Where does the language come most alive?" The resulting structure has the effect of startling and refreshing us; or, maybe, refreshing us via startling: the freshness of the world mimicked in the freshness of the shape of the story, the reader reminded of her susceptibility to, and yearning for, freshness.

All of Paley's work is marked by heart, precision, and concern for others, and surges with real, messy life, and the way life, lived, actually makes us feel: outgunned, befriended, short on time, long on regret, so happy we can't stand it, so in love we become fools. Moments in her stories, often her endings, cause me real sorrow, and, perhaps acclimated to the contemporary tendency toward compensatory lyrical updraft, I feel myself mentally looking over at the author, for, maybe a conciliatory little suggestion that all will be well? But no. She just shrugs. "It's like that sometimes," she says. I love her for this. She's not big on bromides. Her vision of things is complex, by which I mean: she knows that a person can feel irritated and happy at once; despairing and lucky; pleased to be a mother and sick to the core of being a mother. And she is O.K. with all of that.

Her stories, like all great stories, lead us into that uncomfortable holy of holies: ambiguity. How are we to feel, ultimately, about the intermittently racist Iz of "Zagrowsky Tells"? Or the fourteen-year-old who beds a soldier in "A Woman Young and Old," and the soldier who beds her right back? About all of these callow, absent husbands, who show up late and immediately start advising? Well, we feel fully about them, that's for sure. We walk away from her stories feeling, not, "Oh, he got his, or will," but, rather, "Yes, that's how it is in this world." We see them through the lens of her total acceptance of, and fascination with, them.

I love, too, her extraordinary happy frankness in all things; that is, her courage. She is unafraid, for example, to cry fraud re: that particular flavor of grinding American optimism. We Americans are addicted to the happy lie and to the associated notion that to critique something-to call it what it is-is a form of negativity; a defeatist buzzkill. Paley (happily, fearlessly) doesn't buy it. A character tells a dying friend, in "Living," that, well, "Life isn't all that great . . . We've had nothing but crummy days and crummy guys and broke all the time and cockroaches and nothing to do on Sunday but take the kids to Central Park and row on that lousy lake"-and we have to agree with her. "I want to see it all," the dying friend replies, and we agree with her, too. Paley, like her spiritual predecessor Chekhov, likes to have it both ways.

"Art does not have to solve problems," Chekhov said. "It just has to formulate them correctly."

"I'm artistic," a character says in "A Woman Young and Old," "and I sometimes hold two views at once."

Grace Paley has been gone for ten years now. What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking. Those of us still down here are always in need of these models, especially in times of trouble. (And all times are times of trouble.) We have, most of us, yet to find a way of seeing and thinking that works -that allows us to live comfortably and positively in all of this beautiful mess-but our writers, our dear passed writers, have put forth some pretty good models, so that we might suffer less, or at least suffer within some beautiful context. Faith, in the story "Friends," says something about the act of tutoring children that is also true of the conversation between reader and writer: "Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time," she says, "it may at least be known." A writer as good as Paley helps us (at least) know our world by modelling a certain stance toward it that is so pure and distinctive that it makes us go back into the world and take a harder, fonder look at it.

Paley's model advises us to suffer less by loving more-love the world more, and each other more-and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.

To see better means: more joy, less judgment. There is a roof on our language that holds down our love. What has put that roof there? Our natural dullness, exacerbated by that grinding daily need to survive. A writer like Paley comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up.
This essay was drawn from the introduction to "A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry," which is out in April from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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The writer's literary approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn't so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle.

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I am a fan of the work of these two. I look forward to hearing them talk about writing.  ER

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I am a fan of the work of these two. I look forward to hearing them talk about writing.  ER

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✨ Join Authors Elizabeth McCracken and Sabrina Orah Mark in Conversation Next Week! ✨

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Glob­al Jew­ish Lit­er­ary Alliance next Thursday, June 20th, for our second annual literary event: a con­ver­sa­tion between authors Eliz­a­beth McCrack­en, the 2024 Wingate Prize win­ner for her book, , and Sab­ri­na Orah Mark, Jew­ish Book Coun­cil's 73rd Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award win­ner for the Auto­bi­og­ra­phy and Mem­oir cat­e­go­ry for her book Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales The two authors will dis­cuss their books, which revolve around com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ships with fam­i­ly, the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction, and the rela­tion­ship the author has with them­selves as a per­son and a writer.

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Hudson Valley writing friends! I'll be reading at this SUMMER CAMP story event on June 30th in Albany. My story Latrine Days is about isolation and inspiration at a Girl Scout camp.  Maybe see you there to cheer me and the other writers on!  thank you. Emily 

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Hudson Valley writing friends! I'll be reading at this SUMMER CAMP story event on June 30th in Albany. My story Latrine Days is about isolation and inspiration at a Girl Scout camp.  Maybe see you there to cheer me and the other writers on!  thank you. Emily 

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Spoken Word Short Story Writers Share True Experiences on Summer Camp, Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 2:00 PM | Meetup

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Writers Read™ and the [New York State Writers Institute](https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/) present a curated program of personal, 650-word, five-minute **Summer Camp**

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Received in the mail a few days ago.  Congrats Mj !

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Received in the mail a few days ago.  Congrats Mj !

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I have a dream job and family, but I really want to write novels _ Life and style _ The Guardian

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For those who can't access the site.

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Alice Munro, What Is Remembered _ The New Yorker

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Alice Munro - 1994 Paris Review Interview

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Alice Munro - 1994 Paris Review Interview

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FYI.

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Alice Munro, Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 137

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Since the subject of time shifts came up in the convo on Alice Munro, let me add What Is Remembered, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2001 and republished on the site this past week.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/02/19/what-is-remembered-alice-munro-fiction

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In a hotel room in Vancouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves. She wears a beige linen dress and a flimsy white scarf over her hair. Dark hair, at that time. She smiles, because she has remembered something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand said, or was quoted as saying, in a magazine. A quote within a quote-something Queen Sirikit said that Balmain had said.

"Balmain taught me everything. He said, 'Always wear white gloves. It's best.'"

It's best. Meriel smiles at that, not as you'd smile at a joke but as at an endearing absurdity. Her gloved hands look formal but helpless. A kitten's paws.

Pierre asks why she's smiling, and she says, "Nothing," then tells him.

He says, "Who is Balmain?"

They were getting ready to go to a funeral. They had come over on the ferry last night, from their home on Vancouver Island, to be sure of being on time for the morning ceremony. It was the first time they'd stayed in a hotel since their wedding night. When they went on a holiday now, it was always with their two children, and they looked for inexpensive motels that catered to families.

This was only the second funeral they had been to as a married couple. Pierre's father was dead, and Meriel's mother was dead, but these deaths had happened before Pierre and Meriel met. Last year, a teacher at Pierre's school died suddenly, and there was a fine service, with the schoolboy choir and the sixteenth-century words for the Burial of the Dead. The man had been in his mid-sixties, and his death seemed to Meriel and Pierre only a little surprising and hardly sad. It did not make much difference, as they saw it, whether you died at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five.

The funeral today was another matter. It was Jonas who was being buried. Pierre's best friend for years and Pierre's age-twenty-nine. They had grown up together, in West Vancouver-they could remember it before the Lions Gate Bridge was built, when it seemed like a small town. Their parents were friends. When the boys were eleven or twelve years old they had built a rowboat and launched it at Dundarave Pier. At the university, they had parted company for a while-Jonas was studying to be an engineer, while Pierre was enrolled in classics, and the arts students and the engineering students traditionally despised each other. But, in the years since then, the friendship had to some extent been revived. Jonas, who was not married, had come to visit Pierre and Meriel, and sometimes stayed with them for a week at a time.

What had happened in their lives surprised them, and they would joke about it. Jonas was the one whose choice of profession had seemed so reassuring to his parents, and had roused a muted envy in Pierre's parents, yet it was Pierre who had married and got a teaching job and taken on ordinary responsibilities, while Jonas, after university, had never settled down with a girl or a job. He was always on some sort of probation that did not end up in a firm attachment to any company, and the girls-at least to hear him tell it-were always on some sort of probation with him. His last engineering job was in the northern part of the province, and he stayed on there after either quitting or getting fired. Employment terminated by mutual consent, he wrote to Pierre, adding that he was living at the hotel, where all the high-class people lived, and might get a job on a logging crew. He was also learning to fly a plane, and thinking of becoming a bush pilot. He promised to visit when present financial complications were worked out.

Meriel had hoped that wouldn't happen. Jonas slept on the living-room couch and in the morning threw the covers on the floor for her to pick up. He kept Pierre awake half the night, talking about things that had happened when they were teen-agers, or even younger. His name for Pierre was "Piss-hair," a nickname from those years, and he referred to other old friends as Stinkpool and Doc and Buster, never by the names Meriel had always heard-Stan and Don and Rick. He recalled with a gruff pedantry the details of incidents that Meriel did not think so remarkable or funny (the bag of dog shit set on fire on the teacher's front steps, the badgering of the old man who offered boys a nickel to pull down their pants) and grew irritated if the conversation turned to the present.

When she had to tell Pierre that Jonas was dead she was apologetic, shaken. Apologetic because she hadn't liked him and shaken because he was the first person they knew well, in their own age group, to have died. But Pierre did not seem to be surprised or particularly stricken.

"Suicide," he said.

She said no, an accident. He was riding a motorcycle, after dark, on gravel, and he went off the road. Somebody found him, or was with him, help was at hand, but he died within an hour. His injuries were mortal.

That was what his mother had said, on the phone. She had sounded so quickly resigned, so unsurprised. As Pierre had when he said "Suicide."

After that, Pierre and Meriel had hardly spoken about the death itself, just about the funeral, the hotel room, the need for an all-night sitter. His suit to be cleaned, a white shirt obtained. It was Meriel who made the arrangements, and Pierre kept checking up on her in an irritable, husbandly way. She understood that he wished her to be controlled and matter-of-fact, as he was, and not to lay claim to any sorrow that-he would be sure-she could not really feel. She had asked him why he had said "Suicide," and he had told her, "That's just what came into my head." She felt his evasion to be some sort of warning, or even a rebuke. As if he suspected her of deriving from this death-or from their proximity to this death-a feeling that was discreditable and self-centered. A morbid, preening excitement.

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that would have to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back-during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children-into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there.

After the funeral, some people had been invited back to Jonas's parents' house in Dundarave. The rhododendron hedge was in bloom, all red and pink and purple. Jonas's father was complimented on the garden.

