AUGUST 30, 2026 - ISSUE 11

In this issue

Joan Silverman finds the perfect green beans;
Beth Ann Fennelly unearths a bottle of gin;
Peggy Grodinsky reflects on family and flapjacks.

Love the One You’re With

by Joan Silverman

You find a breakfast cereal that you love, the perfect jeans, a tennis racquet whose grip fits yours just so. These things don’t change your life, but they register in the brain, activating some tiny pleasure sensor.

In your own micro-sphere, that momentary crunch of cereal just before the milk engulfs it contains a meeting of matter and mind. All is not well with the world, by any stretch; but for a few seconds there, and in the quirkiest way, you’ve found the ultimate fit.

Call it the Match.com of product placement, minus the questionnaire and the awkward dates.

So it goes that once you’ve used a product for years, and can’t imagine life without it, it vanishes.

When I find a product that I really like, I don’t just buy it. I pre-empt the inevitable runs on inventory by amassing my own. No, I don’t secretly think the whole world wants what I want (though one can never be too sure). Nor do I tend to hoard.

But it takes only a few like-minded sorts to permanently strip a product from the shelves. So I share new product finds gingerly — preferably with those who live out-of-town and won’t strain the local supply.

The exact opposite holds true when it comes to dining out. When I like a restaurant, I share that fact with as wide a range of people as possible. Unlike consumers who stock up on goods, zealous diners have few options to insure that their favorite eateries will survive.

I know this first-hand.

Years back, I found the best Chinese food I’d ever tasted. The restaurant was nearby, the owner an elegant Chinese man determined to prepare his native cuisine without compromise. No sooner did I learn his name (George), and he learn my standing order (Szechuan green beans, slightly burnt), than the restaurant closed.

A succession of restaurants followed — seafood, Korean, and Japanese, to name a few. At some point, new owners didn’t even make the pretense of renovating; they’d slap a new sign on the door, and that was that.

For awhile, I considered myself a restaurant jinx. If I really fell for a place, it was doomed. But then I reconsidered: Restaurants fail, regardless of my affections. I may miss George and those green beans, but he had apparently set up shop in the wrong place. The list of failed restaurants that followed was clear evidence.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that our loyalties in the material world have only limited traction. Products come and go, as do restaurants, and our devotion is worth only so much. Finding a new tennis racquet, cereal, or pair of jeans isn’t the issue.

Of course we find replacements; they’re just not the same. With love, it never is.

Most Days Are Days like This

by Beth Ann Fennelly

If you have gin, there’s no tonic, if you have tonic, there’s no gin, and if you by chance have both, for sure you lack a lime. No lime, not even rattling at the back of the crisper, juiceless as a stone, dark and bitter as a testicle of Jehovah. Most days, except the day of your first big writers’ conference. At the base of the mountain you passed the sign LAST LIQUOR FOR 30 MILES, so you pulled off. Hours later, after the reception, someone organized an afterparty, but by the time you got there — writers milling about, admiring the stars, congenially flirting — the booze was gone. You, meanwhile, were starstruck, working hard at looking chill, when up walks Tim O’Brien, that’s right, Tim fucking O’Brien, a man who’d written a book so beautiful it gave you paper cuts, a book from which you knew whole passages by heart, though you said none of this to him, in fact you were bereft of words entirely. That’s when he murmured to no one in particular, “I could really go for a gin and tonic.” You popped your trunk. You handed him the gin, then the tonic, he gawked like you were the merciful angel of juniper, which you were, your wings surely glowing in the limelight emitting from your trunk when, for your final trick, you held aloft the lime. “Even the lime!” he crowed, boyish in his baseball cap. You understood, in that moment, all your sins had been redeemed. Most days are days in which you dryly tote up all your petty failures, but let’s not dismiss the time you produced a lime for Tim O’Brien.

Pancake Mornings

by Peggy Grodinsky

A recent message from my iCloud account that I was out of storage led me to spend a dull afternoon deleting hundreds of photographs from my iPhone. There, among the many pictures of Trixie (The Most Beautiful Cat in Maine) and the obligatory beach walk pictures of my partner and me, I discovered pancakes. Stacks and stacks of pancakes.

Pancakes on red plates and on green ones. Pancakes shot from overhead and half-eaten ones shot from the side, drenched in syrup. Blueberry pancakes, banana-walnut pancakes, cranberry-pecan pancakes. Fluffy pancakes from those days when I took the time to stiffly whip and fold in the egg whites and flatter ones from those days when I was lazy, or hurried, and didn’t.

Round, golden, photogenic pancakes and the occasional burnt or pale, blobby stack. Not too many of the duds, though. I like to think that’s because I am a practiced pancake maker. But let’s be honest, like most people, I prefer to not broadcast my mistakes.

Milky coffee a constant, also Joe, my pancake-eating (and otherwise) companion.

I grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s eating homemade pancakes with maple syrup every weekend, usually Saturdays, as Sundays were scrambles to get four reluctant little girls to Sunday school on time. I have a fuzzy memory of my mom mixing imitation maple extract with sugar and water and heating it on the stove to make syrup when I was very small, but by the time I was old enough for distinct memories, we were buying the real stuff and it was a point of pride. This was not the era of real maple syrup, or real much of anything food-wise, but my mother grew up in Montreal and we spent our summers with our cousins in Vermont, and we knew from syrup. We poured it into a jug and heated it gently on the stove in a pot of warm water. No cold syrup on hot pancakes for us.

Occasionally, I would form the pancakes into faces with chocolate chips for eyes, nose, and mouth, also shape them into mice (or was it dogs?) by pouring the batter to form ears. When I was 8 or so, I went to a sugar-on-snow celebration in Quebec — the syrup was still collected in buckets then — and ate pancakes with pickles. Weird! But…. a revelation. And one that still resonates in my food likes today.

When my grandmother died, we gave away her mink coats, but I inherited her griddle, a round, worn, cast-iron model some 12 inches in diameter. I was about 24, just starting out on my own and in need of kitchen supplies, plus I lived in Vermont, the maple syrup (and presumably pancake) capital of America. I have no memories of Nana ever making pancakes, none, so why she had the griddle in the first place is a puzzle. Actually, I have no memories of Nana ever cooking anything. She loved to entertain, but the cooking was usually outsourced. Still, I kept that griddle for some 30 years, until its black, comfortable handle deteriorated into loose flakes, and the entire mechanism swirled around whenever I tried to grip it, turning pancake mornings into anxious affairs.

I acquired the griddle toward the end of my know-it-all-days when my parents knew nothing and I knew all, especially about food and cooking. I was, after all, a new reader of Gourmet magazine and an avid follower of the country’s then-nascent food revolution, which was growing up alongside me. This was the era of Chez Panisse, nouvelle cuisine, and kiwis. One thing I knew for certain? Never, ever press on a pancake with the spatula after you flip it. All that height and fluff you’ve worked to create? Smooshed. I smugly corrected my mother one pancake morning as she worked the griddle. She had a temper. I have blocked out any memory of her response.

So real maple syrup, these days my supply usually sourced in Maine, but what about the pancakes themselves? Every few months, I make up a batch of whole-grain mix. A friend bestowed the recipe on my sister Carolyn, who bestowed it on the rest of the family to help my beleaguered mother handle the several dozen guests who perpetually descended on her home on a lake in Vermont. We made it every summer weekend for going-on 30 years, sometimes holding the pancakes in the oven until we had a sizeable stack for the crowded table, sometimes letting visiting cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles, and friends grab them as they came off the griddle. Which strategy is better remains a cause for debate. As the hostesses, my sisters and I took turns manning the griddle.

This was years before my father died; the uncles died; my wise and beloved aunt vanished into Parkinson’s; Mishka the lake-loving dog was struck and killed by a car that didn’t even bother to stop; and my sisters and I began to have aches and pains and wrinkles of our own. Summers, our big, boisterous, argumentative crowd gathered in Vergennes by beautiful Lake Champlain, canoeing every day, biking every day, kayaking every day, swimming every day, bickering every day, watching sunsets and storms over the lake every day, reuniting over dinners and pancake breakfasts. It was our golden time.

The Great Pancake Meltdown occurred one of the first times Joe and I ever spent the night together. We talk about it still, though I can’t say we reminisce fondly. Why he didn’t ditch me that day I’ll never know. I made pancakes for him for the first time, assuming he would immediately appreciate what a talented cook I was and how many contented, leisurely, perfect Peggy weekends lay ahead if he played his cards right. The pancakes stuck, the pancakes burned, the batter ran off the griddle and pooled at the edge, inedible. My temper was as hot as the July morning. I pouted, I whined, I dissolved into tears.

Yet Joe stuck with me then, and to this day. That morning, I eventually calmed down, and we went to the zoo. He knew the names of all the weirdest wild animals and what to call a camel with two humps as well as one. He knew his emu from his ostrich, his alpaca from his llama, just where the animals lived in the wild, and their particular hibernation habits. Was I falling in love?

I have so few rituals in my life. I’ve moved from state to state, with a few countries thrown in for good measure. I’ve held a lot of jobs. I’ve made dear, wonderful friends and then moved away and lost them without meaning to, without wanting to. I learned to speak Japanese and German, not fluently, but not badly, and then most of the hard-won words and sentences dissolved from lack of use. (I still remember pfannkuchen, though, the German word for guess what?) But making pancakes on the weekend in every season — the familiar dance between Joe and me as we set the table, make the coffee, heat the syrup, whip the eggs, pour the batter and flip — steadies me.

Wherever I am, pancakes connect me: To my childhood. To old friends. To places I love. To my extended family, living and dead; and to my nearer, if geographically distant, three sisters who just maybe are making their own pancakes for their own families at the very same moment I am cooking mine.

Credits

Joan Silverman is a Boston-based writer of essays and book reviews, and editor of the digital newsletter, Away From It All: Essays From Near + Far. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Houston Chronicle, and Maine Sunday Telegram. The above piece is an excerpt from her book, Someday This Will Fit: Linked Essays, Meditations & Other Midlife Follies (Bauhan Publishing, 2019).

Beth Ann Fennelly is a poet and essayist, and author of seven books. She served as Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, and is currently Professor of English at Ole Miss. The above essay is excerpted from The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs. Copyright (c) 2026 by Beth Ann Fennelly. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Peggy Grodinsky is currently the food editor at The Portland Press Herald. In an earlier life, she was executive editor at Cook’s Country Magazine and editor at The James Beard Foundation. The above essay first appeared in slightly different form in the anthology, Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger and Family, edited by Deborah Joy Corey and Debra Spark (Beacon Press, 2022).

Photos by Betsey Henkels

AUGUST 16, 2026 - ISSUE 10

In this issue

Sven Birkerts hoists a kayak into the lake;
Ann Stinson visits her feisty mom;
Patricia Vigderman deconstructs a friend’s divorce.

Gravity and Grace

by Sven Birkerts

There are the private little tests and confrontations that nobody needs to know about. Often, too, the smaller the scale, the greater the embarrassment. Like today.

I was doing this daily posting last summer when we were here at the lake. And I confessed my issues with getting into the kayak. Now you know, I thought — case closed. But a case is never really closed.

The kayak thing came up again today. The second time around is a kind of psychoanalysis: how did I do it before? Am I passing the test? This is how I shadow myself through the day.

Forecast be damned, the sky was clear and the lake was like glass. I had to get to the water. The steep path down — the embedded stepping stones damp with dew, ferns everywhere, and then the dock, the same three kayaks lined up on the platform. I’d managed it last summer, not easily, but I’d manage again. Everything was as before, the hovering dragonfly, the shapes of the stones in the shallows. What was maybe different was me. Not that different, but just different enough.

I slid the kayak off the rack and into water and tried to remember the steps that had worked last time. How much to belabor this? An action that would have taken a younger me a confident hoist of one leg followed quickly by the other, now took more steps than an IKEA project. The tools included in the kit were somehow not the right ones. The guy with two titanium hips was now an older guy with two titanium hips. Such hips don’t hoist and the sense of balance isn’t what it was.

I could go on, break it down into a kind of motion study: tilt, wrench, pull back, try again — from here, from there — the whole thing exaggerated for comic effect. But I’m after something else now, something suggestively metaphysical, but also an analogy. I mean the moment when I was finally in, when the wobble subsided, when I pushed away from the dock with my hand and took up the two-bladed paddle — when, after all that fuss, the kayak, built for gliding, cut into the glassy surface in front of me. Gravity and grace, the shush of motion, the flickering shapes of the world there on top of the water.

Sturdy

by Ann Stinson

Mom sits on her deck, a cedar perch newly attached to the room she’s chosen to be her last. It’s where we talk this summer, her ninety-first. I bring her fresh-picked figs and we sigh as we bite into the soft flesh.

She points at an oak across the yard. “I need to talk to your dad about that tree.”

Worried, I ask if she wants him to cut it down.

“No, I want to thank him.”

Dad planted the oak when he and Mom were divorced — a lure to win her back. Along with the tree, she says, he gave her a floor-length red nightgown. She points to her chest, wiggles her shoulders, and laughs. “I never wore it. But the tree — it’s sturdy.”

The Other Side

by Patricia Vigderman

Whenever he and his wife went out to dinner, Oliver told me, on the way home she told him all the things he had done wrong during the evening. It was a regular thing, he said, and he hadn’t even noticed the routine until he was trying to get out of the marriage, which is of course a time when a lot of things you haven’t quite registered take shape. It does sound quite mad: you spend an evening with friends, and then one of you has a commentary on the other’s behavior that has to be shared right away. A replay of your life from another point of view. If marriage can in fact offer another point of view. I guess that would be the wife’s point: that his behavior was somehow something she was supposed to keep in line, or that they were lined up together. Something like that.

At any rate, it’s striking the way this marital logic disintegrates when subjected to a bare bones description from the other’s side of the line-up. Not only does it begin to seem mad, but the line-up itself looks like quite a hopeless idea. For one thing, how many things can a person do wrong at a dinner party? Furthermore, how do you know in fact what wrong is? On the other hand, this is not an exotic impulse. Married people are constantly criticizing each other lots of ways, marriage being the great respite from one’s own shortcomings that it is.

