Features
“Life has gotten real complicated, and when you think of Enchanted Forest, it’s not.” --Paul Kennedy, documentary photographer of Enchanted Forest
On August 15th, 1955, a month after Disneyland Park opened its gates, the second theme park to be built in the US lowered its drawbridge for the first time to a humbler fanfare. “Enchanted Forest...
These were not snapshots, but motion pictures – hence, “movies.” Or rather, they were “talkies” – sound happened too. And through editing there were unions and disunions of movement and sound, the building of story, of character. In the span of seven weeks I watched three.
Things we experience in close proximity in time come to bear on each other,...
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When I read the list of companies who owned the now-ruined clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh—New Wave Bottoms, New Wave Style, Ether Tex, Phantom Tec—I thought about my walks in Abu Dhabi, which have been driven from the start by following the bright spool of electric shop names wrapping around each block. It’s not so...
In this month's author Q&A, Melody Nixon speaks with Shawn Vestal about childhood, the afterworld, and the 'irrevocable lives' we lead in between. Vestal's short story collection Godforsaken Idaho was published by Little A / New Harvest in April.
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At the threshold of summer, the sunglasses are on. Running in blue-sky mode, I’ve been talking up some ideas for multiplying the writing workshop times the architecture studio. Their product would be a format for storytelling across media, an alignment of complimentary strengths really well suited to engage the built environment.
This column has coalesced each month around the...
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In the fall of 1960, an exclusive group of writers and thinkers gathered in Paris to officially launch a new way of approaching both the study and creation of literature. This gathering—which would become “a kind of literary supper club . . . a hallowed echo chamber for investigations of poetic form and narrative constraint and the mathematics of wordplay,” as...
We painted lipstick on our lips and watched businessmen in suits flip open Die Welt, grazing the top of the newspaper with their line of sight, conspicuously shy in their observations of two foreign frauen. The train shot into Berlin's Hauptbanhof with succinct precision, confirming one of our German stereotypes: 7.00pm exactly on Dec 31...
Don Share published three poems, including “Wishbone,” the title poem of his newest collection, in the first issue of...
The ocean encircles a lone peak.
Rough terrain surrounds this prison.
There are few birds flying over the cold hills.
The wild goose messenger cannot find its way.
In the first half of the twentieth century, a Chinese immigrant carved this poem on the wooden walls of the Angel Island...
If Washingtonians have a patron saint, it’s the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice, a famous defender of civil liberties, Douglas was a committed environmentalist, who wanted to be remembered for leaving the earth more beautiful.
In February, Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute dubbed the Washington, D.C....