"Well, I don't know," he said. "We had to get it in shape in a bit of a hurry."

Jonas's mother said, "This isn't a real lunch, I'm afraid. Just a pickup." Most people were drinking sherry, though some of the men had whiskey. Food was set out on the extended dining-room table-salmon mousse and crackers, mushroom tarts, sausage rolls, a light lemon cake and cut-up fruit and pressed-almond cookies, as well as shrimp and ham and cucumber-and-avocado sandwiches. Pierre heaped everything onto his small china plate and Meriel heard his mother say to him, "You know, you could always come back for a second helping."

She didn't live in West Vancouver anymore but had come in from White Rock for the funeral. And she wasn't quite confident about a direct reprimand, now that Pierre was a teacher and a married man.

"Or didn't you think there'd be any left?" she said.

Pierre said carelessly, "Maybe not of what I wanted."

His mother spoke to Meriel.

"What a nice dress."

"Yes, but look," said Meriel, smoothing down the wrinkles that had formed while she sat through the service.

"That's the trouble," Pierre's mother said.

"What's the trouble?" said Jonas's mother brightly, sliding some tarts onto the warming dish.

"That's the trouble with linen," said Pierre's mother. "Meriel was just saying how her dress had wrinkled up"-she did not say, "during the funeral service"-"and I was saying, that's the trouble with linen."

Jonas's mother might not have been listening. Looking across the room, she said, "That's the doctor who looked after him. He flew down from Smithers in his own plane. Really, we thought that was so good of him."

Pierre's mother said, "That's quite an undertaking."

"Yes. Well. I suppose he gets around that way, to attend to people in the bush."

The man they were talking about was speaking to Pierre. He was not wearing a suit, though he had a decent jacket on, and a shirt and tie.

"I suppose he would," said Pierre's mother, and Jonas's mother said, "Yes," and Meriel felt as if something had been settled between them.

She looked down at the table napkins, which were folded in quarters. They were not as big as dinner napkins or as small as cocktail napkins. They were set in overlapping rows, so that a corner of each napkin (the corner embroidered with a tiny blue or pink or yellow flower) overlapped the folded corner of its neighbor. No two napkins embroidered with the same color of flower were touching each other. Nobody had disturbed them, or if they had-for she did see a few people around the room holding napkins-they had picked up napkins from the end of the row in a careful way, and this order had been maintained.

At the funeral service, the minister had compared Jonas's life on earth to the life of a baby in the womb. The baby, he said, knows nothing of any other existence and inhabits its warm, dark, watery cave with not an inkling of the great, bright world it will soon be thrust into. And we on earth have an inkling, but are really quite unable to imagine the light that we will enter, after we have survived the travail of death. If the baby could somehow be informed of what would happen to it in the near future, would it not be incredulous as well as afraid? And so are we, most of the time, but we should not be, for we have been given assurance. Even so, our blind brains cannot imagine, cannot conceive of, what we will pass into. The baby is lapped in its ignorance, in the faith of its dumb, helpless being. And we who are not entirely ignorant or entirely knowing must take care to wrap ourselves in our faith, in the word of our Lord.

Meriel looked at the minister, who stood in the hall doorway with a glass of sherry in his hand, listening to a vivacious woman with blond, puffed hair. They didn't seem to be talking about the pangs of death and the light ahead. What would he do if she walked over and tackled him on that subject?

Nobody would have the heart to. Or the bad manners.

Instead, she looked at Pierre and the bush doctor. Pierre was talking with a boyish liveliness she didn't often see in him these days. She occupied herself by pretending that she was seeing him for the first time now. His curly, short-cropped, very dark hair receding at the temples, baring the smooth, gold-tinged ivory skin. His wide, sharp shoulders and long, fine limbs and nicely shaped, rather small skull. He smiled enchantingly but never to charm, and seemed to distrust smiling altogether since he had become a teacher of boys. Faint lines of permanent fret were set in his forehead.

She thought of a teachers' party-more than a year ago-when she and he had found themselves, at opposite sides of the room, left out of the nearby conversations. She had circled the room and got close to him without his noticing, and then she began to talk to him as if she were a discreetly flirtatious stranger. He smiled as he was smiling now-but with a difference, as was natural when talking to an ensnaring woman-and he took up the charade. They exchanged charged looks and vapid speeches until they both broke down laughing. Someone came up to them and told them that married jokes were not allowed.

"What makes you think we're really married?" said Pierre, whose behavior at such parties was usually so circumspect.

She crossed the room to him now with no such foolishness in mind. She had to remind him that they must soon go their separate ways. He was driving to Horseshoe Bay to catch the next ferry, and she would have to get across the North Shore to Lynn Valley, by bus. She had arranged to take this chance to visit a woman her dead mother had loved and admired, and in fact had named her for, and whom Meriel had always called Aunt, though they were not related by blood. Aunt Muriel. (It was when Meriel went away to college that she had changed the spelling.) This old woman was living in a nursing home in Lynn Valley, and Meriel had not visited her for over a year. It took too much time to get there, on their infrequent family trips to Vancouver, and the children were upset by the atmosphere of the nursing home and by the looks of the people who lived there. So was Pierre, though he did not like to say so. Instead, he asked what relation this person was to Meriel, anyway.

It's not as if she was a real aunt.
So now Meriel was going to see her alone. She had said that she would feel guilty if she didn't go when she had the chance. Also, though she didn't say so, she was looking forward to the time that this would give her to herself.

"Maybe I could drive you," Pierre said. "God knows how long you'll have to wait for the bus."

"You can't," she said. "You'd miss the ferry." She reminded him of their arrangement with the sitter. He said, "You're right."

The man he'd been talking to-the doctor-had not had any choice but to listen to this conversation and said unexpectedly, "Let me drive you."

"I thought you came here in an airplane," said Meriel, just as Pierre said, "This is my wife, I'm sorry. Meriel."

The doctor told her a name which she hardly heard.

"It's not so easy landing a plane on Hollyburn Mountain," he said. "So I left it at the airport and rented a car."

Some slight forcing of courtesy, on his part, made Meriel think that she had sounded obnoxious. She was often either too bold or too shy.

"Would that really be O.K.?" Pierre said. "Do you have time?"

The doctor looked directly at Meriel. This was not a disagreeable look-it was not aggressive or sly, it was not appraising. But it was not socially deferential, either.

He said, "Of course."

So it was agreed that this was how it would be. They would start saying their goodbyes now, and Pierre would leave for the ferry, and Asher, as his name was-or Dr. Asher-would drive Meriel to Lynn Valley.

What Meriel planned to do after that was to visit with Aunt Muriel-possibly even sit through supper with her-then catch the bus from Lynn Valley to the downtown bus depot (buses to town were relatively frequent) and board the late-evening bus, which would take her to the ferry, and home.

The nursing home was called Princess Manor. It was a one-story building with extended wings, covered in pinkish-brown stucco. The street was busy, and there were no grounds to speak of, no hedges or fences to shut out noise or protect the scraps of lawn. On one side, there was a Gospel Hall with a joke of a steeple, on the other a gas station.

"The word 'manor' doesn't mean anything at all anymore, does it?" said Meriel. "It doesn't even mean there's an upstairs. It just means that you're supposed to think that a place is something it doesn't even pretend to be."

The doctor said nothing-perhaps what she had said didn't make any sense to him. Or wasn't worth saying even if it did. All the way from Dundarave, she had listened to herself talking and been dismayed. It wasn't so much that she was prattling, saying just anything that came into her head; rather, that she was trying to express things that seemed to her interesting, or that might have been interesting if she could get them into shape. But they probably sounded pretentious, if not insane, rattled off in the way she was doing. She must seem like one of those women who are determined not to have an ordinary conversation but a real one. And even though she knew that nothing was working, that her talk must seem to him an imposition, she was unable to stop herself.

She didn't know what had started this. Unease, simply because she so seldom talked to a stranger nowadays? The oddity of riding alone in a car with a man who wasn't her husband?

She had even asked, rashly, what he thought of Pierre's notion that the motorcycle accident was suicide.

"You could float that idea around about any number of violent accidents," he had said.

"Don't bother pulling into the drive," she said. "I can get out here." So embarrassed, so eager was she to get away from him and his barely polite indifference that she put her hand on the door handle, as if to open it, while they were still moving along the street.

"I was planning to park," he said, turning in anyway "I wasn't going to leave you stranded."

She said, "I might be quite a while."

"That's all right. I can wait. Or I could come in and look around. If you wouldn't mind that."

She was about to say that nursing homes can be dreary and unnerving. Then she remembered that he was a doctor and would see nothing here that he had not seen before. And something in the way he had said "if you wouldn't mind that"-some mild formality, but also an uncertainty in his voice-astonished her. It seemed that he was making an offering of his time and his presence that had little to do with courtesy but, rather, something to do with herself. It was an offer made with a touch of frank humility, but it was not a plea. If she had said that she would really rather not take up any more of his time, he would not have tried any further persuasion; he would have said goodbye with an even courtesy and driven away.

As it was, they got out of the car and walked side by side across the parking lot, toward the front entrance.

Several old or disabled people were sitting out on a square of pavement that had a few furry-looking shrubs and pots of petunias around it to suggest a garden patio. Aunt Muriel was not among them, but Meriel found herself bestowing greetings. Every step she took, she felt as if there were a wire that lit up, a bright message travelling from her heels to the top of her skull.

(When she asked him later "Why did you come in there with me?" he said, "Because I didn't want to lose sight of you.")

Aunt Muriel was sitting by herself, in a wheelchair, in the dim corridor just outside her own bedroom door. She was fat and glimmering-but that was because of being swathed in an asbestos apron so she could smoke a cigarette. Meriel believed that when she had said goodbye to her, months and seasons ago, she had been sitting in the same chair in the same spot-though without the asbestos apron, which must accord with some new rule, or reflect some further decline. Very likely, she sat here every day beside the fixed ashtray filled with sand, looking at the liverish painted wall (they had painted it pink or mauve, but it looked liverish, the corridor being so dim) with the bracket shelf on it supporting a spill of fake ivy.

"Meriel? I thought it was you," Muriel said. "I could tell by your steps. I could tell by your breathing. My cataracts have got quite vicious. All I can see is blobs."

"It's me, all right. How are you?" Meriel kissed her temple. "Why aren't you out in the sunshine?"

"I'm not fond of sunshine," the old woman said. "I have to think of my complexion."