Anyway, Oliver had to spend some time really feeling like a putz for having gone along with this nutty practice or else for never noticing, which is actually a form of participation. On close (and expensive) examination, that is, it turned out to have been a shared insanity. And then he got out of being married, which I don’t know the whole story of, since by the time he was my friend it was all over, really. He is much happier, and now no one catalogs the wrong things he does, or if they start up he Just Says No or something so as not to be in that bad system anymore. This is the end of his part of the story.

That teller of the other person what he’s done wrong, though; I think about that person sometimes. What it’s like to put yourself in somebody else’s life, to take his name (a continuing custom), live where he works (ditto), become if not one flesh at least one social unit, part of an even-numbered gathering, your first name preceded or followed by “and” in the thoughts of your acquaintances. Doesn’t it naturally follow, then, that if you are dressing to minimize your own bad points you would really feel it, the way he’s, say, wearing some shoes that are worn in enough to show the ungainly shape of his foot, or that his shirt just seems a pathetic choice? And if at the party he ignores somebody because he’s involved in another conversation, wouldn’t you take note of that, or if he bites into a cracker with a topping and it falls all over his pathetic shirt front and the floor and he doesn’t even seem to notice? Wouldn’t it be your job to point that out? Or if he shouldn’t have taken that gooey little hors d’oeuvre in the first place? Or if he talks too much at dinner, takes up more space than seems right and possibly is boring others or tells a story that isn’t supposed to be general knowledge or lets on that he (and by extension you) has a low opinion of someone who is a good friend of the host? What are you supposed to do, just pretend it has nothing to do with you? What did he give you his name for if he wasn’t looking for this kind of feedback?

There are lots of self-help books about this stuff, but what if you are the only one reading them, and he is relying on you to help him? How are you supposed to do it, by mental telepathy? So you open your mouth while the catalog of errors is still fresh in your mind and you ease the humiliation and anxiety of having watched him make these mistakes all evening by sharing your observations and opinions. In the dark and private space of the car you can come together with him, relieving yourself of the loneliness of watching him out there for so many hours not thinking of you or of aligning with you. He listens and doesn’t say much. Oh, occasionally a mild protest, or even an agreement that something was a mistake. Sometimes a fight, but mostly just going to bed as usual or, lighter now, you move on to other topics — somebody else’s indiscretion, or happy future options for using your frequent flyer miles.

And then one day he says he’s been really depressed for ten years and he doesn’t want to be married any longer. He has flown off on his own now and whatever is wrong with him he will be taking along. That’s not what you meant, but there it is — or rather, there he isn’t. It’s not fair because there’s no way you can get back all that careful observation of another human being, get it back to turn to your own benefit if necessary. It’s been lost time and attention: while you were taking all those careful notes the story was unfolding around you along quite an unexpected trajectory and now the plot is pretty much out of your hands.

Now those intimate homeward journeys are stripped of your motives and history and feelings and cultural moment, and they look very much like a perfectly crazy way of relating to another human being — if not a downright expression of hostility. What I’m thinking is, the whole system of even getting into a situation where there are two sides trying to line up as one is a juggling act heading for a pratfall.

The fact is, I am very happy for Oliver that he is out of this marriage that made him so unhappy. Everything changes. I just wonder about the story, how the shaping of things is so much what reality seems to be. All shapes, I mean, are unstable but when they are handed around for other people to feel and to look at they seem so firm. A perfectly nice-looking person with an engaging laugh and a lively manner can be caught in a snapshot looking stiff and predatory — that happy, basically innocent laughter a screw-faced, ugly-toothed image with the nose somehow highlighted, and the wonderful joke inaudible.

Credits

Sven Birkerts is the author of eleven books, most recently The Miro Worm and The Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press, 2024). He is editor emeritus of AGNI, and former director of Bennington Writing Seminars. The above essay appeared in the 06/23/26 edition of his Substack column (@svenbirkerts375678), and is reposted with the author’s permission.

Ann Stinson co-owns and manages a 300-acre family tree farm in southwestern Washington state. She is the author of a memoir, The Ground at My Feet: Sustaining a Family and a Forest (Oregon State University Press, 2021). The above essay originally ran in River Teeth’s Beautiful Things (riverteethjournal.com, 02/09/26). For information about Ann’s farm, family, and newsletter, visit annstinson.substack.com.

Patricia Vigderman is the Cambridge-based author of The Real Life of the Parthenon (OSU Press, Mad Creek Books, 2018). She is professor emerita of English and creative writing at Kenyon College. The above piece is an excerpt from her book, Possibility: Essays Against Despair (2013). Used with the permission of Sarabande Books, Inc.

Photos by Betsey Henkels

AUGUST 2, 2026 - ISSUE 09

In this issue

Jennifer Gallo Gaites spends a day at the museum;
Rivka Galchen sees her infant daughter in a new light;
Aimee Bender visits her dad amid a season of drenching rains.

Snails and the Night Sky

by Jennifer Gallo Gaites

I am standing between my mother and daughter on the escalator, jammed among the crowd moving between the 4th and 5th floors of the MoMA. My mother holds her wrist in front of her face, her eyes narrowing on the small screen of her Apple Watch. The device is not working properly and she is not letting this go.

I watch the stream of people ahead of us ascend then scatter, feeling relieved to be in an airier common space of the museum. We’ve just left a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit entitled “To see takes time….” The breadth of work in the O’Keeffe exhibit had been stunning. Famous pieces like signature oils: sand-toned skulls and desert landscapes. Doorways, sharp and angular. Flowers, bursting open toward the canvas’ edge. And lesser known pieces: charcoal sketches so gently worked that they looked like black and white photographs. A series of nude watercolors, self-portraits — pinks and reds following the folds of skin.

But the gallery had been crowded, and there was a large tour group that overtook us in each room of the exhibit. A scrum of senior citizens moving like a glacier eating everything in its path pushed their way in front of each piece of art. They used canes and walkers as plows. They barked at the docent. They left no space for anyone else. In front of a painting of Lake George, a woman called out, “I see a narwhal!”

More than once, we became subsumed by the group, spun around, and shouldered to the edge of their circle. We continued like this throughout the gallery, chased by a murmuration of museum goers. Trying to stay ahead of the tour. Trying not to succumb to frustration and let our day be spoiled.

The exhibit’s promotional posters featured a painting called Evening Star III. On its own, the piece was so small that it struck me as unremarkable. I wondered why the exhibit’s curators chose to highlight it. Evening Star III is like no other painting of the artist’s that I have ever seen. Completely abstract. Concentric circles in deep golds, orangey-reds, and sapphire blue. The edges of the paper are unpainted, open white surfaces left exposed. It hung among a series of ten — each similar but different. Repetition revealing something new in each frame. Looking at each watercolor, it’s as if we’re watching O’Keeffe see.

“Looks like a snail,” a woman from the tour group says, the heft of her body spilling over her walker-turned-stool. Her quick certainty obscures all other possibilities. I want to laugh. But I too see a snail.

I keep looking.

Maybe I see a setting sun. A calm sea. A jewel toned bullseye. A rug unrolling. A spool with a loose thread.

Then a galaxy. To see takes time.

On the escalator, my mother holds out her wrist and pecks at the screen of her watch with her index finger. It is 12:15, but it looks as if the numbers on the watch face are under a magnifying glass. Only the bottom left corner of the first two digits is visible: the serif at the base of the 1 and the point of the 2.

I feel her tightening. I feel myself growing impatient.

“See?” she says, convinced this glitch is her own doing. We all look at the tiny screen, doing what comes so easily: letting our focus spiral in on what is not working. We replace abstraction with false certainty.

“I don’t know, mom,” I shrug.

My mother is certain she should be able to fix this. Certain that if the watch were strapped to the supple wrist of someone in their 20s — like my daughter — it would be working. I am certain that she is taking this too seriously.

But maybe, if I keep looking, I see something else. A perceived barrier between herself and a changing world. A desire to stay relevant. I feel this too. We both look to my daughter for an answer.

“Grandma, I think it’s broken,” my daughter says, matter-of-factly.

My mother looks skeptical. Then she looks relieved. Another possibility. On our slow pull upward toward the next floor, the white space of the museum widens around us.

“Relax, at least you’re not seeing narwhals in Lake George,” I tease.

My mother’s face opens to an unexpected smile, and slowly laughter overtakes her. Her tightness unfurls. The kind of loosening that pulls at a thread of joy, a surrender to the unknown. And for a moment, with her head thrown back and mouth open, darkness dissipates into twinkling light. My mother’s laughter looks like stars.

More babies in art

by Rivka Galchen

When the baby was very small, still in what I have often heard termed the “fourth trimester,” an out-of-town relative came to visit the baby, and to visit New York, and so one afternoon, the baby was put into the sling and was in this manner transported through a Magritte show at the Museum of Modern Art. The baby’s sling consisted of two loops of black fabric, the one nestling into the other, and the baby was still so small that her feet didn’t stick out, nothing showed of her save her bald head, and sometimes, a tiny hand gripping at the edge of the fabric. The paintings at the Magritte show included: men whose heads had been replaced by apples, a gathering of legs without bodies, an iris that was a clouded sky. Magritte-type images, naturally. Magritte’s stated goal, the museum copy noted, was to make “everyday objects shriek aloud.” In one exhibition room after another after another, a stranger would catch sight of the bald head, the small hand, floating amidst a vanishing cloak of sling and raincoat. One stranger after another said of the baby’s inadvertent performance art, “That’s my favorite piece in the show.”

Organs

by Aimee Bender

Los Angeles is pelted by torrential rains the same week my father is admitted to the hospital with too much fluid in his legs. You cannot safely empty them slowly, explains the doctor, as they hook him up to an IV to which they add, twice daily, a diuretic to drain the liquid so it will not rise up and reach his lungs and drown him. At the same time, when I’m home from the hospital, the house intermittently releases a blast of water from an outdoor pipe hooked up to a sump pump in the tiny basement that has a few inches of rain gathered from this highly unusual wet winter, storm upon storm, flooding in California towns, basement water rolling down the driveway as it exits. “I like the sound,” says my daughter, whose bed head is right near the pipe. “Whoosh and then a little gurgle.” It happens ten times a day. My father pees and pees in the hospital, an aide helping him to the bathroom, the doctors watching his kidney numbers because his kidneys are also worn. He loses thirty pounds of fluid weight in his two and a half weeks there until the doctor crows that he can see his tibia again, tapping on his shin, “look, there it is!” His mind is clearer when the fluid is down because his sodium is up and all these things impact thinking. He asks again how I am. He tells me about his past.

The first night in the hospital, when I took the family shift to stay over as he settled in, I sang “Both Sides Now” in the room because we were alone and it’s soundproofed in there or something and for once my voice didn’t wobble from the emotional load. I just wanted to sing it to him. I know all the words from childhood when he would play his Judy Collins record, her long honey-blond hair on the cover, wearing some kind of tilted wide-brimmed hat, me listening carefully to the lyrics sitting cross-legged near the record player before I knew who really wrote it. Rain poured down outside the hospital, visible streaks through the window. He was half-aware of what was going on, and over a week later, clearer, asked me, “do you know that song ‘Both Sides Now’? It’s been in my head all week.” I printed out the lyrics and told him Joni had apparently been in a rough patch when she wrote it, first on a plane, looking out at the clouds, having recently given up her daughter for adoption, going through a divorce. He shook his head, eyes wet as he read the words. “What kind of brilliant mind can make this up?” he said. The food tray comes in. Low sodium fish and potatoes. He’s a few days till discharge at this point, and one nurse jokingly asks him to stay because he is sweet, because he thanks her, and uses her name. “You think I’ll get out of here?” he asks us both, eyes big. I tell him I read an interview with Joni where she said usually she was pretty guarded but when she recorded Blue in the studio she felt like a bag of organs in a transparent sac on view for all to see. He is sitting in his chair with pillows behind him and blankets in his lap and fierce gray eyebrows as the blood pressure cuff tightens on his arm. “Oh,” he says, “I believe it.”

Was it cruel that I’d lodged “I really don’t know life at all” in his head all week? Was it helpful? He doesn’t want to talk about death.

The plumber visits at home due to a faulty toilet and after he fixes it, we ask him to check the tiny basement and sump pump just in case. He says it’s just doing its job, pumping out the water, and will do so for awhile. It was a record-breaking rainy season, and the water table has risen. By this point, it’s largely the groundwater, he explains, gesturing widely in his boots — even on the dry days, the pump will continue to discharge water onto the driveway, maybe for months, maybe for longer. Already bright green creek-like algae grows in the cracks of the cement.

When he leaves, I look up ‘groundwater’ and check out diagrams of water tables. Water beneath the surface, I read. Inside the pores and crevices of rock. I have been feeling the tears doing the same, at times exiting, mostly building up in my internal storage unit of grief, and sometimes it seems that while the world does its business the metaphors are just waiting alongside, ready to be plucked; surely it had to be so with Joni Mitchell staring out her portal window on the flight, and seeing something different in those clouds.

I drive back to the hospital through the rain. Park in the same outdoor parking lot named for Steven Spielberg and duck through the pelting water to navigate the winding corridors. Pass by abstract paintings and the variety of beeping machines. The song’s back in my head; my father hasn’t said anymore about it but it’s looping in my mind all the time now. I also picked it for myself, it seems.

What did she mean about life’s illusions? So many there are. Even here, right at the edge of death, I look hopefully to the nurse.

“He slept better,” she assures me, as I settle into my spot by his bedside to wait.

Credits

Jennifer Gallo Gaites is a writing instructor at Project Write Now, a nonprofit in New Jersey. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and Literary Mama. The above essay first ran in the 8/15/25 issue of Pangyrus (pangyrus.com).

Rivka Galchen is a Canadian-American author and staff writer for The New Yorker. A physician by training, she frequently writes about medicine and science. The above essay, “More babies in art,” is an excerpt from Little Labors by Rivka Galchen. Copyright © 2016 by Rivka Galchen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Aimee Bender is a novelist and author of six books, including The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). Her short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals, as well as on PRIs This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC. The above essay originally ran in SmokeLong Quarterly (Issue 89).

