Our Chernobyl
From my window, I look out at Montpelier’s empty streets, trying to tune out the COVID-19 news updates that ping and bing on my phone, asking myself why this all feels so eerily familiar. I know this jumble of emotions. Fear, helplessness, despair, and also the sense that we’re all in this together.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Surrealism as a Mode of Memory and Instruction in THE FIRE EATER
Surrealism is a flight against Oblivion. Taking to the winds of Memory on the magical wings of the supra-real. Reality through an extraordinary idea of Reality. What creates memory and what creates forgetfulness, surrealism asks us to ask ourselves.
Scissors of the Air
A visit to the hair salon every seven or eight weeks for me is the emotional equivalent of attending a high school reunion, the kind where two popular girls, naturally both cheerleaders, rush you in the restroom line, singsong, “Are you married yet? We didn’t think so,” and whizz off in a confetti of giggles.
An Eye That Never Closes in Sleep
“Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
Drone Pilot
He changes into his flight suit,
goes to war each morning—
just a twenty-minute drive
Agency
Rose swivels the guest chair with her back to Steven Reiser. Rather than face his desk, she looks out wall-to-wall windows at a slice of Pacific Ocean horizon or glances into the hallway through Steven’s open Funk, Ogden, Upton, and Rosen Agency door, to avoid viewing some revolting thing like the saliva tongue roll.
Review of W. Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrester Elegies by Sean Prentiss
Kayfabe is what keeps people interested in pro wrestling. It’s the feuds that run on for months between hero and heel, it’s the back stabbing, it’s the interviews that sound more like rants
The Loft
Evan Merrill walked to the opening at the far end of the barn loft and told his sister to get ready to take her clothes off.
Robin McLean in conversation with Christy Crutchfield
Robin McLean: I read a story of yours a long time ago (we were in graduate school together)—a scene at McDonald's with a father and boy. I recognize the story in a new form in your debut novel How to Catch a Coyote. Can you talk about the first ideas or scenes that...
Review of Shelagh Connor Shapiro’s Shape of the Sky by Dawn Davies
As an unapologetic reader of everything, I find myself categorizing new things I read with other things I have read, as if placing books and stories and poems in folders in my mind will help me put the growing lifetime pile into desperate, impossible taxonomical order.
The Morning
We both had the morning off. We spent it walking down brick roads until we reached the farmer’s market.