She might have been joking, but it was perhaps the truth. Her pale face and hands were covered with large spots-dead-white spots that caught what light there was here, turning silvery. She had been a true blonde, pink-faced, lean, with straight, well-cut hair that had gone white in her thirties. Now the hair was ragged, mussed from being rubbed into pillows, and the lobes of her ears hung out of it like flat teats. And she used to wear little diamonds in her ears-where had they gone? Diamonds in her ears, real gold chains, real pearls, silk shirts of unusual colors-amber, aubergine-and beautiful narrow shoes.

She smelled of hospital powder and the licorice drops she sucked all day between the rationed cigarettes.

"We need some chairs," she said. She leaned forward, waved the cigarette hand in the air, tried to whistle. "Service, please. Chairs."

The doctor said, "I'll find some."

The old woman and the young one were left alone.

"What's your husband's name?"

"Pierre."

"And you have the two children, don't you? Jane and David?"

"That's right. But the man who's with me-"

"Ah, no. That's not your husband."

Aunt Muriel belonged to Meriel's grandmother's generation, rather than her mother's. She had been Meriel's mother's art teacher at school, first an inspiration, then an ally, then a friend. She had painted large abstract pictures, one of which-a present to Meriel's mother-had hung in the back hall of the house where Meriel grew up and been moved to the dining room whenever the artist came to visit. Its colors were murky-dark reds and browns (Meriel's father called it "Manure Pile on Fire")-but Aunt Muriel's spirit seemed always bright and dauntless. She had lived in Vancouver when she was young, before she came to teach in this town in the interior. She had been friends with artists whose names were now in the papers. She longed to go back there and eventually did, to live with and manage the affairs of a rich old couple who were friends and patrons of artists. She was left out in the cold when they died. She lived on her pension, took up watercolors because she could not afford oils, starved herself (Meriel's mother suspected) so that she could take Meriel out to lunch-Meriel being then a university student. On these occasions she talked in a rush of jokes and judgments, mostly pointing out how works and ideas that people raved about were rubbish, but how here and there-in the output of some obscure contemporary or half-forgotten figure from another century-there was something extraordinary. That was her stalwart word of praise- extraordinary. A hush in her voice, as if there and then and rather to her own surprise she had come on something in the world that was still to be absolutely honored.

The doctor returned with two chairs and introduced himself, quite naturally, as if there'd been no chance to do it till now.

"Eric Asher."

"He's a doctor," said Meriel. She was about to start explaining about the funeral, the accident, the flight down from Smithers, but the conversation was taken away from her.

"But I'm not here officially, don't worry," the doctor said.

"Oh, no," said Aunt Muriel. "You're here with her."

"Yes," he said.

At this moment he reached across the space between their two chairs and picked up Meriel's hand, holding it for a moment in a hard grip, then letting it go. And he said to Aunt Muriel, "How could you tell that? By my breathing?"

"I could tell," she said with some impatience. "I used to be a devil myself."

Her voice-the quaver or titter in it-made Meriel feel that there was some betrayal stirring: a betrayal of the past, perhaps of her, Meriel's, mother, and the kind of friendship she had had with this woman, or thought she had. Or of those lunches with Meriel herself, the high-minded discussions. Some degradation, which remotely excited her.

"Oh, I used to have friends," Aunt Muriel said. "Some people who had a place where we all used to go, on Bowen Island. The Delaneys. You don't remember the Delaneys?" She spoke directly to the man, not to Meriel.

"I don't think I do," he said. "No."

"I thought you might have heard of them. Well, there were various goings on. What took place there might have looked like an adventure but it was all according to script, if you know what I mean. So not so much of an adventure, actually. We all got drunk as skunks, of course. But they always had to have the candles lit in a circle and the music on, of course-more like a ritual. But not altogether. It didn't mean you mightn't meet somebody new and let the script go all to hell. Just meet for the first time and start kissing like mad and run off into the forest. In the dark. You couldn't get very far. Never mind. Struck down."

She had started to cough, tried speaking through the cough, gave up, and hacked violently. The doctor got up and struck her expertly a couple of times on her bent back. The coughing ended with a groan.

"Better," she said, and retrieved her story. "Oh, you knew what you were doing but you pretended not to. One time, they had a blindfold on me. Not out in the woods, that was inside. It was all right, I consented. It didn't work so well, though-I mean, I did know. There probably wasn't anybody there that I wouldn't have recognized, anyway."

She coughed again, though not so desperately as before. Then she raised her head, breathed deeply and noisily for a few minutes, holding up her hands to stall the conversation, as if she would soon have something more, something important, to say. But all she did, finally, was laugh and say, "Now I've got a permanent blindfold. Cataracts. Doesn't get me taken advantage of, in any debauch that I know about."

"How long have they been growing?" the doctor said with a respectful interest, and to Meriel's great relief there began an absorbed conversation, an informed discussion about the ripening of cataracts, their removal, the pros and cons of this operation, and Aunt Muriel's distrust of the eye doctor who was shunted off-as she said-to look after the people in here. Salacious fantasy-that was what Meriel now decided it had been-slid without the smallest difficulty into a medical chat, agreeably pessimistic on Aunt Muriel's side and carefully reassuring on the doctor's. The sort of conversation that must take place regularly within these walls.

A glance was exchanged between Meriel and the doctor, asking whether the visit had lasted long enough. A stealthy, considering, almost married glance, its masquerade and its bland intimacy arousing to those who were, after all, not married.

Soon.

Aunt Muriel took the initiative herself. She said, "I'm sorry, it's rude of me, I have to tell you-I get tired." No hint in her manner now of the person who had launched the first part of the conversation. Distracted, playacting, and with a vague feeling of shame, Meriel said goodbye. She had a feeling that she would never see Aunt Muriel again, and she never did.

Around a corner, with doors open on rooms where people lay asleep or perhaps watching from their beds, the doctor touched Meriel between her shoulder blades and moved his hand down her back to her waist. She realized that he was picking at the cloth of her dress, which had stuck to her damp skin when she sat pressed against the chair back. The dress was also damp under her arms.

And she had to go to the bathroom. She kept looking for the visitors' washrooms, which she thought she had spotted when they were on their way in.

There. She was right. A relief but also a difficulty, because she had to move suddenly out of his range and say "Just a moment," in a voice that sounded to herself distant and irritated. He said, "Yes," and briskly headed for the men's room, and the delicacy of the moment was lost.

When she went out into the hot sunlight, she saw him pacing by the car, smoking. He hadn't smoked before-not in Jonas's parents' house or on the way here or with Aunt Muriel. The act seemed to isolate him, to show some impatience, perhaps an impatience to be done with one thing and get on to the next. Meriel was not so sure now whether she was the next thing or the thing to be done with.

"Where to?" he said, when they were driving. Then, as if he thought he had spoken too brusquely, "Where would you like to go?" It was almost as if he were speaking to a child, or to Aunt Muriel-somebody he was bound to entertain for the afternoon. And Meriel said, "I don't know," as if she had no choice but to let herself become that sullen, burdensome child. She was holding in a wail of disappointment, a clamor of desire. Desire that had seemed to be shy and sporadic but inevitable, yet was now all of a sudden to be declared inappropriate, one-sided. His hands on the wheel were all his own, reclaimed, as if he had never touched her.

"How about Stanley Park? Would you like to go for a walk in Stanley Park?"

She said, "Oh, Stanley Park. I haven't been there for ages," as if the idea had perked her up and she could imagine nothing better. And she made things worse by adding, "It's such a gorgeous day."

"It is. It is indeed."

They spoke like caricatures-it was unbearable.

"They don't give you a radio in these rented cars. Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes not."

She wound her window down as they crossed the Lions Gate Bridge. She asked him if he minded.

"No. Not at all."

"It always means summer to me. To have the window down and your elbow out and the breeze coming in-I don't think I could ever get used to air-conditioning."

"Certain temperatures, you might."

She willed herself to silence, till the forest of the park received them, and the high, thick trees could perhaps swallow witlessness and shame. Then she spoiled everything by her too deep and appreciative sigh.

Prospect Point. He read the sign aloud.

There were plenty of people around, even though it was a weekday afternoon in May, with vacations not yet started. In a moment they might remark on that. There were cars parked all along the drive up to the restaurant, and lines on the viewing platform for the coin-op binoculars.

"Aha." He had spotted a car pulling out of its place. A reprieve for a moment from any need for speech, while he idled, backed to give it room, then maneuvered into the fairly narrow spot. They got out at the same time, walked around to meet on the sidewalk. He turned this way and that, as if deciding where they were to walk. Pedestrians coming and going on any path you could see.

Her legs were shaking. She could not put up with this any longer.

"Take me somewhere else," she said.

He looked her in the face. He said, "Yes."

There on the sidewalk in the world's view. Kissing like mad.

Take me was what she had said. Take me somewhere else, not Let's go somewhere else. That is important to her. The risk, the transfer of power. Complete risk and transfer. Let's go-that would have the risk, but not the abdication, which is the start for her, in all her reliving of this moment, of the erotic slide. And what if he had abdicated in his turn? Where else? That would not have done, either. He has to say just what he did say. He has to say Yes.

He took her to the apartment where he was staying, in Kitsilano. It belonged to a friend of his who was away on a fishing boat, somewhere off the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was in a small, decent building, three or four stories high, inexpensive rather than cheap-looking. All that she would remember about it would be the glass bricks around the front entrance and the elaborate, heavy hi-fi equipment of that time, which seemed to be the only furniture in the living room.

She would have preferred another scene, and that was the one she substituted, in her memory. A narrow six- or seven-story hotel, once a fashionable place of residence, in the West End of Vancouver. Curtains of yellowed lace, high ceilings, perhaps an iron grille over part of the window, a fake balcony. Nothing actually dirty or disreputable, just an atmosphere of long accommodation of private woes and sins. There she would have to cross the little lobby with head bowed and arms clinging to her sides, her whole body permeated by exquisite shame. And he would speak to the desk clerk in a low voice that did not advertise, but did not conceal or apologize for, their purpose.

Then the ride in the old-fashioned cage of the elevator, run by an old man-or perhaps an old woman, perhaps a cripple, a sly servant of vice.

Why did she conjure up, why did she add that scene? It was for the moment of exposure, the piercing sense of shame and pride that took over her body as she walked through the (pretend) lobby, and for the sound of his voice-its discretion and authority-speaking to the clerk the words that she could not quite make out.

That might have been his tone in the drugstore a few blocks away from the apartment, after he had parked the car and said, "Just a moment in here." The practical arrangements, which seemed heavyhearted and discouraging in married life, could in these different circumstances provoke a subtle heat in her, a novel lethargy and submissive anticipation.