Photos by Betsey Henkels

JULY 19, 2026 - ISSUE 08

In this issue

Naomi Cohn finds common ground with woodpeckers as she types in braille;
Steven Church takes his daughter for a drive;
Adam Farrer adopts an old dog.

Tapping

by Naomi Cohn

The sound my stylus makes as I write. The sound a woodpecker makes on the telephone pole in the alley behind our house. Drumming, ornithologists call it. In my Saint Paul city neighborhood, a small tangle of leafy streets pressed between highways and railyards, the noise is most likely made by a flicker or a downy woodpecker. My tapping sounds most like the little downy. One December day, a loud bird comes through our neighborhood: black, maybe crow-sized. Calling calling calling. Ray and I are walking the ice-slick streets. We follow the black dot. I ask Ray if it has any white on it. Yes, he sees the flash of its wings as it comes to roost in a bare oak. Calling, still calling. Another bird responds. A pair.

Back home, I listen to a birding app. Yes, that is the call. I peer at tiny photos. Yes, that is the white stripe. I piece together a pileated woodpecker. Usually a bird of deeper woods, it’s wandered here to call among our city oaks. A pileated woodpecker is big enough for me to get an impression of with my naked eye. Memory tells me it looks like a striking dinosaur, flying through the trees. Its hammering echoes across woods. The birding guides show it dressed like a superhero, a white lightning bolt streaking its black neck.

My stylus noise evokes strong responses. My tapping does not indicate a hunt for food, nor any direct communication. My tapping’s just a by-product of my braille writing, a by-product of eventual communication. I remember sitting in the audience at a conference panel, taking notes in braille. A woman in front of me kept turning around, twisting her body with a face even I could see was wrinkled with displeasure. I neither explained nor responded. Likely she had no idea what I was doing, could not identify the slate or stylus, but nonetheless wanted to shush me.

Other times I use slate and stylus in a writing workshop and people come up to me during breaks to tell me how much they like hearing the sound. Usually I smile, but sometimes not. Like a woodpecker, I am just trying to live my life.

Night Owl

by Steven Church

He switched the headlights off and urged her up, into the night air.

“Go on. Stand up,” he said, pointing at the Toyota’s open moon roof. The car rolled slowly down a country road, somewhere deep in the valley of quakes. Soon enough she would be too old for this.

“Really?” the little girl asked, wide-eyed.

He reassured his daughter that he had everything under control even as he knew this wasn’t true. Beyond the green glow of the dashboard, the stars seemed to hang over the Cholame Valley like ornaments on the gnarled oaks, their twisting leafless branches silhouetted in the October moonlight. He’d brought her here, to this place, because it meant something to him. He wanted her to feel what he felt in the Earthquake Capital of the World.

The little girl climbed up onto the middle console and he grabbed ahold of her left leg as she gripped the edge of the open roof and slowly poked her head out. He let the car idle and roll slowly, tires crunching on the macadam. There wasn’t another car in sight. Just the distant porchlights of farm houses. And the silence he’d grown to love. They’d come to this place to escape the noise of the city, a father and his daughter sharing a weekend together. They only get two each month. So, he tries to make them memorable.

“Faster!” the girl commanded and he obeyed until her hair was blowing back behind, her face lit up by the moon. She squealed with delight as he accelerated slowly, carefully, knowing he had to think about the stories she would later tell her mother. She spread her arms out wide, fingertips wiggling above the road. He tightened his grip on her leg, wrapping his arm around her calf as he pressed lightly on the gas.

He looked at the road ahead and saw something drop from the trees, cruising just beneath the limbs, a shadow of something, a brush stroke fluttering across the night. A thin black wave. It magnified in size as they rushed toward it and he had no idea how to stop it or avoid it. He knew the girl couldn’t see it yet. Or didn’t want to. And perhaps that’s the way things should be.

Reaching up slowly he curled his hand over the girl’s belt and eased off the accelerator as the winged shadow drew closer and closer still. At what seemed the last moment, he yanked her down into the car. She screamed and tumbled into her seat, confused and frightened. He took his foot off the accelerator, slammed it down on the brake and flipped on the headlights.

He pointed at the windshield.

In a flash, illuminated above them, wings spread almost as wide as the car, was the white underbelly of a barn owl, its talons open as it slowed suddenly, frightened by the light, hovering for a half-second over them before flapping hard to recover its flight, pulling up from its dive, wheeling left, and disappearing back into the darkness, carving a new line across the moon-silvered fields.

He still remembers the thwop-thwop-thwop-thwop of its wings above the open roof and the way his daughter looked at him, already telling this story, the one you’re reading now, the one about the owl and the darkness and her father trying to hold back the bird.

The Museum of Withernsea

by Adam Farrer

My dog, Millie, sits most of the time these days, because she cannot stand for long. If we spend too much time in one spot her back legs will gradually give way like a punctured inflatable, lowering her to the ground. So, on walks we either keep moving or we give in to the collapse. When we stop, she often chooses my feet to rest on, because they’re big and I don’t move anywhere fast. Waiting outside Ellis’s Cafe, just off Withernsea promenade, her choice was either my trainers or the concrete, so she lumped down onto my feet and shimmied up to me, resting her head against my knees.

I adopted her back in September of 2019 when she’d just turned fifteen and was by far the most unwanted dog in the kennels. I’d already decided to pick the oldest one they had, but Millie was something else. A twice abandoned Labrador, too sick and old to live up to anyone’s dream of what a family dog should be. In truth she’s a Labrador cross, though crossed with what no one is sure. Whatever it was, she’s ended up looking like a failed but still remarkable experiment. A first draft you just want to leave unchanged. She’s barrel-shaped with stumpy legs and pig-pink skin, visible through an off-white coat that moults away from her in downy, fist-sized tumbleweeds whenever she sneezes, which is roughly every five minutes.

When one of the handlers brought her out of the kennels and over to me for the first time, Millie was on the brink of collapse, awkwardly sashaying like a catwalk model attempting to navigate a runway in precarious heels. Her tongue hung from one side of her mouth like a half-eaten rasher of thick-cut bacon, making her look appealingly dopey and lost in thought. She was deaf, had diarrhoea and her shaggy body was studded with egg-sized tumours. Twice daily medication was required to help ease the pain from the arthritis in her hips. The front part of her body was okay, home to healthy organs and a pair of front legs that a powerlifter would be proud of, but her hind legs were so withered at that point they looked as if they’d been plucked from a chicken on its death bed. Still, possessed by a youthful energy that her body couldn’t quite sustain, the realisation that she was being taken for a walk overtook her and she attempted to bound towards me, at which point she lost her balance and tumbled headfirst into a hedge. I fell in love with her immediately.

The handler, a stout middle-aged woman named Jane, placed Millie’s lead in my hand.

‘Take her for a spin,’ Jane said, smiling. ‘But not too fast.’

A four-legged tragedy, tectonic plates moved faster than Millie. On top of the arthritis, she also had an inner ear infection that was affecting her balance, so she had to be held upright with her harness in order to stop her from falling over. This made walking her an act closer to puppeteering. As we picked our way around the grounds she turned all corners with trepidation, approaching each as if it was both her first time doing so, but also as if it could be her last.

‘Is it fair to keep her alive?’ I asked Jane, as I crouched to stroke Millie’s ears and stare lovingly into her drooping, mournful eyes.

‘Well, the vets say she’s okay,’ Jane said, ‘but she’ll be lucky if she makes it past Christmas.’ I must have done something drastic with my face because she looked flustered and quickly recalibrated, switching to the positive. ‘She’s happy and playful though. Plenty of miles left in her.’

It was weird to be offered a dog by someone who kept using car sales talk. Like getting the hard sell on a cut-and-shut: two cars that have clearly been welded together. And in fairness, that was Millie – a canine cut-and-shut. Front end decent, back end bad. But, me being a sucker for a lost cause and a short-term let with character, I adopted Millie that day. Jane and I sat in the reception area, going through the paperwork, while Millie tottered around the room like a cartoon drunk, eventually collapsing at my feet and looking up at me with so much unwarranted adoration that I felt woozy from it. I fussed her ears as I read through her notes, pausing when I reached the section on personality quirks.

‘It says here that she’s a bit of a diva.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Jane replied, her eyes widening, ‘she’s a diva alright.’

I looked at Millie lying on the floor, barely capable of breathing, let alone outrageous demands. She struggled to her feet and briskly farted from the exertion.

‘Are you going to change her name?’ Jane asked, as I signed the adoption papers.

‘Yes,’ I said, watching as Millie slowly navigated a doorway and collided with the frame. ‘I’m going to call her Lightning. Or Mariah Carey.’

‘Really?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why change the name of a deaf dog?’

‘That’s all the more reason,’ Jane said. ‘You can call her anything you like. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.’

The kennels usually charged £150 for adoptions but they didn’t think it was right to charge me that kind of money just so I could watch a dog die. It wasn’t that kind of business.

‘Maybe just make a donation,’ Jane said. ‘How does £20 sound?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It seems fair.’

I settled up and walked Millie to the car, my third-hand, £20 puppet, and hoisted her up into the back seat. I love you, I thought. And something else. I’ve saved you.

Credits

Naomi Cohn has lived many lives, among them, as a community organizer, encyclopedia copy editor, therapist, artist, and Minnesota-based writer. She is the author of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024), from which the above essay originates.

Steven Church is an essayist, whose most recent book is I’m Just Getting To The Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear and Fatherhood (Outpost19, 2018). He is a founding editor of the journal, The Normal School, and professor of creative nonfiction at Fresno State. The above essay originally appeared in Brevity (brevitymag.com, 9/12/25).

Adam Farrer is a writer, lecturer, and editor in Manchester, UK, whose latest book is Broken Biscuits: and Other Male Failures (HarperNorth, 2025). The above piece is an excerpt from his memoir in essays, Cold Fish Soup (Saraband, 2022).

Photos by Betsey Henkels

JULY 5, 2026 - ISSUE 07

In this issue

Howard Mansfield ponders the meaning of yard sales;
Aaron Angello recalls a childhood pet;
Ann Hood reappraises her parents’ food truck.

On Going Late to Yard Sales

by Howard Mansfield

Everyone will tell you to go early to a yard sale, but I recommend going late. You won’t come home with many treasures, but you will walk away with a glimpse of the riddles that are other people’s lives.

In the last hour of a yard sale, the sellers are exhausted. They may be remorseful about what has sold and what remains. They have a look of soporific regret, much like the dullness that follows gluttony. They are not cleansed by losing some useless things. Rather, they seem exposed, as if their junk — old chairs and blenders — was off with the new owners telling secrets on them. They have put part of themselves in boxes out on the driveway, and watched themselves scatter to the winds. They are surprised. They had just put stuff out to sell and now they feel diminished and judged. Late at yard sales, they sit trying to decipher the verdict.

Here are the “object-secrets” of a house outside in the sunshine, the intimate now public. They still retain a touch of their domestic duty, the marks of wear and use. Once they were commodities, one of a million produced in a factory, then they were possessions, and now at a yard sale they are a third thing, existing in uncertainty. Some of these things are on the cusp of being trash; some have gained value as a fetish, a prized collectible.

What we are seeing at yard sales are moments of uncertainty. It’s as if the driveway or barn or garage sat on a seesaw. Are we witnessing the end of an empire, the breakup of a marriage? Is someone decamping for another dream-vector, another fate-center on the map? Is the rest of the seller’s life as bereft of grace as this driveway selection?

I remember two houses in particular. Each yard sale marked an ending, one happy, one not.

At the happy place, my wife and I arrived after the owners had nothing left to sell. It was an old farm and the couple was in their late sixties. We got to chatting: their family had raised chickens, goats, sheep, horses.… They’d done it all, and now they were moving on. They had come to New Hampshire in the 1950s, after the Korean War, and it had been a good life, the woman told us, and she smiled as she said this. She had the poise not to be disappointed by her yard sale; she could let go.

The unhappy house was easy to spot. It was a house divided — half of it painted a chocolate-bar brown, the other half a thin, sloppy white, like skim milk. The line where brown met white was rough and ran from the foundation to the eaves.

At the sale, only a few heavy objects were left, including a dubious avocado-green refrigerator and an air-hockey table that weighed more than our car. A man and a woman (husband and wife?) sat there, silently in different spheres.

We edged quietly back to our car. The house was sour with old anger.

“What do you think happened there?” my wife asked.

“Kaboom,” I mimed, moving my hands wide apart.

If you go early to a yard sale, pushing in during the Oklahoma-land-rush frenzy, you may find some bargains, but you will miss the puzzles that are left when the boxes are nearly empty.

A Handful of Cloud

by Aaron Angello

Once, when I was very young, I was riding in the car with my parents. We were driving along these winding mountain roads between Cripple Creek and Victor. As often happens on these roads, we drove into a cloud that sat heavily on the ground like a patch of mountain fog. My father excitedly rolled down the window and yelled back to me, “Aaron, quick, grab a handful of cloud!” I reached both of my hands out the window, into a particularly dense bit of cloud, and cupped them around it. “Do you have it?” “I think so.” I pulled my hands back into the car, making sure there were no gaps between my fingers from which the cloud could escape. I held the cloud in my hands for the entire ride home. Once home, I ran into my room and stowed the cloud in the top drawer of my dresser. For more than a year after that, I would spend hours in my room playing with what I’d come to refer to as my pet cloud. I never named my pet cloud, I just called it my pet cloud. It couldn’t really do anything other than be a pet cloud, but neither can a pet fish or a pet hamster or a pet turtle. I think I really loved my pet cloud. But as often happens with the things we love as children, my pet cloud became increasingly less important to me. I played with it less frequently. It eventually became just a part of the stuff that was in that drawer. Sometimes I’d not even see it when I looked into that drawer for something else. Eventually we moved, and I lost track of it entirely. Maybe I’ll find it someday, in an old box of trophies, report cards, baseballs.

Sausage on Wheels

by Ann Hood

Long before the Dessert Truck and Kogi Korean BBQ and the Grilled Cheese Grill, before the Mighty Cone and Frysmith, there was Sausage on Wheels.

No one would ever call my parents trendsetters. My father wore Harris tweed to work as the operations manager for the IRS in Government Center in downtown Boston, and flannel shirts and jeans on weekends. My mother still favors Liz Claiborne for dressing up. Other than the Italian food my grandmother made, we ate the staples of the 1960s: meatloaf made with Lipton dried onion soup, canned vegetables, hot dogs and hamburgers cooked on the backyard grill. My parents drove Chevys, watched Hee Haw; they drank whiskey sours and Michelob, line-danced and played Bingo. Yet in 1979, my safe, predictable parents bought a truck, converted the cab into a kitchen, and sold sausage-and-pepper sandwiches and meatball grinders from it.

I had forgotten about Sausage on Wheels because, I admit, their business venture had embarrassed me. I was twenty-two that year and trying on a new self, a more worldly and sophisticated one. I drank Chablis and wore Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I dated young lawyers who drove Porsches and took me to dinner at expensive restaurants. I lived on the sixth floor of a soaring high-rise on the waterfront in Boston, just one T stop from Logan airport, where I was based as a TWA flight attendant. How could two parents who drove a truck to a flea market every Sunday to sell sandwiches ever fit into the world I was so carefully trying to create?

But one summer many years later in Portland, Oregon, I followed a map carefully marked by the hotel concierge to a parking lot where people sold food out of their trucks. I stood, surrounded by trucks selling Wiener schnitzel sandwiches and sushi and Thai noodles and Mongolian beef and sliders and tacos. Truck food was hot. It was hip. The trend was spreading east. On that sunny day in that parking lot, I remembered Sausage on Wheels and the energetic hope and pride with which my parents ran it.

Sausage on Wheels made money. Not enough for them to quit their real jobs working for the IRS, but enough for them to take trips to Las Vegas, to give both my brother and me down payments for houses. “Even if it didn’t make a dime,” my father told me, “I would still do it. I love it that much.” I smiled tightly while he dreamed of expanding. “Couldn’t you see a Sausage on Wheels downtown?” he said, his eyes gleaming. “All those people on their lunch breaks?” I could imagine it, and the idea made me shudder. What if someone recognized them?

My parents never did expand. Instead, life got in the way. In June 1982, my brother, Skip, died suddenly. A few days later, we sat, stunned, on the back porch of our house. Sausage on Wheels was parked in the driveway. My father got up and went into the house, returning with the restaurant-sized bowl he used for mixing the meatballs. My mother joined him as he went back to the kitchen. Together, crying, they sliced peppers and onions and rolled hundreds of meatballs. The next day, they drove the truck to the flea market to sell the food they’d made.

I have a picture, a Polaroid, of my parents smiling out from the truck on its first day in business. The words SAUSAGE ON WHEELS are painted in fat letters on the side. They are happy and proud, holding sandwiches out the window. When I look at that snapshot, I wonder what they would have thought had they been able to see the future: the food trucks parked everywhere in cities across the country. Or perhaps they would be satisfied that in their ordinary way, they taught me something extraordinary. That even in grief, we must take tentative steps back into the world. That even in grief, we must eat. And that when we share that food with others, we are reclaiming those broken bits of our lives, holding them out as if to say, I am still here. Comfort me. As if with each bite, we remember how it is to live.

Credits

Howard Mansfield has written extensively about history, architecture, and preservation, exploring our place in the world. The New Hampshire-based author has a new book forthcoming in October from Lyons Press: Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. The above piece is from his essay collection, Summer Over Autumn: A Small Book of Small-Town Life (Bauhan Publishing, 2017).

Aaron Angello is a poet, essayist, and playwright, who teaches creative writing and theater at Hood College in Maryland. The above essay appears, under a different title, in his genre-bending book, The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications (Rose Metal Press, 2022).

Ann Hood knits, cooks, and travels, and writes about these and much more. Currently based in Manhattan, she is the author of fifteen novels and four memoirs, as well as middle school and YA books. The above essay is excerpted from Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food. Copyright (c) 2019 by Ann Hood. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Photos by Betsey Henkels

JUNE 21, 2026 - ISSUE 06

In this issue

Three views of the great outdoors:

Roger Rosenblatt makes the case for, and against, Vermont;
Darien Gee trudges to class in Hawaii;
Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning, and true love, while camping in Florida.

Don’t Retreat to Maine or Vermont, Especially Vermont.

by Roger Rosenblatt

As the years go on, the urge may overcome you to pack it all in and head for some bucolic paradise where you and your spouse may end your days in the bosom of nature. The truth is that nature doesn’t care if you are in her bosom or not.

Katherine Hepburn will tell you otherwise. Watch On Golden Pond and you will hear Ms. Hepburn praise the land of loons and tiny yellow flowers till all you want to do is join her and Henry Fonda in their rustic paradise. It doesn’t exist. Take it from me.

One year, Ginny and I took the three children to Norwich, Vermont. Why, you ask. Because it’s de rigueur for writers to rusticate, usually in Vermont. It’s the law. And Vermont is the place every rusticater wants to live, until they live there.

It’s not that Vermonters aren’t lovely, good-hearted, or interesting. Vermonters are lovely, good-hearted, and interesting. It’s nature that drives you nuts — the loons and tiny yellow flowers, and the grackles, and the beavers. I spent a whole year talking to beavers and not writing a sentence. I didn’t even make it through “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Luckily, at the end of that year Time magazine called to offer me a job, and we returned to the bosom of the sooty and crime-ridden city.

It takes a special temperament and cast of mind to live with nature day in and day out. If you possess those qualities, more power to you. Thoreau, who claimed to be such a person, spent his days with Walden Pond and his nights with his mother. I do not have the nature-living temperament. And neither do most of my contemporaries who, like me, at one time or another were drawn by nature’s siren call, under the belief that one will find life’s true meaning in God’s green acres.

Want life’s true meaning? Embrace your loved ones in any setting, anywhere. Everything else is loons and tiny yellow flowers.

Vine

by Darien Gee

On the way to a writing workshop, I curse the coordinator who thought it would be a good idea to house us in separate condos throughout the island, “like pebbles scattered on a beach.” My place is half a mile away from where we will be meeting, and there is a small hill, and it is hot. I am out of shape. I am not one who relishes the outdoors, who hikes through valleys or mucks through the rainforest, who breathes deep before plunging into the shimmering blue of the Pacific. I am an air-conditioned sort of person, windblown only by a hair dryer, the kind of woman whose road most travelled is between the desk in her bedroom and the kitchen.

• • •

The map app announces the journey will take nine minutes by foot, which means thirteen or fourteen minutes for me. The sun is full in the sky though it is not even 10:00 am. I trudge along the edge of the narrow road. Every so often a car passes a little too close. I am at the point in the walk where my head drops, even though it’s only been ten minutes, and that’s when I see, parallel to my path, a vine of heart-shaped leaves wending its way under fallen leaves and debris. Later, I will look it up: wild petunia, Ipomoea obscura, not native to Hawaii, invasive. I lean over the guard rail to look for where it begins, but the vine goes on forever, heart after heart. I know better than to think this is a divine message.

• • •

I walk this path for five days. On the last day, I pinch off a leaf to press between the pages of my journal. When I find it weeks later, back in my bedroom desk with the air conditioner set at 74°F, the green has turned a mottled brown.

The Love Test

by Suzanne Roberts

Everglades National Park, United States,

February 2007

I had a suspicion then, which has since been confirmed, that this was my relationship test. Don’t pretend you have never been subjected to one or devised one yourself. We were camped at the deserted Highland Beach, 100 miles into a 150-mile kayaking trip in the Gulf of Mexico, paddling from Florida’s Everglade City to the Flamingo Visitor’s Center and back. My practical-to-the-extreme and water-savvy new boyfriend had been a kayaking instructor with Outward Bound, and he wanted to make sure his new girlfriend could make such a trip.

By the third twenty-mile kayaking day, my forearms squeaked like rusty door hinges when I tried to move my wrists or my hands. Later I learned the medical term for this, “crepitus,” making it sound like the death of an arm, which in some ways it was. On the fourth day, we ran over a shark in the shallow waters between mangroves, and I had a tantrum, which is quite a feat considering I was squeezed into my kayak compartment like a wrapped mummy.

“It’s just a nurse shark,” Practical Boyfriend said.

“So?” I screamed. “Shark. Shaaaarrrk.”

“Calm down. I don’t even think they have teeth.”

I grew up at the height of the Jaws paranoia, so the sight of a dorsal fin brought me back to my six-year-old self and the trochaic meter of that Jaws music, the thrashing, and blood blooming like red begonias under the sea. One has to wonder why parents ever let their small children see such a film.

And for the record, nurse sharks do have teeth.

I was surely passing the test. I had paddled through my crepitus and didn’t sink the boat during our shark encounter. I even agreed to hitting a fellow boater over the head with my paddle, if needed. A school group was out at a rough point, not ironically called Shark Point. Their canoes had tipped in the wind, and the waves lashed at their boats and their now-submerged bodies. They were screaming. A lot.

“Listen,” Practical Boyfriend said, “I have a tow line. We’ve got to go out and get them.”

“We do?” I asked. My question was not rhetorical.

Apparently, this particular corner of ocean was popular with the hammerheads, who even Practical Boyfriend admitted had teeth. But he had been a Boy Scout and an Outdoor Trip Leader, and there was no way we were going to paddle past the group in their time of need. They were all bobbing about the angry gray sea like eggs boiling in a pot. One of their canoes was upside down, the other beyond their reach.

“But if they try to grab at you,” Practical Boyfriend warned, “hit them with your paddle, so they don’t capsize the boat.”

I was poised but still full of doubt. How could I crack the head of someone in need with my hard-plastic paddle? I certainly would have failed that test. Thankfully, Practical Boyfriend saved the day with his tow line and his quick wits, and no head-smashing was called for.

That night we arrived at Highland Beach on our way back up to Everglade City and set up Practical Boyfriend’s small blue tent between two palm trees. We watched bald eagles steal fish from osprey. The salty sky turned blue to pink, and a mackerel jumped from the sea, glinting silver. Crab shells littered the edge of the shore, shining white like bones. The sun streaked across the sea, a tunnel of light reaching the sand. The wind whistled through the palm fronds above and kept the black flies away. A hawk caught in a draft of wind, flashed a brown triangle of wing, a red tail.

We drank red wine from a box, and I watched as Practical Boyfriend cooked dinner. Three pelicans glided by, and the line between sea and sky shined like glass. I dug my toes into the sand, the million tiny broken stones and shells. An osprey called overhead. A flock of orange-beaked oystercatchers darted above the water. We looked out over the horizon; pelicans were silhouettes in the darkening sky. As the constellations appeared, Practical Boyfriend pointed to them, deciphering the syntax of stars — Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Orion’s Belt. The tide unrolled a curtain onto the sand, surging and retreating, leaving behind beautiful corpses of conch shells, pink and temporal. Raccoons scurried to the tide pools, pulling the flesh from shells.

Then the wind carried clouds, obscuring the stars, as if they were covered by the gauzy net of a veil. And then flashing light bloomed in the distance. “Are those explosions?” I asked.

“I’m not sure what that is,” Practical Boyfriend said. “Maybe lightning.”

“How could that be lightning? It looks like a fireworks show.”

The light erupted like a volcano, a commotion of orange and yellow along the line between the black sky and gray sea.

We listened to the marine radio with its mechanical warnings to small craft about electrical storms, high seas, and winds.

“I guess you were right,” I said, “but I’ve never seen lightning like that before.”

We sat on the sand, looking out at the flashing horizon; the storm still seemed so very far away.

We woke at dawn, and the radio issued new, more urgent warnings to the small craft that had not heeded the initial announcement. The rain fell in pleats against the nylon roof and walls of the tent. The ground beneath us shook with the rumble of thunder. But still an ocean away. Or so it seemed. Practical Boyfriend wasn’t worried, and so we reached for each other.

Then the rain turned to hail stones, and the small tent lit up with each new bolt of lightning. The distant thunder became detonations on our sandy beach, between our two lovely palms, around our little love tent. “Listen,” Practical Boyfriend said. “If anything happens, here’s how you call out on the radio.” He showed me.

“What do you mean anything? Why would I call? Who would I call?”

“If anything happens to me,” he said. This was not a man who overreacted, so I tried to concentrate on what button to push and when.

“And we better get in lightning position,” he said between cracks of thunder and flashes of lightning. The air smelled like burning things, and my hair stood on end. Until that moment, I had always thought of this as a cliché. But sometimes, there’s truth in cliché.

“Okay,” I said. “Lightning position. What’s that?”

Practical Boyfriend demonstrated. He rolled up his sleeping pad, kneeling on it. I copied him. “You have to have your knees and feet together,” he warned. “So if we’re hit by ground current, there’s one entry and exit place. It’s safer that way.”

“Ground current?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Kneel like this.”

So I did.

I didn’t find out what this meant until later — that if the lightning struck close enough, it could reach us by traveling down one of our palm trees and through the sand. Practical Boyfriend knew a fellow Outdoor Leader who had died exactly this way. One point of entry and exit means less burning of the body.

There we kneeled, naked and knees together on our camping pads. Now closer, the thunder sounded like bombs exploding nearby.

When it got to be too much, I started to cry.

“It’ll be okay,” Practical Boyfriend said. The blue tent lit up with each strike, followed by another crashing ka-boom. And the smell of something like sulfur. I was scared, but it wasn’t that — well, at least not exactly that.

“I have to go poo,” I finally admitted. The fear plus this crouching, knee-together kneeling position meant I might not be able to hold it. It’s one thing to be scared of sharks in front of a new boyfriend or even fail to smash a fellow boater’s head with your paddle should you need to.

This was another thing entirely.

But Practical Boyfriend reached for his knit beanie, and he said those six words every woman longs to hear: “You can poop in my hat.”

Practical Boyfriend had not yet told me he loved me, nor even said that he liked me.

But because of my practiced yoga postures, a strong will, sheer embarrassment, and an offering of the hat that I interpreted as true love, I was able to hold off until the storm finally moved on, and I could sprint from the tent and squat in privacy behind a palm. In the end, it was Practical Boyfriend who passed the test.