After dark, she was carried back again, driven through the park and across the bridge and through West Vancouver, passing only a short distance from the house of Jonas's parents. She arrived at Horseshoe Bay at almost the very last moment, and walked onto the ferry. The last days of May are among the longest of the year and, in spite of the ferry-dock lights and the lights of the cars streaming into the belly of the boat, she could see some glow in the western sky and, against it, the black mound of an island-not Bowen but one whose name she did not know-tidy as a pudding set in the mouth of the bay.

She had to join the crowd of jostling bodies making their way up the stairs, and when she reached the passenger deck she sat in the first seat she saw. She did not even bother, as she usually did, to look for a seat next to a window. She had an hour and a half before the boat docked on the other side of the strait, and during this time she had a great deal of work to do.

No sooner had the boat started to move than the people beside her began to talk. They were not casual talkers who had met on the ferry but friends or family who knew each other well and would find plenty to say for the entire crossing. So she got up and climbed to the top deck, where there were always fewer people, and sat on one of the bins that contained life preservers. She ached in expected and unexpected places.

The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything-and, by remember, she meant experience it in her mind, one more time-then store it away forever. This day's experience set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside.

She held on to two predictions, the first one comfortable and the second easy enough to accept at present, though no doubt it would become harder for her later on.

Her marriage with Pierre would continue, it would last.

She would never see the doctor again.

Both of these turned out to be right.

Her marriage did last, for more than thirty years after that-until Pierre died. During an early and not too painful stage of his illness, she read aloud to him, getting through a few books that they had both read years ago and meant to go back to. One of these was "Fathers and Sons." After she had read the scene in which Bazarov declares his violent love for Anna Sergeyevna, and Anna is horrified, they broke off for a discussion. (Not an argument-they had grown too tender for that.)

Meriel wanted the scene to go differently. She believed that Anna would not react in that way.

"It's the writer," she said. "I don't usually ever feel that, but here I feel it's just Turgenev coming and yanking them apart and he's doing it for some purpose of his own."

Pierre smiled faintly. All his expressions had become sketchy. "You think she'd succumb?"

"No. Not succumb. I don't believe her-I think she's as driven as he is. They'd do it."

"That's romantic. You're wrenching things around to make a happy ending."

"I didn't say anything about the ending."

"Listen," said Pierre patiently. "If Anna gave in, it'd be because she loved him. When it was over, she'd love him all the more. Isn't that what women are like? I mean, if they're in love? And what he'd do-he'd take off the next morning, maybe without even speaking to her. That's his nature. He hates loving her. So how would that be any better?"

"They'd have something. Their experience."

"He would pretty well forget it, and she'd die of shame and rejection. She's intelligent. She knows that."

"Well," said Meriel, pausing for a bit, because she felt cornered. "Well, Turgenev doesn't say that. He says she's totally taken aback. He says she's cold."

"Intelligence makes her cold. Intelligent means cold, for a woman."

"No."

"I mean in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century it does."

That night on the ferry, during the time when she thought she was going to get everything straightened away, Meriel did nothing of the kind. What she had to go through was wave after wave of intense recollection. And this was what she would continue to go through-at gradually lengthening intervals-for years to come. She would keep picking up things she'd missed, and these would still jolt her. She would hear or see something again-a sound they made together, the sort of look that passed between them, of recognition and encouragement. A look that was in its way quite cold, yet deeply respectful and more intimate than any look that would pass between married people, or people who owed each other anything.

She remembered his hazel-gray eyes, the close-up view of his coarse skin, a circle like an old scar beside his nose, the slick breadth of his chest as he reared up from her. But she could not have given a useful description of what he looked like. She believed that she had felt his presence so strongly, from the very beginning, that ordinary observation was not possible. Sudden recollection of even their early, unsure and tentative moments could still make her fold in on herself, as if to protect the raw surprise of her own body, the racketing of desire. My-love-my-love, she would mutter in a harsh, mechanical way, the words a secret poultice.

When she saw his picture in the paper, this did not happen. The clipping had been sent by Jonas's mother, who as long as she lived insisted on keeping in touch, and reminding them, whenever she could, of Jonas. "Remember the doctor at Jonas's funeral?" she had written above the small headline. " BUSH DOCTOR DEAD IN AIR CRASH. " It was an old picture, surely, blurred in its newspaper reproduction. A rather chunky face, smiling-which she would never have expected him to do for the camera. He hadn't died in his own plane but in the crash of a helicopter on an emergency flight. She showed the clipping to Pierre. She said, "Did you ever figure out why he came to the funeral?"

"They might have been buddies of a sort. All those lost souls up north."

"What did you talk to him about?"

"He told me about one time he took Jonas up to teach him to fly. He said, 'Never again.'"

Then Pierre asked, "Didn't he drive you someplace? Where?"

"To Lynn Valley. To see Aunt Muriel."

"So what did you talk about?"

"I found him hard to talk to."

The fact that he was dead did not seem to have much effect on Meriel's daydreams-if that was what you could call them. The ones in which she imagined chance meetings, or even desperately arranged reunions, had never had a foothold on reality, in any case, and were not revised because he was dead. They had to wear themselves out in a way she did not control and never understood.

When she was on her way home that night, it had started to rain, not very hard. She stayed out on the deck of the ferry. She got up and walked around and could not sit down again on the lid of the life-jacket bin without getting a big wet spot on her dress. So she stayed looking at the froth stirred up in the wake of the boat and the thought occurred to her that in a certain kind of story-not the kind that anybody made up anymore-the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body plumped up with a sweet self-esteem. A romantic act that could be seen-from a forbidden angle-as supremely rational.

Was she tempted? She was probably just letting herself imagine being tempted. Probably nowhere near yielding, though yielding had been the order of that day.

It wasn't until after Pierre was dead that she remembered one further detail.

He had driven her to Horseshoe Bay, to the ferry. He had got out of the car and come around to her side. She was standing there, waiting to say goodbye to him. She made a move toward him, to kiss him-surely a natural thing to do, after the last few hours-and he had said, "No."

"No," he said. "I never do."

Of course, that wasn't true, that he never did. Never kissed out in the open, where anybody could see. He had done it just that afternoon, at Prospect Point.

No.

That was simple. A cautioning. A refusal. Protecting her, you might say, as well as himself. Even if he hadn't bothered about that earlier in the day.

I never do was something else altogether. Another kind of cautioning. Information that could not make her happy, though it might be intended to keep her from making a serious mistake. To save her from the false hopes and humiliation of a certain kind of mistake.

How did they say goodbye, then? Did they shake hands? She could not remember.

But she heard his voice, the lightness and yet the gravity of his tone, she saw his resolute, merely pleasant face, she felt the slight shift out of her range. She didn't doubt that the recollection was true. She did not see how she could have suppressed it so successfully. For all this time.

She had an idea that if she had not been able to do that, her life might have been different.

How?

She might not have stayed with Pierre. She might not have been able to keep her balance. Trying to match what had been said at the ferry with what had been said and done earlier the same day would have made her more alert and more curious. Pride or contrariness might have played a part-a need to have some man eat those words, a refusal to learn her lesson.

There was another sort of life she could have had-a life of impulse and adventure. Which was not to say she would have preferred it. It was probably because of her age (something she was always forgetting to take account of), and because of the thin, cool air she had breathed since Pierre's death, that she could think of it simply as a kind of research that had its pitfalls and achievements.

Maybe you didn't find out so much, anyway. Maybe the same thing over and over-which might be some obvious but unsettling fact about yourself. In her case, the fact that prudence-or at least some economical sort of emotional management-had been her guiding light all along.

The little self-preserving movement he made, the kind and deadly caution, the attitude of inflexibility that had grown a bit stale with him, like an outmoded swagger. She could view him now with an everyday mystification, as if he had been her husband.

She wondered if he'd stayed that way, or if some other role had been waiting for him, up ahead. ♦

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A brief affair and its lifelong repercussions: a short story by Alice Munro.

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Following up on E. Gaffney's Craft Talk discussion on 5/16/2024, wanted to recommend My House in Umbria by William Trevor.   (Apparently there is a movie starring Maggie Smith.)   

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Following up on E. Gaffney's Craft Talk discussion on 5/16/2024, wanted to recommend My House in Umbria by William Trevor.   (Apparently there is a movie starring Maggie Smith.)   

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The full text of my story from last summer's issue of Epiphany is now online 

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The full text of my story from last summer's issue of Epiphany is now online 

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The front door lay in bits when the family returned. Broad daylight, Sunday afternoon, 1970. Tawny splinters, chips of paint. Twisted chicken glass crunched beneath Liz's mary janes.

Fifty years later, she passed that doorway as she walked home to her daughters, pizza box in her arms. She wheezed, just barely able to make out the aroma of the margarita's mozzarella and sauce. Sometimes she couldn't tell what was suffocating her anymore, her lungs' asthmatic slime coat or those three fucking layers of damp cotton.

The old place was in excellent repair, she saw, bricks recently repointed, all the window trim and ironwork glowing with tidy black semi-gloss. She didn't know who lived there now. It hadn't been so spiffy, then, the day its iron gate was installed.

Other families were picking up stakes, fleeing to the woods of Westchester, Jersey, Darien, on the day the Browns took the kids to hear Pete Seger at the Seaport and came home to no more front door. But even after the city reared up and bit them, the Browns stayed. It was cheap yet rarified, vibrant if decaying, challenging and worth it. It contained multitudes. They had stayed for the people. They'd refused to drop dead for the people.

Now, where were all the people? At home, of course, hiding from each other and a virus. The bridge park had been desolate as Liz walked its piers in her orange polka dotted mask with yellow rickrack ties. She'd stopped to read the lines written in the railing along the pier - flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! - then called the pizza place. The person who had handed her the warm, wide box was wearing full PPE, a hat with a face shield over a mask, gloves, but she recognized him and he her. They exchanged eye smiles and "Stay Safes," and off she went, back to Ada and Storey. Jake was at work. He wouldn't be coming home to them.

When they'd got home from the Seaport, Liz's father braced himself on the spalling brownstone door jamb as he leaned down and picked up the robbers' ax from the pile of splintered wood and shattered glass. He'd lifted it over his shoulder. "Stay out on the sidewalk," he commanded, and then, like a gladiator, entered the apartment.

Their super, Henry, flew up the block, pork pie hat sliding back on his bald head. Usually, he gave Liz and her brother, Victor, lollipops. Not that day.