Practical Boyfriend would eventually become Practical Husband, and for the record, I have never pooped in his hat.

Credits

Roger Rosenblatt is a New York-based writer whose commentaries appeared for many years in Time Magazine, and on PBS NewsHour. He is the author of some two dozen books, among them novels, essays collections, and memoirs. The above essay is an excerpt from his latest book, More Rules for Aging: Making the Most of Your Ridiculous, Wondrous Life (Turtle Point Press, 2026).

Darien Hsu Gee is the multi-genre author of five novels, including Friendship Bread. Her next book, Fortune Cookie (part of the Object Lessons series), will be published by Bloomsbury in 2028. She lives in Hawaii, and teaches creative nonfiction at UCLA Extension and micro prose at Writer-ish (writer-ish.com). The above piece is an excerpt from her micro essay collection, Allegiance (Legacy Isle, 2020).

Suzanne Roberts is a California-based travel writer, poet, and memoirist who has written three essay collections and four books of poetry. Her forthcoming craft book, 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer, will be published in the fall by University of Nebraska Press. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. The above essay is a chapter from her book, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Photos by Betsey Henkels.

JUNE 7, 2026 - ISSUE 05

In this issue

Brock Clarke deconstructs a habit of everyday conversation;
Beth Ann Fennelly considers the whereabouts of a missing wine glass;
Murr Brewster rediscovers her local library.

Very

by Brock Clarke

I once knew a guy — a guy past the age where he could wear tight jeans but still wearing them, a guy with not enough hair in front to justify the ponytail in back — who asked a friend of mine out on a date. She was flustered by this, maybe because he was asking her out while I was standing right there next to her, and also maybe because she’d thought the guy was gay, and as everyone knows, when you’re most flustered, you’re also most likely to tell the truth, which was why my friend blurted out, “I thought you were gay.”

“What?” the guy said, obviously offended, but trying to compose himself, stroking his ponytail, tugging at his jeans. “Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know,” my friend said, obviously embarrassed and wanting to get out of the conversation. “I just thought you were gay, that’s all.”

“Well, I’m not,” the guy said.

“O.K.,” she said. “I believe you.”

“Good,” the guy said. Then, trying to make sure my friend really did believe him, he said something he shouldn’t have: “I’m very heterosexual.”

Is there a weaker, sadder, more futile word in the English language than very? Is there another word as fully guaranteed to prove the opposite of what its speaker or writer intends it to prove? Is there another word that so clearly states, on the speaker’s or writer’s behalf, “I’m not going to even try to find the right word,” or “No matter how hard I try, I’m not going to find the right word”? Is there a less specific, less helpful, less necessary, less potent word in our vocabulary? There is not. The weatherman knows this when he tells us to bundle up because it’s going to be very cold outside. The mother knows this when she tells her teenagers whom she’s caught smoking out behind the garage again that she’s very disappointed in them. Elmer Fudd knows this when he tells Bugs Bunny to be vewy quiet. Our students know this when they write, in their stories and by way of providing their characters the physical details we tell them their characters need in order to be characters, that so-and-so is very heavy, or very beautiful, or very statuesque. We all know this is an awful, lame word (John Cheever, in his story “The Wrysons,” describes a group of rich people who travel up and down the eastern seaboard as being “very aquatic,” and manages to employ [or deploy] the word as he did others — knowingly, beautifully; but it’s dicey to try to write like Cheever, as I know very well to be true and maybe Cheever himself did, too). So why do we use this awful, lame word? Is it because we’re too lazy to find the right word to describe the things that are most important to us? Or is it impossible to find the right word to describe those important things? When we say, “very,” do we say, “I don’t care”? Or do we say, “I care too much”?

I was watching my seven-year-old son read a book the other day — it was The Clue of the Screeching Owl, No. 41 in the Hardy Boys series. He was sitting on his bed, the book in front of his face, and didn’t notice me standing in the doorway watching him. I must have stood there for five minutes, watching him read, watching him and watching him and falling deeper and deeper in love. What is it about seeing your children read that makes you love them so much, love them as much as you should love them all the time? I don’t think it’s only writers who feel this way. I don’t think it’s only readers who feel this way, either. I don’t think it has anything to do with reading at all — after all, as far as spectator sports go, watching someone read is only slightly more exciting than watching someone play golf. Maybe it’s easier to love a child at rest than a child in motion. Or maybe to watch a child reading is to watch a child not in any danger, a child you haven’t put in peril, a child you haven’t screwed up, or screwed up yet, or screwed up totally. Or maybe to watch a child who is unaware of you watching them is to watch something so perfect and unself-conscious that it is impossible to do anything but love them.

“What?” my son said. Because of course he’d noticed me standing there, and was now reading me the way he’d been reading the book a moment earlier, except he was reading me skeptically, suspecting, maybe, that I wanted something from him, whereas he’d been reading The Clue of the Screeching Owl with pleasure, and this, by the way, is the main reason we read: The people we love always want something from us, but the books we love do not want anything from us except that we read them.

“Nothing,” I said. Because how could I tell him how I felt? How could I tell him I worry about him every second of every day except when he is reading? How could I tell him I would die if something bad happened to him, even something just a little bad that only caused me to die a little bit, and so as long as he kept reading and let me watch him do it I wouldn’t have to die yet? How could I tell him that by reading he was giving me more time to love him? How do you say this kind of stuff to your son, or to anyone else for that matter? You don’t; I didn’t. Instead I said, “I love you very much.”

My son looked at me over the top of his book. It was that parental look, full of disappointment. “Very?” his look seemed to say. “Is that the best you can do?” And then he returned to his book, which, presumably, hopefully, would do better.

Two Phone Conversations

by Beth Ann Fennelly

— I can’t find my wine glass. My favorite wine glass.

— The one with the glass beads glued on?

— That’s the one. I think the maid took it.

— The maid didn’t take it.

— Yes, she did. The Polish maid. She took it.

— The maid didn’t take the wine glass, Mom. If she was going to steal, she’d steal something valuable. Jewelry or money. But she’s not stealing. And she certainly didn’t take your wine glass. You’ve misplaced it. It’ll turn up.

* * *

— I found my wine glass.

— Yeah? Where?

— In the cabinet. She put it back.

Libraries: A Love Letter

by Murr Brewster

Time was, children, if you wanted a library book, you had to go to the library. The actual physical library building. You located your book in the card catalog. Then you rowed through the stacks until you chased it down by its Dewey decimal number. And since you were already there, you might cruise through those stacks just to see whether something interesting popped up.

I was at the library the very day the card catalog was hauled away. I was barely 40 years old but had a full-blown case of premature curmudgeonry. This was a terrible betrayal. It was as though the ancient Greeks had ousted their oracle. But I’m over it. Now, the library is a place where people go to get warm. The rest of us are online. We can put a hold on a book, and they’ll even mail it to us for free if we want. It’s like shopping, or getting food, or banking — there’s no need to pry yourself out of your comfy chair.

But I enjoy the starch of virtue I get from walking to the library to pick up my book. The space devoted to holds is almost as big as the rest of the stacks now. They don’t have as many books out on the main bookshelves anymore. It feels like an orphanage for books nobody wants to put a hold on.

I’m certain the books I order gossip about me in the hold limbo. The nonfiction sneers at the genre lit, and the literary fiction sneers at everything. They’ve got time; they can be there awhile. When I put a book on hold, the library usually informs me that I’m No. 257 in line for 22 copies. So, I already know other people want to read that book, too, and since everything is done on the honor system now and there are no overdue fines, I have to try really hard to get the little princesses read and returned.

That’s not my strong suit. For someone who takes to wordage like an otter takes to water, I’m a remarkably slow reader. I hardly ever sit in a chair and read. I read in bed. That’ll get me five pages in before I fall asleep, and I won’t remember them the next night.

And for the past few years, I have — more than once — tried to return a book to a library that was no longer open. Thanks to the generosity of Portland, Oregon, taxpayers who can’t pass up a library or parks levy, our neighborhood libraries are getting a makeover. Some of them might even be retrofitted to withstand the big Cascadia subduction zone earthquake that the geologists have penciled in for us.

Five years ago, my local branch closed down, and the suggested replacement added a mile to my walk. Then that one closed, and the county arranged for a pop-up branch in a tiny room of a college campus, where the staff was lonely and eager to help out and recommend things. I loved that little gem, but last year it closed for good, and I was directed to a whole different branch. I’m sure there was an announcement made, but I never seemed to find out until I walked a book back and saw the sign on the door. I can adjust. I don’t take these things personally.

The other day, I returned a book to this latest entry in Library Bingo, and had nothing to pick up. So I browsed the actual physical shelves like a caveman. Honestly, what’s next? Picking live food off trees?

Anyway, there was a novel I hadn’t read, by an author I admire! I checked it out and sneaked away as though I’d found a diamond ring in a dark alley. I started reading it that night.

It was not good. This author had won the Pulitzer Prize, but not for this sad little opus. Still, I gave it every chance. Maybe it would redeem itself on the last page.

It did not.

And it was almost overdue. But they weren’t hounding me for it. Apparently, word was out: Nobody else wanted to read it, either. And, of course, when I went to return it, the library was closed. The sign directed me to the original location, three miles from home. Renovations were complete.

It was gorgeous. Spacious, friendly, and apparently ready for anything plate tectonics could throw at it. There was art; there was light; there were beanbag chairs, community rooms, large windows. In a world where facts are sometimes manufactured to order and the truth can twist out of reach, there is comfort and serenity in a library that stays put.

I returned my book, four weeks late. No one’s in line to check it out. I gave it a pat of encouragement. “Find a shelf, and make yourself at home,” I said to my book as I dropped it in the slot. “You’re not going anywhere for a good long time.”

It’s my home now, too.

Credits

Brock Clarke is a novelist and short story writer, whose latest book is Special Election, an anthology of stories (Acre Books, 2025). He is Professor of English at Bowdoin College. The above essay is an excerpt from One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, edited by Molly McQuade (Sarabande Books, 2010).

Beth Ann Fennelly is a poet and essayist, whose latest book is The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton, 2026). She served as Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, and is currently Professor of English at Ole Miss. The above excerpt is reprinted from Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, copyright (c) 2017 by Beth Ann Fennelly. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Murr Brewster spent 31 years as a Portland, Oregon mail carrier, and on the eve of retirement, took up writing. Her essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, High Country News, and Orion. The above piece originally ran, under a different headline, in the 03/06/26 issue of The Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com).

Photos by Betsey Henkels.

MAY 24, 2026 - ISSUE 04

In this issue

Three variations on getting and spending:

Barbara Hurd reflects on the power of a gift to deceive;
Nicole Walker speculates on the half-life of a plastic bag;
Rachel Z. Arndt goes to Bed Bath & way Beyond.

Broken Oar

by Barbara Hurd

I was twelve when my parents returned from the Bahamas with a lie they must have thought would comfort me and a basket of shells I understood as a bribe. Somehow I knew they’d gone for that week in an effort to save their marriage. They came back with careful smiles and gave me the basket as an offering — or was it a bargain? Take these, they seemed to say — tiger shells and fluted conches. Look at these, instead of at us.

The shells, all highly polished and in perfect condition, were clearly purchased at some souvenir stand, not scavenged from the beach. That made me even lonelier. I remember positioning the shells on my bureau with their openings facing each other, pretending their apertures were mouths so some conversation might ensue. Later, turning the back of one to the other or moving them to opposite corners, I created visible dramas for the invisible ones I must have known were taking place behind closed doors. Maybe for a while that sufficed.

I don’t credit my parents with the longings that deepened over the years. If they induced these feelings at all, it was through the gift of the failure of their gift, the possibility that those exquisite shells on my dresser helped me to see the difference between the lie of the perfectly preserved vs. the venture of the salvaged and transformable. I’m more interested these days in what might be rescued — from near-destruction, from invisibility, from silence.

Microbags

by Nicole Walker

At Fry’s Grocery and Drugstore, the plastic bags are tinted brown. Thin enough to see through, they should be strong enough to hold at least three items. But the clerks at Fry’s dig their hands into the abundance of bags. Stacked like money, peeled like sawbucks, a bag wraps a carton of eggs. Another, a half gallon of orange juice. Another, a pound of butter. Another, a quart of milk. A loaf of bread. You know the song. Each bag makes each item precious. How can I eat this butter now? I should preserve it in a cabinet of wonder but by the time I get home the cabinet of wonder becomes merely a refrigerator. The loaf of bread. The quart of milk. Each item reshelved in the icebox of my future — I now can make béchamel, French Toast, crème Anglaise, Pasta Carbonara, countries of recipes, thanks to bags of permanence and transportation.

The bags, emptied, do not realign. I cannot stack them. They do not fit in my billfold. I bunch them up. I crush them into the reusable canvas bags that I sometimes remember to take to the store. The bags live in the garage. Unlike the refrigerator, the garage is not airtight. Sometimes, I leave the garage door open. Sometimes, there is a wind. Sometimes the wind comes in and steals the plastic bags as if the wind had some groceries to make precious. The wind takes the bags, plasters them against Ponderosa, wraps them around pinecone, flags them against a decaying stick. The stick isn’t going anywhere now. The Ponderosas preserved. The pinecones, seeding inside of the bag, with the benefit of a dusty rain, grow their own tree inside the bag. Inside the bag is a perfect microcosm. A hundred million tiny planets floating across the state, blowing their forevers across the highway, through the forests, across the ocean, establishing themselves as normal as continental cash.

Exchange

by Rachel Z. Arndt

I never lie at Bed Bath & Beyond. This toothbrush stopped vibrating. This hair dryer caught on fire. This comforter is no longer puffy. This Cuisinart shot out smoke. These sheets got small in the wash. I am not a good liar, only a good editor. There are rarely follow-up questions.

The electric toothbrush was the most recent in a series of successful, self-edifying exchanges made at Bed Bath & Beyond, a store whose Beyond, I like to think, refers to its liberal return policy on top of its already paradisiacal domestic promise of having finally made it to adulthood. The toothbrush broke over months of me knocking it off its charger, precariously balanced between a towel bar and the wall; my bathroom had no counter or power outlets, so my toothbrush sat as far as its cord stretched, woven through a notch in the door threshold to the nearest outlet in the other room, where it burst forth in a tangle of too many cords like the hair of a cartoon who’s stuck her finger into a light socket.