"I called the cops, and Vinnie-the-iron-guy. And I got this..."

He lifted his shirttail to reveal a gray pistol grip tucked in his waistband. Liz and Victor bugged their eyes at each other. Their mother blanched.

"Where's the mister?" Henry asked.

At which point Liz's father reemerged through the shattered doorway.

"You shouldn'ta gone in there by yourself, Mister B," said Henry.

"Well, I had the ax," said Liz's father.

"Ax no match for bullet."

"Anyway, they're gone."

Liz remembered the day in snapshots: the sparkling, mast-hemmed harbor, the chips of wood, the navy blue carpet of her parents' room strewn with brassieres, their TV trussed up by the door in the green mohair blanket that belonged on the back of the sofa. The strange militarization of Henry, with his gun, and her usually bookish father, with the ax. There were absences: her mother's vacant jewelry box and the space on Liz's dresser where her sterling piggy bank with the leather ears once stood. The next day, in Kindergarten, Liz had brought a shard of wood from their stove-in door for Show and Tell, passed it around like a piece of the true cross. Each child touched the broken wood that had been touched by the robber, pondering their vulnerability. Mrs. Chapin asked her if she wanted to tell the class anything.

"We got a metal gate," she said. "We're going to be safe now."

In the spring of 2020, when the lockdown began, Liz still owned the ax that broke down her childhood front door, though she hadn't used it in decades. Sometime around the turn of the millennium, she and Jake began burning logs of recycled cardboard and wax. It was supposed to be greener. Still, she was glad she had the ax.

She'd talked to her brother on the phone, in the Midwest, other day. He'd told her he worried about riots and looting. Victor taught painting at a university. He'd been more progressive once. But when they spoke, he admitted he'd stood in a line for two hours to buy ammo, "just in case."

They'd had such a lovely day at the Seaport. Pumpkin carving on the deck of the sloop Clearwater. Gulls wheeling overhead. Halyards snapping in the breeze. Pete Seeger singing his song of danger ... warning ... love ... and justice ... all over this land. Her family sang it together on car trips, along with the radio. To Liz, then, "The Hammer Song" was the mysterious thread that connected the lettuce boycott to Viet Nam. One of Liz's uncles had died in the war, one was still fighting, and a third went to Canada forever because of it, and the lettuce workers were not safe on their farms, meaning Liz must eat sulfurous broccoli for her vegetables instead of the sweet iceberg wedges she loved. The world was filled with unwelcome changes and sudden peril, but singing "The Hammer Song" helped fix it. The wind wafted the lyrics out across the East River along with the seaweedy smell that issued from tin-clad sheds of the Fulton Fish Market - trimethylamine, the stinking decomposition product of the molecule that enables fish to survive in the salty seas.

Liz never saw the Market open for business, not in all her years. It closed for the day at seven in the morning, and then, in 2005, it closed forever. Even with the shutters locked, it reeked. Even after the market moved to Hunt's Point, its old shed stank for another thirteen years, till the city finally demolished it. Liz wished she'd gone, just once, before dawn, and shopped its bins for oysters, crabs, eels or skate wings. Just once breathed its clean ocean whiff before the scales and filets caught the shimmer of dawn and deoxidized into their putrescent components. Fish, when it's fresh, has an extra oxygen atom. With that atom, it smells nothing like the Market in the heat of the day and not remotely like the breaded sticks her mother lifted from the pan with metal tongs every Friday and served to Liz and her brother with ketchup and macaroni. Fish, when it's fresh, sparkles like crashing waves trimmed in bubbly white lace. It smells as glistening and transparent as the eyeball Liz's father gave her in a baggie after gutting their bluefishone morning when she was nine: golden iris, deep black pupillary well, lens like ether. Fresh fish is one with ocean.

It had been a warm holiday weekend at the end of fourth grade. The Browns had gone to the shore. Her father took her, just her, not Vic, she didn't remember why. It was the spring of the Bicentennial, because she'd been wearing her 200 Years Young t-shirt, white material, blue trim at the neck and arms, red lettering.

As they landed the first fish that Liz had ever hooked herself, it thrashed.

"Back off, Liz," her father shouted. "These guys have some serious teeth in them."

It was big, or big to her, and when it thrashed again, the hook tore free from its cheek. Blood flew. Her father swore as it slashed his thumb. He knocked the fish's skull against the metal stanchion, and it went slack. A few minutes later, as her dad pulled the loose flap on the pad of his thumb back into place with a pair of butterfly bandages, Liz saw that her t-shirt was spattered and wondered, Whose blood?

Liz had sealed the fish eye in a rinsed-out olive jar and packed it in her suitcase for the trip back to Brooklyn. Then on Tuesday morning, she tucked the eye into her lunchbox along with her ham sandwich, her dill pickle, and her Thermos of milk. A nine-year-old girl with an eyeball in an olive jar can freak out her friends. Liz wanted to make them laugh, to make them scream, to make them think she was tough. She'd been worried her best friend Julie was drifting toward another girl who'd joined their class midyear. Taking the eyeball to school was a misstep. It only nudged Julie further away. Still, Liz liked the eyeball. Now and then, she reached into the back of the refrigerator where she kept it hidden behind the horseradish and marmalade, took out the cold glass and regarded it. It looked back at her but never judged. It helped her be brave that whole summer between fourth and fifth grades. By Halloween, the eyeball had gone to sludge and been discovered and discarded by her mother. The trimethylamine when she opened it made the house smell like a packing plant for hours.

The winter she turned ten, Liz developed a phobia of the nearby welfare hotel she passed on her way to school every morning and started going three blocks out of her way, just to avoid it. The St. George had been grand once. Liz's mom had stayed there as a girl and swum in its vast saltwater swimming pool. She'd eaten breakfast one table over from Esther Williams. By Liz's childhood, the pool and all the fancy restaurants were shuttered. The guests, such as they were, paid by the month or the week, cooking their noodle soups in hotpots - or maybe they survived entirely on sandwich crackers and tapwater, and the city covered the rent. It wasn't the diet of the guests that worried Liz. It was the random justice of the icy milk cartons that fell like bombs from their windowsills. Her father had written a story for the paper about a forty-year-old mother of three who was killed by a quart.

How old are you, Mommy? Liz had asked.

As she walked by the old hotel now, she looked up at its repointed yellow bricks and sandblasted limestone sills and imagined the dead mother's thoughts as the rock-hard wax-paper carton hurtled - 2% over homogenized over MISSING. (Etan Patz had been six years old.) It struck her coronal suture, the spot where babies have those soft fontanelles. What should I make them for lunch? the mother might have been thinking.Wham. The mother's pupils dilated, and her brain bled out. What visions did she see? Whose frozen milk was it? Was the milk's owner a murderer? A manslaughterer? A motherslaughter? Did the person even know what had happened, when they opened their window the next morning, letting in the bitter cold, and cursed to find the milk missing. Did they grumble as they choked down their coffee black? Liz remembered a few residents of the hotel, as diverse as the city itself but with at least one thing in common: the winter was their only refrigerator. They were probably sleeping on the streets now, those that were still alive, chilled milk a forgotten luxury. Gentrification, a suspicious fire, and welfare reform had conspired to evict them. Only the hotel itself came up roses - after years of boarded-up windows and doors, the decaying building was gutted and transformed into a fancy dorm. It was a survivor.

Liz credited her father for her own survival of the Seventies. Beginning just after the Seaport robbery, he'd taught her how to walk on the streets of New York City: how to be fully aware.

Don't walk inside scaffolding or tightly parked cars.

Know who's on the sidewalk with you - and across the street.

Look them in the eye, and they will choose another victim.

If you hear hoots or whistles, change your route - it may be a signal among thieves.

Keep a fake wallet with just $5.00 to give to your mugger, so you don't get fleeced for more.

Hold your keys so one protrudes through your fist as a weapon, and have them ready before you approach your door. Check the surroundings first, then enter quickly.

Caution and preparedness were part of the equation, but because her father believed the corollary of safety was fear, he had also taught Liz not to be afraid. Not of bad guys, nor of darkness, not of death, nor decay. Cycle of life, Chicken Little, he said. It's unavoidable. Deal with it.

It wasn't a lesson she'd always remembered.

Liz had propped the front door of her parents' building open the day when things came full circle for her father, hoping it would speed the EMTs to his rescue. This was long before Liz's daughters were born. It still made her wince with regret that they never got to meet their Da. The 911 operator recommended the door thing, to save time. It didn't make a difference. Funeral directors, not medical technicians, carried her father away in a Naugahyde bag. Her mother shrieked as they put him in the van. No one had expected it, not yet, though probably they should have. He'd had that mortician's pallor, atherosclerosis, a history of heart disease.

They left the door open, even after the hearse turned the corner. Soon, Jake walked up the block. Then out of a cab from the airport stepped Liz's brother, Victor, and his wife. All day and night, a stream of mourners came and went through the unlocked portal, bearing flowers and casserole and love. No one thought to shut it.

Crime had gone down since the Seventies, Liz thought, as she stepped over the round metal hatch in the sidewalk, just beside her stoop, and removed her mask. Assault, burglary and homicide were almost non existent since the Lockdown, though that was temporary. Liz stood in the very spot where her daughters' brand-new over-and-under stroller had flipped, shortly after Storey was born. Liz and Jake had saved up for the thing, a seemingly ingenious invention that enabled a parent of two to navigate busy sidewalks and shop the narrow aisles of urban grocery stores, and it came in such great colors. They chose red. Ada, their toddler, reached for the handle for leverage as she climbed out of the lower seat, her weight pivoting the stroller on it rear wheel. The crack when occiput met bluestone ripped through Liz's core like a gunshot. The lower seat was for the smaller child, according to the safety warning Liz became aware of only after the incident. Who read the instructions on a stroller? Who followed all the rules?

Failing to follow the rules resulted in a thirty-second blackout, a trip to the ER, permanent amnesia for the prior and subsequent twenty-four hours, and who knew what other insults to Storey's still-forming brain. When she later was diagnosed with dyslexia, they wouldn't know why. But unlike the case of the mother and the milk, the swelling subsided, Storey survived.

What was the difference: blunt force from this or that, pneumonia from a common virus or a novel one, system collapse due to coronary artery disease or a cytokine storm? The death rate throughout human history, as her father'd often remarked, holds constant at 100%. The goal being to stave it off as long as you can, at least long enough to reproduce, and to make the most of the interstices.

Liz was raising her children in Brooklyn, in the neighborhood where she was raised. They were upstairs right now, doing their homework perhaps, awaiting her return with dinner and unconditional love. Did she love them unconditionally? Was there a chance she despised them, saw them as parasites who'd unwittingly trapped her in the very prison she and her own parents had inhabited, the prison of life? No, not today. Today, they tethered her to life. They snapped shut the possibility of an easy out: the oven, the Sylvia Plath maneuver, the choice her grandmother had made.

Why twist any longer on this mortal coil, when the end was the end was the end?

Because of matching ladybug boots, an imaginary friend named Move-On Marvin, and the way Ada had made the pandemic spring sweet by baking thirty variations of chocolate lava cake. Because of the wild shrieks of the girls jumping hand in hand off the lifeguard stand, the terror, the joy, the sisterhood.

Jake, was at the hospital, all suited up in full PPE as if this was an airborne toxic event. Which it was. He'd been sleeping at a free hotel room in midtown for weeks now to spare the family the risk of contagion. Was survival worth solitude, distance, separation? Sometimes she didn't think she could do it anymore, single parenting, living in fear. Then she thought of him saving the lives of strangers, or trying to, coping and kind in the face of their massive viral loads. She had to try harder.

Before she climbed the stoop, she set down the cooling pizza and reached into her bag for sanitizer and her keys. She squirted and scanned the streetscape all around: cars, stoops, lampposts, several masked pedestrians, none of them muggers. Which didn't make them safe. Killers were incognito now, asymptomatic carriers. Was it just her, she wondered, or did everyone now have revolting breath? She was looking forward to a visit to the hygienist, as soon as this was over. She imagined the day the masks came off, the vaccine was available, the streets again teemed with people. It seemed scary. People, the point of life, were also a threat. The vector. They always had been, to some extent.

For every season, there was a peril and a fitting mode of self-defense. Someday, the pandemic would end. Soon, her girls would be ready for their own jagged Medecos. It wasn't the Seventies anymore, but when the masks came off, there would be joblessness. Would crime resurge? She must teach the girls that every key was also a weapon. They would need to know.

A neighbor she recognized but had never spoken to drifted toward with her, green coffee straw shoved through a hole in her mask. Was that kosher, Liz wondered? Was that distant? The woman had her eyes glued to her phone, as usual, but then, when she got close, she looked up, met Liz's eyes and waved her green tea Frappuccino.

"Hi," said Liz.

Some people claimed there'd been progress in the world - this was a kinder, fairer time. Others argued the confluence of pandemic and cicada, warming and war, tornadoes and police violence, proved humanity was doomed. Liz squinted her fish eye at the scene around her, then picked up the pizza and climbed the stairs. So far, she'd weathered emergencies real and imagined, faced monsters large and small, wiggled out of disasters natural, man- and woman-made. So, presumably, had that neighbor with her drink, and all the rest of the people out there on the sidewalks. Jake. Even their girls, in their own ways. She peered through the window, into the vestibule. There was no one waiting there to mug her. If you survived long enough to breed, you'd been selected. The rest was gravy. She pushed against the outer door and stepped into the must of years. A gust of ocean, fresh off the harbor, followed her into the vestibule. She shoved her key in the lock.

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"How Not To Run Away From Monsters" by Elizabeth Gaffney - Epiphany Magazine

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"In the spring of 2020, when the lockdown began, Liz still owned the ax that broke down her childhood front door..."

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Some people at expressed an interest in reading Vicki's APS piece. Here it is.

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This Alice Munro story came up in the 4/26 convo since it's mentioned in Joan Silber's the Art of Time in Fiction. Attached is the version that appeared in the New Yorker.

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Alice Munro, “The Albanian Virgin,” _ The New Yorker

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reading The Berlin Stories by Isherwood— interesting first person voice /retrospect/ first story brings reader on a train ride like Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata…. Mj  https://books.google.com/books/about/Mr_Norris_Changes_Trains.html?id=MCaREkDrtoUC

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reading The Berlin Stories by Isherwood— interesting first person voice /retrospect/ first story brings reader on a train ride like Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata…. Mj  https://books.google.com/books/about/Mr_Norris_Changes_Trains.html?id=MCaREkDrtoUC

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Two Englishmen meeting on a train to Berlin in 1930 kick off one of Isherwood's most enduring novels

On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris, an irresistibly comical fellow Englishman wearing a rather obvious wig and nervous about producing his passport at the frontier. So begins a friendship conducted in the seedier quarters of the city, where Norris runs a dubious import-export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary,his creditors, and his dominatrix girlfriend, Anni. As the worldwide economic Depression strangles the masses and the Communists make a desperate stand against Fascism and war, Norris sells himself as political orator, spy, and double agent. He also sells his friends. Like its companion novel, Goodbye to Berlin, Mr Norris Changes Trains offers unforgettable characters struggling in the vortex as the Nazis rise to power.

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Two Englishmen meeting on a train to Berlin in 1930 kick off one of Isherwood's most enduring novels On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris, an irresistibly comical fellow Englishman wearing a rather obvious wig and nervous about producing his passport at the frontier.

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Not actually a publication, but in celebration of Poets & Writers 50th anniversary, I was included in this short video played at the Gala (I was not in attendance).  P &W is great organization and resource for us writers. I appear at the end of the video, where you get to see a glimpse of my Loads of Prose readings in laundromats. 

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Not actually a publication, but in celebration of Poets & Writers 50th anniversary, I was included in this short video played at the Gala (I was not in attendance).  P &W is great organization and resource for us writers. I appear at the end of the video, where you get to see a glimpse of my Loads of Prose readings in laundromats. 

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POETS & WRITERS: A House with Many Doors

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An essay on How Should One Read a Book?  by Virginia Woolf from The Yale Review archives, posted by Mj

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An essay on How Should One Read a Book?  by Virginia Woolf from The Yale Review archives, posted by Mj

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Virginia Woolf: “How Should One Read a Book?”

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A classic essay by Virginia Woolf from The Yale Review’s archives: “At this late hour of the world’s history, books are to be found in almost every room of the house—in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen...”

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Writing Exercise from the Times, from Jon

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Writing Exercise from the Times, from Jon

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Opinion | The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned

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I share an important exercise with my writing students that asks them to stand in another person’s shoes. They’re finding it harder and harder to do.

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I read Pedro Paramo ages ago and saw a theater production based on it 30-something years ago. I guess it may be time to reread this new translation, especially after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude together..

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...if either of these two float yer boat, enjoy! - Jenny D.

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Writers on Writing: Lauren Groff and Rebecca Makkai

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In the latest issue of NYRB, Namwali Serpell considers a feminine aesthetic....

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‘Such Womanly Touches’ | Namwali Serpell | The New York Review of Books

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On Tübingen, "The Big Picture: Via Blake on Dante’s “Inferno,” Canto 2 (God Image: “The Mission of Virgil”)" posted by Laura Maria

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On Tübingen, "The Big Picture: Via Blake on Dante’s “Inferno,” Canto 2 (God Image: “The Mission of Virgil”)" posted by Laura Maria

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Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate

hangover from Stuttgart's bad days obscures.

The weather of modernity. The lady's tattooed

musculature is what comes of getting too close

to the angry father. Decode. He'd been left behind.

We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust,

iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden

aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous

red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily

but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even

at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before

dawn to catch the sun's origins I realized I was

looking into the core of purgatory. The house

would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun

played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill,

the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane

shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good

and bad. Who is to choose? I don't mind the walk,

negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking

potshots at you, it makes it impossible. I don't use

a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense.

But this is Tübingen and we're nearing our time:

the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans,

the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome

and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will

ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes.

I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will

rewrite "Half of Life" upside down. The inversions

of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy

speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn't rained

today but the Ammer River is still swift outside

this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout.

Behind the glissade of faces the goings home.

Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth.

Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God

watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship.

I apologize for the distractions. Wondering while I write.

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The Big Picture: Via Blake on Dante's "Inferno,"... | Poetry Magazine

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The Angry God of This World & His Throne in Purgatory

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Hymns to the Night by Novalis shared by Laura Maria 

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Hymns to the Night by Novalis shared by Laura Maria 

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Home | Full Text: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 | Links

Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world -- sunk in a deep grave -- waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes. -- The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul? Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved -- joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother. How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light -- how joyous and welcome the departure of the day -- because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence -- thy return -- in seasons of thy absence. More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts -- needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul -- that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophet of the holier worlds, to the guardian of blissful love -- she sends thee to me -- thou tenderly beloved -- the gracious sun of the Night, -- now am I awake -- for now am I thine and mine -- thou hast made me know the Night -- made of me a man -- consume with spirit-fire my body, that I, turned to finer air, may mingle more closely with thee, and then our bridal night endure forever.

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2

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night. -- Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep -- gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes -- in the magic oil of the almond tree -- and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap -- never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

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3

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life -- lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable -- powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery. -- As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing: -- then, out of the blue distances -- from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight -- and at once snapt the bond of birth -- the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning -- the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world -- Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me -- the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust -- and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed -- I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream -- and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

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4

Now I know when will come the last morning -- when the Light no more scares away Night and Love -- when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the dark bosom of the mound against whose foot breaks the flood of the world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the Night -- truly he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.

On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles -- tabernacles of peace, there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours draws him down into the waters of the spring -- afloat above remains what is earthly, and is swept back in storms, but what became holy by the touch of love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like fragrances, it mingles with love asleep.

Still wakest thou, cheerful Light, that weary man to his labor -- and into me pourest joyous life -- but thou wilest me not away from Memory's moss-grown monument. Gladly will I stir busy hands, everywhere behold where thou hast need of me -- praise the lustre of thy splendor -- pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft -- gladly contemplate the clever pace of thy mighty, luminous clock -- explore the balance of the forces and the laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons. But true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart eternally true? has thy sun friendly eyes that know me? do thy stars lay hold of my longing hand? and return me the tender pressure and the caressing word? was it thou did adorn them with colors and a flickering outline -- or was it she who gave to thy jewels a higher, a dearer weight? What delight, what pleasure offers thy life, to outweigh the transports of Death? Wears not everything that inspires us the color of the Night? She sustains thee mother-like, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself -- in boundless space thou wouldst dissolve, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and flaming, begot the universe. Truly I was, before thou wast -- the mother sent me with my brothers and sisters to inhabit thy world, to hallow it with love that it might be an ever-present memorial -- to plant it with flowers unfading. As yet they have not ripened, these thoughts divine -- as yet is there small trace of our coming revelation -- One day thy clock will point to the end of time, and then thou shalt be as one of us, and shalt, full of ardent longing, be extinguished and die. I feel in me the close of thy activity -- heavenly freedom, and blessed return. With wild pangs I recognize thy distance from our home, thy resistance against the ancient, glorious heaven. Thy rage and thy raving are in vain. Unscorchable stands the cross -- victory-banner of our breed.