The final blow came on the third and last night of a fling with a man who liked whiskey and J. D. Salinger. It had seemed promising the first night and doomed by the second. As I tried to fall asleep before the man came back in from the bathroom, I heard the familiar crash of electric toothbrush against tile. The sound reminded me, as always, of the foreboding plastic crack a TI-83 Plus calculator makes when it slides off a desk onto a thinly carpeted floor, a sound that would make my high school calculus teacher say, every time, his beard framing a curmudgeon’s grimace, That’s not a very good thing to do to a calculator.

An hour after the crash, after brushing my teeth the normal, old-fashioned way, the man was asleep, and I wanted him to leave. I wanted it to be tomorrow, when I’d go to Bed Bath & Beyond to get a new toothbrush.

I had not bought this Philips Sonicare DiamondClean Rechargeable Electric Toothbrush in White; it came courtesy of Philips’ PR department, which wanted me to review it for the tech magazine I used to work for. It was one of many perks of the job, the primary being the job itself—the people, the work, and the fact that it existed: A few months before the toothbrush landed on my desk, the hostile machismo at the job I’d come to New York for became intolerable, and I quit. I gave myself three days for wallowing. Then I went to a Midtown Aldo and bought my first pair of heels and learned to wobble in them, wearing them only as long as each interview lasted and changing out of them while leaning against buildings. I went to the News Corp. building and the Condé Nast Building and the Hearst Tower and, the day after I got the new job, to the Bed Bath & Beyond on the cusp of where the Financial District becomes Tribeca. I had decided weeks before that I would reward myself for getting hired, for writing ten or twenty or thirty polite cover letters (the embarrassing self-promotion, the stilted language of “skills” and “I welcome the opportunity”) and pretending to want jobs I didn’t by smiling and asking follow-up questions—and that the reward would be a new comforter, something that would fit the queen-size bed I planned to get one day, after leaving New York.

I’d done my research. The Wamsutta Cool and Fresh Down Alternative Comforter was just for me: fake feathers, to avoid allergy-induced congestion, in a thickness and arrangement that would supposedly lessen my night sweats. After I left the tech-magazine job for grad school in the middle of the country, I learned that neither of those things was necessary: It turns out my childhood down allergy had subsided, and my night sweats were a side effect of the antidepressants I was taking, not of my bedspread.

I learned too, via firsthand experience and reviews on the Bed Bath & Beyond website (and some Amazon reviews for validation) that down-alternative fillings tend to bunch up, leaving wide expanses of sheet-thin fabric interrupted by sudden lumps, a topography not unlike that of the Upper Midwest. So of course that first grad-school spring, when life was no longer novel, just different, I headed out for an exchange at the nearby Bed Bath & Beyond, conveniently located not next to a Whole Foods, like the one I went to in New York, or a Trader Joe’s, like the one I went to growing up in Chicago, but next to I-80. Inside, they’re all beautifully the same. No regional distinctions change layout: Kitchen gadgets are always to the right when you walk in, bath stuff to the left, picture frames in the middle, and SodaStream accessories throughout. There’s a certain comfort to be found rounding the store’s racetrack aisles, when just buying a new shower curtain feels like taking control of your life, the implied declaration that you’ll get a handle on all your shit, be productive, be happy. It’s the certain comfort of the domestic possibility I learned from my mother and that first promising exchange, sans receipt or packaging, when I was ten or twelve, of the best toaster either of us has ever used.

The man at the customer service desk in the I-80-adjacent Bed Bath & Beyond hardly peeked inside the bag I’d stuffed the comforter into; he didn’t notice or didn’t want to mention the drool stains; he said, Go pick out a new one. My new one is filled with real feathers and was cheaper than the original; using my credit I bought some toothbrush heads, 20 percent off with an expired coupon.

This was pure fantasy — but in real life! The dream of ergonomic spatulas and finely gridded cheese graters and other unnecessary (but necessary) kitchen gadgets I let myself indulge in once, twice a year max. Hence the exchanges, which feel so close to actual purchases but require no extra money, just a half hour or so to give me the illusion of being the kind of person who can buy a new Cuisinart once a year — the kind of person who calls such a purchase frugal because it was made with a coupon. Does it count as conspicuous consumption if I need that Cuisinart because I like to make pesto and I like to make pesto because the mindless process of it, like very few things, makes me happy? That cooking in general is one of the very few things that makes me happy? With that kind of justification, Bed Bath & Beyond became not just normal but crucial.

The beauty of living this way is that the objects are simultaneously temporary — they can be exchanged often — and permanent — they can be exchanged infinitely, each time for a replacement so indistinguishable from the original that often I’ll forget how many times I’ve exchanged a thing and, eventually, that I’ve exchanged it at all. Replacements can happen forever, stretching into a future when I’ll swap the old for new just to keep things the same. I never have to say goodbye; my fantasy life accumulates. And so does the illusion of permanence in my life — that I’ve reached a stage when I can stay put. Of course that’s not true. Of course there’s a Bed Bath & Beyond in every state.

But I did not buy this toothbrush at a Bed Bath & Beyond in any state. I now lived in a place where I said “run errands” and I ran them in a car. It was my second winter in the middle of nowhere. Still, I had hope. I put the toothbrush in what little packaging I had, coiling the charging cable and securing it with a twist tie—it looks real this way, I thought — and drove toward the highway, where, merging, I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the salty windshield and saw the face of a grown-up. I still was not lying at Bed Bath & Beyond, but the omissions were getting larger. The store had become a place of aspirational exchanging, not aspirational buying, the hope for a better future replaced by the hope for one that’s exactly the same. It’s an unacceptable hope, but what else to do besides pretend and hold onto the receipt.

There was no problem returning the toothbrush. I waited in line for what felt like too long but only in the deeply selfish way that standing in line for something you don’t deserve feels too long the moment you start doing it. I handed the customer-service man the toothbrush case, toothbrush nestled inside, and the charger, and told him about the vibration problem. Someone else brought me a new toothbrush from the storeroom, and I left. No one ever checked to make sure the toothbrush was actually in the case.

I marched out into the anonymous parking lot proud and jubilant. I told myself, as I do after every Bed Bath & Beyond trip, not just the exchanges, how responsible an object owner I am, how responsible a consumer! I am the type of person who takes action when there’s something wrong. I act promptly. I speak politely yet firmly with the people at customer service. I even smile and make eye contact when I say thank you. I dress, sometimes, like a real adult.

Credits

Barbara Hurd writes about the natural world and our relation to it. Author of nine books, she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The above excerpt is from the preface to her essay collection, Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (University of Georgia Press, 2008).

Nicole Walker’s latest book is How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature (Bloomsbury, 2026). She is nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and professor of creative writing at Northern Arizona University. The above essay is an excerpt from her book, Micrograms (New Michigan Press, 2016).

Rachel Z. Arndt is a Chicago-based writer and researcher focused on culture, language, and advertising. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Popular Mechanics, and The Believer. The above essay is a chapter from her book, Beyond Measure (2018), used with the permission of Sarabande Books, Inc.

Photos by Betsey Henkels.

MAY 10, 2026 - ISSUE 03

In this issue

Three authors grapple with identity and personal attachments:

Naomi Cohn considers the beauty of braille;
Sven Birkerts sorts through a lifetime of books and objects;
Jennifer Gallo Gaites finds larger meaning in small midlife pleasures.

Braille

by Naomi Cohn

“Braille,” if capitalized, refers to Louis Braille, the child of a nineteenth-century saddle-maker in Coupvray, France. Braille, who accidentally blinded himself with an awl. Braille, who invented a tactile system of reading and writing for the blind.

Lowercase “braille” refers to the system he created. Translating the experience of reading and writing braille into printed word stumps me. I have struggled to write this piece for months. I keep getting bogged down in providing information: Braille’s biography, when Braille invented braille, the intricate mechanics of reading, writing, and producing braille.

What I want to write is a love poem. What I felt about books was passion, desire, love. My love of books was a young love, a first love. Visual. Yes, touch mattered, stroking the typographic scar of each letter on a page. But all those beauties in the bookstore! Once I had chosen, I loved to gaze on the beloved.

Large print, small print, the print on cereal boxes, the fading print of cheap paperbacks, the glossy ink of coffee table books. Yesterday’s newspaper, microfiche, card catalogs, scribbled notes, hand-painted signs peeling in the sun, maps. A map, its fusion of image and text and symbol.

But now I am older and blinder, and I love braille. I love braille in the way of the old. Loving touch, lights on, lights off, eyes open, eyes closed. It does not matter. I’ve fallen hard. It’s taken years to begin to know the bumps and oddities. The lighter my touch over braille’s contours, the more I understand.

When I began learning braille as part of Adjustment to Blindness Training in 2010, people often said that more than half of our brain is allocated to processing visual input. Others said that learning braille uses brain space and neural connections in the visual cortex. New connections reach across, fingers of axon touching fingers of dendrite. Old love wipes out young.

Visual pathways once said eyes crinkling without a smile meant repressed laugh.

Thick line along seam of t-shirt meant inside out.

Thread loose on button meant find a needle.

Now I have re-wired. One combination of bumps says J. Another indicates a number sign. Feeling the two next to each other now means the clump of dots that read as J will now read as zero. After much practice, pathways take in clumps of bumps and know: CH and E and F, and recognize chef.

It’s too much to explain. You know how love is. The intimate knowing defies description. How do you talk about where joy happens?

Braille is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, those almost touching fingers of God and Adam. When my finger touches braille bumps, something moves in me.

The Voice of Things

by Sven Birkerts

My wife and I moved a short while back from our crowded and lair-like house outside Boston to an abruptly more open and airy place in Amherst. Over a month in, I’m still gaping at new space and different light. The move came after thirty years in the house that most of our lives had happened in, the house about which I said for close to thirty years to anyone who would listen, “You’re going to have to bury me out back by the hollowed-out apple tree trunk.” And I meant it.

How I (we) got from that primal allegiance to ordering boxes from Home Depot is a narrative I won’t try to unspool. Suffice it to say, the boxes arrived in bundles of ten, so many that we admitted we had over-bought, an admission we retracted few weeks later when we had to repeat the order.

I found that going through my accumulations became an ongoing encounter with everyone I’ve been on the way to whoever I am now.

Books were obviously the most powerful triggers, and I could fill many pages just itemizing my hours of vetting. There was no way I could just stack them by the handful into the boxes. The process for me was akin to updating an old address book, a kind of time-travel. The Alexandria Quartet (keep, maybe….), The Sportswriter (am I really going to read about Frank Bascombe again?), The Wings of the Dove (there may yet come a day….) and so on. If one were to follow that stream-of-consciousness until all the books were packed, the diary of my inner life — which is to say — my reading life, would be on open display.

Then there were all those things, objects saved through the years. The “keep or take” dilemma for those was usually fairly straightforward. The decisions were made along the lines of usefulness and sentiment. Much calling across the room. “What about this?” “Are you kidding? My sister gave me that — I want it!” Between the two of us most of the “stuff” got sorted and was either saved or set aside for the big Goodwill truck parked out behind the Stop & Shop.

But now I ask, for I still wonder, what about everything else? What about all the things in between? Things not necessarily useful but also not saturated with association. The Latvian ornament someone gave my parents who then passed it to me; the watches and glasses I will never wear again; that small piece of the Berlin Wall, alongside with a chip of granite taken from Joyce’s Martello tower in Dublin; a small, glazed ceramic head my daughter made; that silver flask my wife gave my father for his birthday….

Asked, I will claim a love of spareness. I privately invoke Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and affirm the answer: six feet. So then what are all those boxes doing there, Mr. Kane? If I never opened those boxes again, just left them piled up there through the seasons, I would probably forget them entirely. So why not the dumpster?

This, I guess, brings the real question. Why, if not out of nostalgia or utility, does one keep something? Why can’t I toss that old wooden knife sharpener shaped like a rooster? My album of Paul Butterfield’s East-West, which will never revolve on a turntable again?

The answer is, I think, shockingly simple. I keep these things because I have gone through time with them. They have been in my field of vision for decades, many of them. The Butterfield album was there with me in room after room of my growing up. The objects I keep are not necessarily connected to special occasions and mark no anecdotally special moments. They belong to the special class of nouns: They were the things that were with me, part of my surroundings as year after year I moved through my ordinary day.

These familiar things, no matter how useless, hold the mark of our nearness to them. An object seen daily for thirty years is one I have gradually irradiated with my idle glances, or, vice versa, that has molecule by molecule imprinted itself on me, staked its mysterious claim. All these recognitions belong to the profound retrospective that is packing-up. They determine for me letting go and also preview what might yet happen. I have little doubt that they also stand in for larger and deeper assessments still to come.

Unglued

by Jennifer Gallo Gaites

Eyelashes have a natural growing and shedding cycle. I’m thinking about explaining this to the doctor, but I’m not sure she’ll understand. Not about the cycle, of course. Just the shedding.

I want to tell her I leave a trail of eyelashes wherever I go. Open parentheses across my bathroom vanity, in the crease of my book at night, on my husband’s shoulder.

She washes her hands and we chat for a few seconds — long enough for me to learn that since I’ve entered the windowless examining room the skies have opened. She just called her husband and asked him to cover their child’s sandbox to keep it from getting waterlogged.

She surveys my face. “Ooh, that looks painful,” she says.

My left eyelid has an infection and is three times its normal size. It’s also a reddish-purple hue that I might like as a shade of eyeshadow, but I don’t wear eyeshadow.

As we talk, I take off my glasses. She leans in with a penlight and asks questions: When did it start? Is it itchy? Is there discharge?

I guess that she is somewhere in her early thirties which I reflexively think is, like, ten years younger than me. But, since I’m almost fifty, there’s probably closer to a twenty-year distance between us. Not that it matters.

What I’m about to ask feels absurd. If she’s in her thirties, she’ll think she understands, but I’m not so sure.

She gently pulls at my upper lid with her thumb.

“Do you think this is from getting fake eyelashes?” I ask.

“It could be,” she says noncommittally and — I am grateful — nonjudgmentally. “Sometimes the glue can irritate the eye.”

I feel like I’ve been punished. Like some sort of perimenopausal Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

* * *

The first time I asked for eyelash extensions, I felt like I was asking to be dipped in glitter. I had no big fancy event coming up. I am not on a reality TV show. Simply, I’d been noticing the definition around my eyes had changed. A fading.

The lash technician asked me questions about what I wanted. I didn’t know how to answer, how to say I wanted my own lashes from ten years ago. Noticing her heavy lashes, I resisted the urge to answer, “Not like yours.”

When we were done, she handed me a mirror. She showed me how to brush them. The lashes were thicker than I’d hoped. A little unexpected. I loved them.

“I hope it’s not the glue,” I say to the doctor. “I love eyelash extensions. It’s one thing on my body I can control right now.”

She laughs and says, “Something you can control. I totally get that.”

She prescribes an ointment to treat the infection. What I didn’t understand when I was the doctor’s age is how many pieces of ourselves we lose by the time we get to menopause. The bits of ourselves that fall away. All the ways we come unglued.

In the exact tone and words I’d use if I were talking to one of my children, I tell myself I shouldn’t get fake lashes anymore. I scold myself for being vain.

But this isn’t about vanity. It’s about joy.

* * *

Within a week, one eye has cleared up, but the infection spreads to the other eye. This time, I call to make an appointment with my eye doctor.

In the years I’ve been seeing this optometrist, we’ve shared bits of ourselves. I know we’re the same age. I know when her son started driving. When her mother stopped driving. Where she gets her haircut. We’ve laughed at the life-changing magic of prescription sunglasses. I know, like me, she doesn’t wear contact lenses anymore. Our eyes get dry.

The receptionist tells me that the eye doctor is out on medical leave. They can put me in with a covering doctor. “Would that be okay?”

“Of course,” I say. But I want to know what’s happened, if the doctor is okay. If her family is okay. It’s none of my business, but I’m surprised by my worry for her — by my disappointment at not hearing her easy laugh when I tell her my predicament.

The covering optometrist is young and emotionless. She gives me a prescription for an oral antibiotic but warns, “It’ll take time to clear up.”

As if I’m going to confession, I tell her about getting fake lashes, tell her that I love them.

I don’t know why I felt embarrassed about wanting fake lashes. To admit that I missed parts of myself I’d taken for granted. To find joy in my own body in the midst of change.

* * *

“You don’t need fake lashes,” my husband insists. I appreciate this; he means it as a compliment. “It’s silly.”

I agree, mostly.

I concede because my right eye is still swollen. For now, I say that I’ll stop getting my eyelashes done. But I don’t think it’s silly — in the face of getting older and all that changes, in us and around us — to find delight in something that feels indulgent. To want to find small joys, knowing that they are fleeting, and attach them to ourselves one by one. To hold onto those joys for as long as we can, admiring them, tending and nurturing them. Wanting to let joy fall off our bodies, leaving a trail of tiny pleasures behind.

Credits

Naomi Cohn has lived many lives, among them, as a community organizer, encyclopedia copy editor, therapist, artist, and Minnesota-based writer. She is the author of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024), from which the above essay originates.

Sven Birkerts is the author of eleven books, most recently The Miro Worm and The Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press, 2024). He is editor emeritus of AGNI, and former director of Bennington Writing Seminars. The above essay originally appeared in the 09/13/21 issue of Brevity (brevitymag.com).

Jennifer Gallo Gaites is a writing instructor at Project Write Now, a nonprofit in New Jersey. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and Pangyrus. The above essay first ran in the March/April, 2025 issue of Literary Mama (literarymama.com).

Photos by Betsey Henkels

MAY 3, 2026 - ISSUE 02

In this issue

Karin Falcone Krieger offers a swan song of a different sort;
Darien Gee presents a family gathering at poolside;
Andre Dubus III depicts a writer’s desk — and characters — in the making.

How to Save a Swan

by Karin Falcone Krieger

Not long ago I was riding my bike on the walking path along West Shore Road on a mild overcast day, and the traffic was backed up as far as I could see. I rolled past dozens of cars and encountered a huge white mute swan, huffing his way up the narrow road. The cars slowed. They honked. A lady rolled down her car window and said to the bird, “Hey move!” and inched past him. I was convinced something bad was going to happen, so I left my bike on the walking path, hopped the rail, and started walking alongside. His giant webbed feet were slapping the smooth new black pavement, like the sound my own bare feet would make, and I feel his pain. His head is as high as my shoulder, his beak is open and he is panting. I can see his tongue. Swans do not look this big when they are floating in the water.

“Hey, buddy, get out of the road.”

“Fly away.”

“Why, you’re holding up the parade!”

These are things people say to the swan from their car windows, most of them laughing that this could be the source of the hold-up. By now cars near and far are honking. I wonder if I could lift the swan up, over the rail, over the sea wall, into the bay, but I am afraid of touching the huge animal. Now I am marching with him. The pace is relentless and he is oblivious to me.

Now drivers see me walking with the swan, and associate me with the swan, as if I know him personally, or as if I know what to do, and they start saying things to me like “What are you going to do?” “Is he hurt?” “Did you call someone?”

I just shrug. I do not have my phone. That is why I take bike rides, to get away from my phone. I just keep tramping along, thinking at least he will not be run over if I am by his side. I am buying time.

A car coming in the other direction stops. There is barely a shoulder but she leaves her green Subaru there half in the road, a blonde in yoga gear with narrow eyes. She joins me, beside the enormous panting creature, marching, so now her car and body are also in the way. The traffic comes to a complete halt. The woman driving the car crawling along behind us decides to join the team of swan people now, too. She and her minivan full of kids are sympathetic; she is not going to honk or inch past. She puts her emergency lights on. Then I hear shouts coming from behind us. Seemingly out of nowhere a large sunburnt woman with reddish hair comes running up behind us with a big old comforter from the 1970’s, the kind printed with patchwork calico in earthy colors. It is flapping in her outstretched arms.

She is thinking like a rescue person: Cover the injured animal to calm it down and move it, but the bird is healthy and not slowing down. The spectacle of the lady running with the comforter, the Subaru in the road, the minivan with flashers on, the two ladies marching in exercise gear, all held up enough traffic in both directions to give the swan his only way out, a very long runway.

Suddenly those great feet as wide as a man’s hand break into a run. And the vista is clear, but not endless, as the road bends and a car could decide to dash past, so there is a moment of uncertainty. The sound of a swan’s wings, if you have never heard it, is loud. It’s like a whip cutting through air, but louder, and the rhythm builds. He’s 20, 40, 70 feet away and finally his feet rise and he is airborne! An enormous effort, but all that weight that was slapping the road is up and off and over our heads, over the rail and over the sea wall and finally, safely into his watery domain.

He lands far from the road, into the bay, near two other swans, small as toys at this distance. He flicks and tucks his great wings away. All I can think is how good the cool water must feel on those feet. I imagine they hurt and feel blistery from the ordeal.

The four of us women nod, breathe, sigh, and smile, say things like “Way to go!” and “Wow….” and “Beautiful!” and go along our separate ways, and the cars start rolling forward. It is likely we will never meet again, but for a moment like four superheroines we came from four directions, each with our own superpowers, each exponentially increasing the powers of the others. In reality, we did nothing for the swan, except to hold space. Holding space in the face of confusion, taking pause in place of restless action, giving protection, bringing skills and knowledge.

Swans needs a really long runway, and people need hearts big enough to hold that much space.

Photograph: Poolside Selfie at the Four Seasons Hualālai

by Darien Gee

The four of us seated in a row—my brother, me, my sister-in-law, my husband. My sister-in-law is pregnant and my husband holds our five-month-old daughter in his lap, a portrait of two families in the making. Our bodies angle toward the camera as if this promised land will stop time from moving forward. The frame of towering palm trees and perfect blue skies evidence a holiday from life, not life itself. My brother and his wife will divorce within a year. A decade later, he and I will no longer speak. Other bodies will assume the position in these chairs. Other bodies will believe this paradise.

Beneath

by Andre Dubus III

Early in her writing life, an old friend of mine bought herself an expensive and ornate hardwood desk. It had a green felt surface and smooth-sliding drawers for paper and pens and manuscripts, and she put this desk in a library of books, then bought a fine brass lamp and set it on this desk, and that is where she planted herself each morning and wrote.

This was more than thirty years ago. In those days, I could not afford a desk and lamp or a library to put them in; but even if I could, I believe I would have run from that. I preferred to travel lightly, to carry only pencils and a notebook and shadow my nascent fiction like a hunter or neurotic lover. If I were to set up shop like my friend, it would be a naked declaration that I was committing myself to writing, that I had even created a shrine to receive it, but that was where the trouble began; at a deep and not so deep level, I did not feel worthy of receiving it at all.

Who knows where this came from? My father of the same name was a master short-story writer, though, when I wrote, I rarely thought about him or his work or any other writer, living or dead. I did not even feel their presence. What I was trying to feel, instead, was the presence of these half-born beings called characters.

This sense of unworthiness lasted years, and I suspect it had to do with the kind of New England working-class neighborhoods I was raised in, places where bright boys and girls hid their brightness so they would not be seen as “conceited” or “stuck-up.” It was why I hated the word author, which sounded elitist to me. The better word for me was writer, because it seemed to more directly express the honest labor of writing itself.

Maybe I believed my friend with the fancy desk was trying to look like an author every time she sat at it. But I did not even want to be an author. I just loved writing words, the true words that became true sentences that then somehow seemed to both penetrate and then become these now-living spirits called characters. I would watch as they would start to say and do things, and their stories would begin to emerge like driftwood on a beach at low tide, and I would follow them with my pencil and paper, for what I loved more than anything was this following, this half-trance that seemed to come more frequently if I did not think too much about it or force it in any way.

So I traveled light. I wrote wherever there was a flat surface on which to rest my notebooks: For my first book, a collection of short stories, I wrote at a metal library carrel I stole from a local college’s dumpster and hauled back to my apartment over a shoe store and barroom. The desk leaned to one side, and I shimmed that leg with a phone book and got to work. Another story I wrote at the cigarette-burned desk of a motel room I rented in Boulder, Colorado. Another, the first I’d ever written from the point of view of a woman, I wrote in a friend’s apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay, but that apartment was small and held a family of five, so I’d sit on the floor of the guest bathroom and write with my notebook resting on the closed toilet seat. This felt to me like just the right place. Why? Because it was about as humble as you could get, and what I kept finding again and again, even now, all these years later, is that if the writing of fiction is anything, it is an act of humility, an act of surrendering yourself to something larger than you are.

Those rare days when I sense I might be writing well, there’s a forward pull into an unfolding that feels inevitable, and it’s as if I’m unearthing my story, not creating it. Over the years, as I’ve practiced daily this digging for what lies beneath, that tug of unworthiness has weakened, and it’s been replaced by a dogged desire just to get to work, to find those essential details that pump blood into the veins of breathing, thinking, feeling people who begin to move through their very real stories.

For this I need quiet, no human voices, no music, which is why I wrote my third book in my parked car in a graveyard not far from my rented house. In the winter, I turned on the heat and wrote in the dim glow of the interior light. In the summer, I opened all the windows and sprayed myself with mosquito repellent. Those days I was working as a self-employed carpenter and as an adjunct writing teacher. My small used Toyota was littered with student manuscripts, power tools, and sawdust. Sitting behind the wheel of my parked car, I wrote in those same composition notebooks, and I sharpened my pencils with the U-knife from my leather carpentry belt.

After three years of this, I had filled twenty-two notebooks with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It took me a year to type these. My agent sent it to twenty-four publishers and when the twenty-fourth published it, it sold so many copies I had enough money to build my family our first home. My brother designed it, and when he asked me where I wanted my writing office, that old sense of unworthiness and that desire to travel light welled up in me again, and I told him not to worry about it; I’d find someplace to write.

This turned out to be our future master bathroom. I wrote at an unvarnished plywood desk I put right over where the toilet would go. When I finally hired a tile man to come in, I found a space in my basement where I built a small, soundproof room with a port window I cover every morning with a blanket. The ceiling is low, and my unvarnished desk sits before a blank wall, and this is where I sit now. It’s where I’ve written two more books, and it’s where I’m deep at work on something new. I have planted myself in one place like my friend so long ago. And because I no longer travel light and track my stories like a trapper, I, too, have created a shrine to receive them.

Up against that blank wall is a corked bottle of water from the Delphic oracle a poet friend brought me from Greece. There’s an open box of unsharpened Blackwing 602 pencils and a short length of alderwood one of my Louisiana cousins drilled two holes into as a pencil holder for me more than twenty years ago. There’s a fragment of trilobites another friend gave me after I gave him a copy of Breece D’J Pancake’s short story “Trilobites.” It was one of the first stories I read as a young writer, and it pushed me to write about people and places I knew and cared about. There’s a flat, heart-shaped stone from Moosehead Lake, Maine, that Fontaine, my wife of twenty-five years, painted blue and yellow, enclosing our initials in red. There are the two stones she gave me before we’d even married and had our three miraculous children. One of the stones is rose quartz and is supposed to resonate love, the other is aventurine, a deep green, and has something to do with creativity, I’m not sure what, though I keep these stones on my desk as if they’re gifts left out for a stranger.

There are two magnifying glasses that once belonged to my father-in-law, and on the wall ten feet behind me hangs a Bowie knife in its sheath my older sister and I gave our late father on his sixty-first birthday. On the wall to my left are two shelves cluttered with manuscripts and contracts and travel schedules, the top one weighted with dozens of volumes of poetry. It’s how I start each writing day, by reading a few poems, that distilled and essential verse of the finest writing among us; it pulls me down and in, and it makes me reach for headphones that hang on a hook in the wall to my right. They’re the kind I used to wear when working with loud power tools, and they make my quiet writing cave grow even quieter. Next to that hangs an etching a friend did of a twelve-paned door in an old clapboard house. Sometimes I stare at it, my cave so silent I can hear the air go in and out of my lungs, the beat of my heart, all these talismans on my desk as still as if they’re waiting for something. Then I open my composition notebook and reach for my pencil, push its point into the black Ranger sharpener screwed into the wall, and I crank until my pencil is sharp enough to puncture and to penetrate, to enter one true word at a time that dream world that lies beneath the surface of wherever we are, talismans or not.