Over I journey
And for each pain
A pleasant sting only
Shall one day remain.
Yet in a few moments
Then free am I,
And intoxicated
In Love's lap lie.
Life everlasting
Lifts, wave-like, at me,
I gaze from its summit
Down after thee.
Your lustre must vanish
Yon mound underneath --
A shadow will bring thee
Thy cooling wreath.
Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood --
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

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5

In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls -- the earth was boundless -- the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean's dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine -- poured out by Youth-abundance -- a god in the grape-clusters -- a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves -- love's sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies -- Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape --

That fearsome to the merry tables strode,
A wrapt the spirit there in wild fright.
The gods themselves no counsel knew nor showed
To fill the anxious hearts with comfort light.
Mysterious was the monster's pathless road,
Whose rage no prayer nor tribute could requite;
'Twas Death who broke the banquet up with fears,
With anguish, dire pain, and bitter tears.

Eternally from all things here disparted
That sway the heart with pleasure's joyous flow,
Divided from the loved ones who've departed,
Tossed by longing vain, unceasing woe --
In a dull dream to struggle, faint and thwarted,
Seemed all was granted to the dead below.
Broke lay the merry wave of human bliss
On Death's inevitable, rocky cliff.

With daring spirit and a passion deep,
Did man ameliorate the horrid blight,
A gentle youth puts out his torch, to sleep --
The end, just like a harp's sigh, comes light.
Cool shadow-floods o'er melting memory creep,
So sang the song, into its sorry need.
Still undeciphered lay the endless Night --
The solemn symbol of a far-off might.

The old world began to decline. The pleasure-garden of the young race withered away -- up into more open, desolate regions, forsaking his childhood, struggled the growing man. The gods vanished with their retinue -- Nature stood alone and lifeless. Dry Number and rigid Measure bound it with iron chains. Into dust and air the priceless blossoms of life fell away in words obscure. Gone was wonder-working Faith, and its all-transforming, all-uniting angel-comrade, the Imagination. A cold north wind blew unkindly over the rigid plain, and the rigid wonderland first froze, then evaporated into ether. The far depths of heaven filled with glowing worlds. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the more exalted region of feeling, the soul of the world retired with all its earthly powers, there to rule until the dawn should break of universal Glory. No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence -- they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations -- into it the gods went back -- and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. Among the people who too early were become of all the most scornful and insolently estranged from the blessed innocence of youth, appeared the New World with a face never seen before -- in the poverty of a poetic shelter -- a son of the first virgin and mother -- the eternal fruit of mysterious embrace. The foreboding, rich-blossoming wisdom of the East at once recognized the beginning of the new age -- A star showed the way to the humble cradle of the king. In the name of the distant future, they did him homage with lustre and fragrance, the highest wonders of Nature. In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded to a flower-chalice of almighty love -- upturned toward the supreme face of the father, and resting on the bliss-foreboding bosom of the sweetly solemn mother. With deifying fervor the prophetic eye of the blooming child beheld the years to come, foresaw, untroubled over the earthly lot of his own days, the beloved offspring of his divine stem. Ere long the most childlike souls, by true love marvellously possessed, gathered about him. Like flowers sprang up a strange new life in his presence. Words inexhaustible and the most joyful tidings fell like sparks of a divine spirit from his friendly lips. From a far shore, born under the clear sky of Hellas, came a singer to Palestine, and gave up his whole heart to the wonder-child:

The youth thou art who ages long hast stood
Upon our graves, so deeply lost in thought;
A sign of comfort in the dusky gloom
For high humanity, a joyful start.
What dropped us all into abyssmal woe,
Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now.
In everlasting life death found its goal,
For thou art Death who at last makes us whole.

Filled with joy, the singer went on to Hindustan -- his heart intoxicated with the sweetest love; and poured it out in fiery songs under the balmy sky, so that a thousand hearts bowed to him, and the good news sprang up with a thousand branches. Soon after the singer's departure, his precious life was made a sacrifice for the deep fall of man -- He died in his youth, torn away from his beloved world, from his weeping mother, and his trembling friends. His lovely mouth emptied the dark cup of unspeakable woes -- in ghastly fear the birth of the new world drew near. Hard he wrestled with the terrors of old Death -- Heavy lay the weight of the old world upon him. Yet once more he looked fondly at his mother -- then came the releasing hand of eternal love, and he fell asleep. Only a few days hung a deep veil over the roaring sea, over the quaking land -- countless tears wept his loved ones -- the mystery was unsealed -- heavenly spirits heaved the ancient stone from the gloomy grave. Angels sat by the Sleeper -- delicately shaped from his dreams -- awoken in new Godlike glory; he clomb the limits of the new-born world -- buried with his own hand the old corpse in the abandoned hollow, and with a hand almighty laid upon it a stone which no power shall ever again upheave.

Yet weep thy loved ones tears of joy, tears of feeling and endless thanksgiving over your grave -- joyously startled, they see thee rise again, and themselves with thee -- behold thee weep with sweet fervor on the blessed bosom of thy mother, solemnly walking with thy friends, uttering words plucked as from the Tree of Life; see thee hasten, full of longing, into thy father's arms, bearing with thee youthful humanity, and the inexhaustible cup of the golden future. Soon the mother hastened after thee -- in heavenly triumph -- she was the first with thee in the new home. Since then, long ages have flowed past, and in ever-increasing splendor have stirred your new creation -- and thousands have, away from pangs and tortures, followed thee, filled with faith and longing and fidelity -- walking about with thee and the heavenly virgin in the kingdom of love, serving in the temple of heavenly Death, and forever thine.

Uplifted is the stone --
And all mankind is risen --
We all remain thine own.
And vanished is our prison.
All troubles flee away
Thy golden bowl before,
For Earth and Life give way
At the last and final supper.

To the marriage Death doth call --
The virgins standeth back --
The lamps burn lustrous all --
Of oil there is no lack --
If the distance would only fill
With the sound of you walking alone
And that the stars would call
Us all with human tongues and tone.

Unto thee, O Mary
A thousand hearts aspire.
In this life of shadows
Thee only they desire.
In thee they hope for delivery
With visionary expectation --
If only thou, O holy being
Could clasp them to thy breast.

With bitter torment burning,
So many who are consumed
At last from this world turning
To thee have looked and fled,
Helpful thou hast appeared
To so many in pain.
Now to them we come,
To never go out again.

At no grave can weep
Any who love and pray.
The gift of Love they keep,
From none can it be taken away.
To soothe and quiet his longing,
Night comes and inspires --
Heaven's children round him thronging
Watch and guard his heart.

Have courage, for life is striding
To endless life along;
Stretched by inner fire,
Our sense becomes transfigured.
One day the stars above
Shall flow in golden wine,
We will enjoy it all,
And as stars we will shine.

The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss --
One everlasting poem --
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.

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6

Longing for Death

Into the bosom of the earth,
Out of the Light's dominion,
Death's pains are but a bursting forth,
Sign of glad departure.
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float.

Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.
We are heated by the day too bright,
And withered up with care.
We're weary of a life abroad,
And we now want our Father's home.

What in this world should we all
Do with love and with faith?
That which is old is set aside,
And the new may perish also.
Alone he stands and sore downcast
Who loves with pious warmth the Past.

The Past where the light of the senses
In lofty flames did rise;
Where the Father's face and hand
All men did recognize;
And, with high sense, in simplicity
Many still fit the original pattern.

The Past wherein, still rich in bloom,
Man's strain did burgeon glorious,
And children, for the world to come,
Sought pain and death victorious,
And, through both life and pleasure spake,
Yet many a heart for love did break.

The Past, where to the flow of youth
God still showed himself,
And truly to an early death
Did commit his sweet life.
Fear and torture patiently he bore
So that he would be loved forever.

With anxious yearning now we see
That Past in darkness drenched,
With this world's water never we
Shall find our hot thirst quenched.
To our old home we have to go
That blessed time again to know.

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more --
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling --
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Down to the sweet bride, and away
To the beloved Jesus.
Have courage, evening shades grow gray
To those who love and grieve.
A dream will dash our chains apart,
And lay us in the Father's lap.

previous section

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From the Web site Novalis: Hymns to the Night at
http://www.logopoeia.com/novalis/

Copyright 2000 by Michael Smith aka Logopoeia. Direct comments and questions tocomments@logopoeia.com

The text of Hymns to the Night is the editor's freely revised and amended version of George MacDonald's translation in the following public-domain work:

Rampolli: Growths from a Long-Planted Root: Being Translations, New and Old, Chiefly from the German.
London; New York: Longman's, Green, 1897. Printed by Ballentyne, Hanson & Co.
PR 4967 R34 1897 from the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

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Full text, in English, of Novalis's Hymns to the Night.

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From the Friday 11/17 gathering in the Lounge, here's the title poem "Phantom Pain Wings" in the latest poetry book by Kim Hye Soon 

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From the Friday 11/17 gathering in the Lounge, here's the title poem "Phantom Pain Wings" in the latest poetry book by Kim Hye Soon 

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My night feathers are infinitely, infinitely large

You're too filthy for them

I keep dreaming the same dream

It has the face of a human but

is a bird when it stretches out its limbs

I told you not to cut me off

I keep dreaming the same dream

bird's transparent pathway

two black beans on a silver platter

(Can you read dreams with those two beans?)

I can't take any calls at the moment because I'm having a meal

That bird with glass stuck to its abdomen

Maybe it has sand feathers?

Bird sticks to glass then vanishes

To be honest, I walk because my armpits flutter

I walk because I'm ashamed of my huge wings

I walk because my bird house is smaller than me

When it rains my soaked hands are infinitely, infinitely large

Bird was on its way to die, to hide

The second it turns around to look at me

it chirps, This is Seoul!

There's no place for me to hide here!

Please push me off the cliff!