Credits

Karin Falcone Krieger is a writer, Master Gardener, and personal chef on Long Island, NY. Her writing can be found in numerous publications, including Tupelo Quarterly, Santa Fe Writers Project, and The Decadent Review. The above essay originally appeared in The Laurel Review (Fall, 2020).

Darien Hsu Gee is the multi-genre author of five novels, including Friendship Bread. Her next book, Fortune Cookie (part of the Object Lessons series), will be published by Bloomsbury in 2028. She lives in Hawaii, and teaches creative nonfiction at UCLA Extension and micro prose at Writer-ish (writer-ish.com). The above piece is an excerpt from her micro essay collection, Allegiance (Legacy Isle, 2020).

Andre Dubus III is the author of nine books, including the novel, House of Sand and Fog, and the memoir, Townie. He is professor of English at University of Massachusetts Lowell. The above essay was reprinted from Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin. Copyright (c) 2024 by Andre Dubus III. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Photos by Betsey Henkels (“Birds of paradise gossiping”)

APRIL 26, 2026 - ISSUE 01

From the editor’s desk ….

Do you follow the news, or does the news seem to follow you?

Everywhere we turn, there are headlines, bulletins, breaking news — all vying for our attention. It’s relentless and depleting.

I developed this newsletter to create a brief haven for readers — a bit of respite from the news and information that assault us daily. To that end, the newsletter will be a news-free zone, totally apolitical.

Each issue will feature three essays by leading writers on anything and everything, but the news. The essays are serious, funny, and everything in-between; ranging in length from micro to medium-long. Most of the essays have been previously published in books or journals — gems that many of us missed the first time around. Others will be excerpts from the latest books, allowing readers to sample new work before or soon after publication.

Among the authors you’ll read in the newsletter are Sven Birkerts, Andre Dubus III, Adam Farrer, Darien Gee, and Nicole Walker — writers from Hawaii to England, and closer to home.

And you won’t be distracted by hyperlinks in the middle of your reading. All credits and links will appear separately at the end of each edition.

The newsletter will be delivered to subscribers every other Sunday, free of charge.

When I sent out sample essays to a group of readers last year, I asked what sorts of readings might appeal to them in a digital newsletter. To paraphrase, they wanted pieces that were thoughtful, restorative, sometimes funny. As one of them said, “Just take me away for a short time.” So that’s the idea in a nutshell — and the source of the name, Away from it all: Essays from near + far. - JS

Love Comes in Waves Like an Ocean

by Nicole Walker

Maybe I can make it work here in Flagstaff, where I think I’m thirsty all the time but know in actuality, that my thirst is well-slaked. I pour one more glass of wine at Erik’s mom’s house while I say to him, “You have to take all the stuff to the car because I picked up all the toys and did all the dishes,” which may be true but is still churlish and beside the point. And yet you take the churlishness to heart and drive it home hard, saying, “So what if you did the dishes? Stop assigning me tasks. I am not your assistant,” and I say, “Are you yelling at me?” Which makes Zoe tell me to stop being so mad. If I had a top, it would blow but instead I simmer and storm and think now you’ve turned the child against me as if children were boats and you and I separate armadas. It is a sea of metaphors, this marriage.

Later, I’ve calmed down, Erik says, “Maybe I could be your assistant.” He wiggles these eyebrows. There’s a Butthole Surfers song that says, “You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes.” Sometimes I get a glimpse of myself through Erik’s eyes. It’s both what I think of myself and not. I am temperamental. I am right. I am a tempest but my seas calm quickly. Looking at yourself through other people’s eyes reminds you that they have eyeballs. That you both have eyes.

It’s when we treat each other like children that we get mad. That instead of one sweet kayak of a family, we turn into a fighting navy. I tell you what to do. “Clean up.” You tell me what to do, “Calm down.” Maybe it’s less like armadas and more like splashing each other across our rafts, trying to swamp each other’s boat. Either way, we both get wet, wet as in the wet of an Oregon downpour. It took me a time out, a bedtime story about a cat who loves his blue shoes, and the final episode of Breaking Bad to stop crying. Erik used to say I had the red wines when I drank too much. Now, instead of saying words, he pulls on the gators and wades around in the temperate rainforest of my raging, silently. He waits. I let it go. In the morning, he reads to me from the Arizona Daily Sun. They predict more rain this September. Maybe we’ll find mushrooms in Arizona after all.

I sing in praise of puttering

by Robert Klose

I am an inveterate putterer, but I come by it honestly. My father was a putterer deluxe. From my earliest years I harbor images of him tapping this, rearranging that, trimming, tightening, and adjusting. I recall, when I was five, sitting on our back porch on a sunny summer day, watching as he fiddled with our rickety wooden screen door. When I asked what he was doing, he told me that it didn’t make the right sound when it shut. After some careful hand planing, he pulled it open, released it, and we both watched – and listened – as it slammed against the jamb with a decided crack!

Tuning a screen door. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Well, now as an adult, I understand. Puttering is not diagnostic of someone with time on his hands (my father worked long, hard hours at his regular job). It is an outlet, an indulgence, a satisfying way of tinkering with one’s domestic environment the way one cannot do with the world at large.

I’ve had a difficult time communicating this to my college-age son. Anton recently bought a used car. I was proud of him for negotiating a good deal. When I looked it over, I noticed a tiny but clearly burgeoning spot of rust. Like a superhero out to save the day, I swooped down on the imperfection with a piece of sandpaper and a small bottle of clear nail polish from my cache of puttering resources. Anton watched as I sanded the spot and then coated it with the nail polish. He rolled his eyes. “Someday you’ll understand,” I told him.

As a rule, I do not usually conduct such public performances. Puttering is, by and large, a solitary act, and putterers are modest people. They observe small things that most folks simply abide – a picture hung askew, a squeaky hinge, a wobbly table leg. It doesn’t take much effort or time to right such deficiencies. But once again, there is something in the sensibility of the putterer that makes amending them deeply rewarding.

Allow me to bring all of this home by outlining my recent Saturday here in lovely Maine. After my ablutions and breakfast, I removed the laces from a pair of worn-out sneakers and used them to tie up my tomato plants. I then repaired a garden hose with electrical tape (knowing it wouldn’t hold past this summer, but puttering does not promise miracles or permanent fixes). Moving right along, I patched my cracked watering can with silicone and set it in the sun to dry.

My eye then caught a missing shingle from the garden shed. Having no replacement shingles and knowing it wasn’t possible to buy just one, I cut a large soup can, flattened it out, and – voilà! – there was my replacement. There followed, in languid succession, a walk in the woods to gather a bucket of pine needles to mulch the blueberry bushes, a jaunt down to the river to collect some smooth stones for the border of my garden, pruning the apple tree, replacing a vinyl shutter, resurrecting a sunken paving stone on the front walkway, unclogging the bird feeder, and finally, propping up a sagging step.

All of this risks giving an impression of endless, and perhaps mindless, activity. But nothing could be further from the truth. The beauty of puttering is that it is emblematic of the luxury of having control over one’s time, responding to the needs of one’s home and hearth as one sees fit: If I don’t replace the bulb over the back porch today, I can do it tomorrow, or the next day, or not at all.

Puttering, you might say, has set me free.

The Reading

by Marcia Aldrich

Before leaving for the reading, you washed your face and hands. Washing your face and hands, whether dirty or not, is something you do before and after events requiring reserves of resilience. You stopped mid-lather and looked up to see yourself in the Sheraton’s mirror shortly before 3:00 p.m. Reaching for the towel, you asked yourself what you saw when you looked in the mirror. You decided that at this moment in the overheated Sheraton bathroom, you should avert your eyes. You could hear the creaks and cracks as you moved about the furniture of your face.

You exited the room and then the hotel through the back doors that opened onto the pedestrian plaza where an overweight woman seated by the fountain was singing Irish ballads in a mournfully high soprano voice. Two signs were taped to the front of her chair, which may or may not have been a wheelchair. You didn’t know for sure because you swept by in a hurry. No one stopped to listen, and no one placed money in the soprano’s donation box. All along the pedestrian way you heard the woman’s high unfettered voice singing.

The reading was held in a ballroom. When you arrived, the fourteen readers had begun to seat themselves in the first two rows on the right side of the room. A few nonreaders were sprinkled among the group like spies. The podium careened to the right, off center on the stage, and everyone in attendance had shifted toward it in a sliding, lopsided motion like a broken plow. You took a seat on the aisle in the second row. You glanced about and saw that some of the readers were gloomy, even a little forlorn. One kept pushing his glasses up his nose though they had not slid down. In another, the jaw muscles flexed and quivered like a slide show depicting hard times. Often you thought you were the only writer who suffered at readings, but you saw now that you were wrong.

The writers were to read in alphabetical order, just like grade school and a whole lot of other martyr-making events where because of your last name you had to go first. Always first in school to present your report on Harriet Beecher Stowe or bread mold, you mumbled below hearing. Not first because of importance or merit, but first to break the trail, give the report, take the test, hit the ball, offer yourself up to the tribunal. If only you had a name later in the alphabet. You didn’t want a name like Stoppit or Testerone; they came too late and besides belonged in the pages of the grotesque, but you’d be happy to have a name ending in the letter H. Let the ABCDEFG’s exert themselves to warm up the crowd, and then turn it over to the H’s for a while. But no, you were an early alphabet, a figure who for the daring required of you should be equipped with flying cape and steed. Alas no such flare and vertical capacity sprang from your spine.

When you mounted the stage, you didn’t say that it was a miracle you had a copy of your piece, “My Mother’s Toenails,” which would be forthcoming soon in print. You didn’t tell the audience that the printout of “My Mother’s Toenails” was lying on your desk at home in a different Midwestern state right next to the forgotten list of things to remember for your trip. The list and the forgotten “Toenails” reminded you of that joke about the lazy man who sits down to watch TV without his remote and wishes he had a remote for his remote. You had never managed to put the printout into your bag. You didn’t tell them that you had two classes, each two hours long, three appointments, and one meeting the day before you left. That you returned one set of memoirs and a quiz on the differences between the short story and personal essay and had given a sensitive response to the fifth installment of a ten-thousand-word consideration of a boating excursion on a small lake by an independent-study student named Grim. Or that between these duties you drove out to the airport to pick up a plane ticket for your daughter from a man whose stomach fell to his knees. You didn’t tell them how he propped his stomach on the counter while he scheduled your daughter’s flights with a kindness you were unaccustomed to. How you wondered if his stomach was the result of absorbing other people’s sorrow. You often thought that people with great stomachs were absorbing the world’s sorrow, the sorrow that seeps out of car windows and suitcases at the passenger drop-off. You didn’t tell them how you woke up that morning at the Sheraton, looked through your papers, and did not find “My Mother’s Toenails.” How you ransacked your suitcase, sifted through the piles of conference material in vain.

That morning you had gone to the bookstore thinking perhaps the review in which “Toenails” was to be published had come in and you would be saved. It hadn’t. You ran into two writers and told them about your dilemma. They challenged you to write a new essay; you had the time, they said, a few hours. You should be able to come up with 750 words by 3:00 p.m. Just recount what happened, they said: a writer forgets her material. Then you should explain why, they said—top it off with some sprinkles of reflection. What would Freud say? He was a reliable guide to composition on this subject. Freud would say the reader left her work at home to escape an occasion of judgment. The reader had not consciously decided to back out and save herself. She didn’t mean to leave the piece at home. But Freud would say that the reader had preemptively shot herself in the foot to inflict the wounding she thought would be forthcoming from others. Freud would go on to explain whence in early life the damage got started. He might bring up the etymology of the name Oedipus, that is, “Swollen Foot.” But you only had 750 words. Thanks for the help, you said as you turned away. The writers at the bookstore leaned against a pile of nonfiction mysteries and concluded you were like a lot of other smart screw-ups hoping for grace.

You didn’t tell the audience that you walked back to the hotel having decided there was nothing to do but reconstruct the original “Toenails”—all 750 words. You sat at the desk outfitted with silver ice bucket, coffee maker, and an array of cups. You were not thirsty. Outside the wind was fierce and you imagined a long procession of people and the dusky sounds of swirling leaves. You began, As her memory darkened, I did not see my mother. You said each word out loud as you pressed it upon the page, scratching out words and then replacing them. More words came. Her nails had grown so long that they curled over her toes and underneath, spreading upon the floor. They were a thick, waxy yellow, hard and prehistoric. Did she not notice? She had to notice, for she couldn’t walk properly, scuttling across the floor like a crab. Perhaps the nails had grown so tough, so thick and obdurate, that she no longer had the strength to cut them. The reconstruction of “Toenails” took two hours and your hand burned all the way up to the elbow. You were uncertain whether this version you had written out was identical to the one you left at home, but you were surprised how the sentences came back to you, floated up, thick and hard and intact as your mother’s toenails. Perhaps there was another reason you left your piece at home besides the foot wound and all. Perhaps you needed to hear the words come back to you like this, discovering them all over again. The piece was a living thing inside you now, not a printout lying on your desk.

Credits

Nicole Walker is the author of ten books, most recently, How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature (Bloomsbury, 2026). She is nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and professor of creative writing at Northern Arizona University. The above essay is an excerpt from her book, Sustainability: A Love Story (Mad Creek Books / OSU Press, 2019).

Robert Klose is the author of a novel, two memoirs, two essay collections, and a children’s book. He teaches biological sciences at The Honors College, University of Maine in Orono. The above essay first appeared in the 10/03/18 issue of The Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com).

Marcia Aldrich’s most recent book is Studio of the Voice (Wandering Aengus Press, 2023), from which the above essay was excerpted. It first appeared in the anthology, You, edited by Kim Dana Kupperman. Aldrich is professor emerita at Michigan State University and former editor of Fourth Genre.

Photos by Betsey Henkels

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