Bird swirls in the air like a lonely gaze

Safety can't be guaranteed

We'll hit you when you come in

Bird replies, Please stop talking about me!

after being flung onto the ground

Honestly, this isn't the sound of rain

It's the sound of my high heels pounding the asphalt

Tonight, there's no place for me

to hide except in this bathroom

I'm calmed by the sound of

water streaming from the faucet

as I curl up my eyelashes with mascara as if lifting up my black wings

The sound of rain hitting the tiles pushes me off the deep end

Tonight, there's no place for me to put down my poem

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Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon | Poetry Foundation

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from Elizabeth England, with not much time to spare!

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from Elizabeth England, with not much time to spare!

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A book prize which submission window closing tomorrow -- 11/15/23!

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In honor of Kevin "Mc" McIlvoy, who passed away suddenly on September 30, 2022, WTAW is pleased to establish the annual Kevin Mc McIlvoy Book Prize for an unpublished book of prose (novel, memoir, narrative nonfiction, collection of stories or essays, hybrid forms).

Submissions will open September 30, 2023 and run through November 15, 2023. The winner will receive book publication with a standard publishing contract that pays royalties, a $2500 prize, and 25 copies of their book. All submissions will be considered for publication. There is a nonrefundable $28 fee. Nina McConigley, Peter Turchi will serve as final judges. Joan Silber, and

Mc was the author of , a novel he said he knew was the most important work of his life. During six decades of commitment to his art, he published five other novels: At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo) , Hyssop (TriQuarterly Press), Little Peg (Antheneum/Macmillan), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books), and A Waltz (Lynx House Press); a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf); a book of short fictions and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books); and, most recently, numerous poems. His short fiction appeared in Harper's, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and many other literary magazines.

Read Mc's testimony about his experience publishing with WTAW Press.

Guidelines for the Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize

We welcome submissions of full-length books of prose (novels, memoirs, narrative nonfiction, collections of stories or essays, hybrid prose) from new, emerging, a nd established voices and from writers of all backgrounds.

Entries must be submitted through our submission manager from September 30 - November 15, 2023.

Identifying information for the author must not be included anywhere on the manuscript, including the name of the file or the title field in the submission manager. Manuscripts containing identifying information in any way will be automatically disqualified and the entry fee forfeited.

A manuscript in its entirety must be previously unpublished. It may contain some previously published portions, but it should contain a majority of new work.

Any previous published material contained in the manuscript must be credited in the cover letter (see more about the letter below).

Acknowledgements of any previously published material may not be included in the manuscript file. Manuscripts containing acknowledgments will be automatically disqualified.

All material must be the author's own, original composition and free from copyright restrictions. We do not accept submissions generated by AI tools or language models.

Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but the writer must agree to notify WTAW immediately if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere for publication and to withdraw it from our submission manager.

Multiple submissions are accepted with each accompanied by a separate entry fee. Note: each submission must be unique.

Submissions cannot be edited once they are submitted. Manuscripts selected for publication will go through an editing process with the editors.

Manuscripts should be submitted as a .doc or. docx file in a 12-point standard font such as Times New Roman, double-spaced, with at least 1 inch margins, and paginated. Include a title page with a total word count and a table of contents, as applicable.

Cover letters must be entered into the appropriate field on the submission manager. They may not be included in the submission file itself. Submission files that contain a cover letter will be automatically disqualified.

Cover letters must include the following information

Any submission that doesn't follow the guidelines will be disqualified and the submission fee forfeited.

WTAW responds to every submission it receives through the submission manager at the email address furnished with the submission.

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Annual book prize named in honor of author Kevin McIlvoy for unpublished book of prose. Winner receives $2500 cash prize, publication, standard contract with royalties, 25 books. All books considered for publication.

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And one more from Lucinda's Wise Blood inspired songs--2 Kool 2 B 4 Gotten, from her most popular album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road 

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And one more from Lucinda's Wise Blood inspired songs--2 Kool 2 B 4 Gotten, from her most popular album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road 

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"2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten" is the third track from Lucinda Williams' 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

The song was inspired by the photographs of Birney Imes, from his 1990 collection Juke Joint. The photographs capture the "juke joint" music halls of the Mississippi Delta. The song is filled with stories from these place, intermixed with direct quotations of graffiti and signs posted throughout those spaces.

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2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten Lyrics: You can't depend on anything, really / There's no promises, there's no point / There's no good, there's no bad / In this dirty little joint / No dope smoking, no beer sold after 12

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Another of Lucinda's songs inspired by Wise Blood, Atonement 

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Another of Lucinda's songs inspired by Wise Blood, Atonement 

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Come on, come on
Kill the rats in the gutter
Come on, come on
Sings the voice in the choir
Come on, come on
Bring your Father and your Mother
Come on, come on
Sing it higher and higher

Shake the clammy hand
Repeat the 23rd psalm
Make you understand
Where it was you went wrong
Voices from tapes
Shouting with twisted tongues
Emotional rape
Hellfire scorched lungs

Come on, come on
Pay close attention to this
Come on, come on
Let me give you something good to eat
Come on, come on
Bite down hard 'til it sticks between your teeth
Come on, come on
Glory, glory, we've killed the beast

Blinded by glittery diamonds
Resting on crooked fingers
Shaded eyes, they are the ones
Who'll lead you to your deliverance
From the figure of doom
Force you to understand
Lock you in a room
With a holy roller and a one man band

Come on
Kill the rats in the gutter
Come on
Sings the voice in the choir
Come on
Bring your Father and your Mother
Come on
Sing it higher and higher

Shake the clammy hand
Repeat the 23rd psalm
Make you understand
Where it was you went wrong
Voices from tapes
Shouting with twisted tongues
Emotional rape
Hellfire scorched lungs
Blinded by glittery diamonds
Resting on crooked fingers
Shaded eyes, they are the ones
Who'll lead you to your deliverance
From the figure of doom
Force you to understand
Lock you in a room
With a holy roller and a one man band

Come on
Kill the rats in the gutter
Come on, come on
Sings the voice in the choir
Come on, come on, come on
Bring your Father and your Mother
Come on, come on, come on
Sing it higher and higher

Come on, come on, come on
Pay close attention to this
Come on, come on
Let me give you something good to eat
Come on, come on
Bite down hard 'til it sticks between your teeth
Come on, come on
Glory, glory, we've killed the beast

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Come on, come on / Kill the rats in the gutter / Come on, come on / Sings the voice in the choir / Come on, come on / Bring your Father and your Mother / Come on, come on / Sing it

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Singer/Songwriter Lucinda Williams is a huge fan of Flannery O'Connor, and several of her songs were inspired by Wise Blood. Here's one, Get Right With God from the album Essence (my fave of her albums)

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Singer/Songwriter Lucinda Williams is a huge fan of Flannery O'Connor, and several of her songs were inspired by Wise Blood. Here's one, Get Right With God from the album Essence (my fave of her albums)

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[Intro]
Get down hmm, mmm hmm

[Verse 1]
I would risk the serpent's bite
I would dance around with seven
I would kiss the diamondback
If I knew it would get me to heaven

[Chorus]
'Cause I want to get right with God
Yes, you know you got to get right with God

[Verse 2]
I would burn soles of my feet
Burn the palms of both my hands
If I could learn and be complete
If I could walk righteously again

[Chorus]
'Cause I want to get right with God
Yes, you know you got to get right with God

[Verse 3]
I would sleep on a bed of nails
'Til my back was torn and bleeding
In the deep darkness of Hell
The Damascus of my meeting

[Chorus]
I want to get right with God
Yes, you know you got to get right with God

[Verse 4]
I asked God about his plan
To save us all from Satan's slaughter
If I give up one of my lambs
Will you take me as one of your daughters?

[Chorus]
'Cause I want to get right with God
Yes, you know you got to get right with God
'Cause I want to get right with God
Yes, you know you got to get right with God
'Cause I want to get right with God
Yes, you know you got to get right with God
'Cause I want to get right with God
Yes, you know you got to get right with God

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Intro] / Get down hmm, mmm hmm / [Verse 1] / I would risk the serpent's bite / I would dance around with seven / I would kiss the diamondback / If I knew it would get me to heaven

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These are great to look at while reading Wise Blood. I will add a few over the next few days. ER

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From Mj, under the name Georgia San Li, two beautiful poems in theravensperch.com

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From Mj, under the name Georgia San Li, two beautiful poems in theravensperch.com

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theravensperch.com/as-if-there-were-only-science-by-georgia-san-li/

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I've entered his contest several times without winning, but I've always enjoyed writing to the prompts. Maybe you would too. -- Cliff

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I've entered his contest several times without winning, but I've always enjoyed writing to the prompts. Maybe you would too. -- Cliff

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Short Short Writing Contest

Win FREE tuition* to your choice of one of our two generative workshops. Get The Lead Out is an online workshop with faculty Pam Houston, Keenan Norris & Lidia Yuknavitch, and the Boulder Workshop is an in-person workshop with faculty Kim Barnes, Peter Ho Davies, & Pam Houston in Colorado.

RULES: Your piece can be fiction, non fiction, memoir or poetry but it must include the name of a band from the 80's, a food that did not originate in the U.S., a geologic phenomena, a gait of a horse, the name of a river and the name of a semi-precious stone.

WORD LIMIT: 250

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: December 1, 2023

*Travel and lodging not included in tuition at the in-person workshop

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Writing Contest - Win FREE Workshop Tuition

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Short Short Writing Contest Win FREE tuition* to your choice of one of our two generative workshops. Get The Lead Out is an online workshop with faculty Pam Houston, Keenan Norris & Lidia Yuknavitch, and the Boulder Workshop is an in-person workshop with faculty Kim Barnes, Peter Ho Davies, & Pam Houston in Colorado.

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These poems are a feast for pondering. Louise Gluck, Rest in Poetry

ER

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A wonderful perfect impromptu evening at this re-creation of a local restaurant somewhere in the South Korean countryside —  cold beers before and during, shop talk, can’t wait for the next impromptu meet up!

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This was sometime before a Gen Z influencer set up and recorded her broadcast of delectables from the table next to us..  She put on a bib to protect her blouse as she adjusted her micro lighting!

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Elizabeth trying pork belly and spices..

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At an Impromptu 24-H Room meet up in K-town NYC on Thursday Oct 12, 2023

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At an Impromptu 24-H Room meet up in K-town NYC on Thursday Oct 12, 2023

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We dove in, game for a high-spice adventure, and enjoyed an array of rustic traditional K dishes, a clear departure from Korean BBQ !

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What kind of times are these
when a conversation about trees
is almost a crime
because it implies silence
about so many atrocities.

--Bertolt Brecht

(posted by Cliff S.)