Sarah Wu

Podcast: Vix Gutierrez on “Don’t Step Off the Path”

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Transcript: Vix Gutierrez

Vix Gutierrez speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Don’t Step Off the Path,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Vix talks about writing this essay, a coming of age story about her teenage years spent in the Balkans immediately after the Yugoslav Wars, where she lived with a very small humanitarian aid organization. The essay is a fascinating look at a rarely-explored moment in time, and probes the doubts, dangers, and power that come from being a young woman in a postwar landscape of men. Vix also discusses her formative time spent at the DISQUIET International Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and in the MFA program at the University of Florida.

portrait of vix gutierrez

Podcast: Vix Gutierrez on “Don’t Step Off the Path”
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Translation: Sindhu Library

By GEET CHATURVEDI
Translated by ANITA GOPALAN

Piece appears below in both English and the original Hindi.

 

Translator’s Note

There is an inherent quiet music and a brokenness in the story “Sindhu Library” excerpted from Geet Chaturvedi’s fiction Simsim. In its simple external reality, the story thinks with images and situations. There is a delicate textuality in the characterizations that take shape in a kind of leisureliness, be it the old man sitting among tattered books in his library or the balloon woman appearing at the start and end of the story, which is very poetic. I have translated the author’s pauses whenever I could, building a balance between language and sensation, between rhythm and vacuum.

Translation: Sindhu Library
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This Is Salvaged: Vauhini Vara in conversation with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

headshot of  Vauhini Vara

In this conversation-in-correspondence, TALIA LAKSHMI KOLLURI and VAUHINI VARA discuss Vauhini’s electrifying collection, This Is Salvaged, and its themes of connection, the evolution of the self, and the incomprehensible nature of grief. Kolluri and Vara explore craft, how work evolves over time, and the ways time infuses stories with emotional depth.

This Is Salvaged: Vauhini Vara in conversation with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
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Boysenberry Girls

By NORA RODRIGUEZ CAMAGNA

June 1978
Central Valley, California

We demanded, we begged, we guilt-tripped our parents for money. We had reached the age where we cared about our image. We no longer accepted garage sale clothes or Kmart blue-light sale items. We wanted the hip-hugging, sailor-pant flap Chemin de Fer jeans, we wanted the upside-down-U-stitch-on-the-butt Dittos, we wanted the iconic Ralph Lauren polo, and we wanted the clunky Connie Clogs. We wanted the clothes our American middle school classmates strutted around in.

Boysenberry Girls
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Don’t Step Off the Path

By VIX GUTIERREZ                                            

When I was finally allowed to leave home on my own, my sister accompanied me on the train from Moscow. For the first leg, anyway. In the morning, she would get off and I would go on to Croatia, alone. We knew the instructions well. No sooner were we inside the sleeper cabin than my sister set to blocking the air vent with clothes and duct tape. It was 1998, and, along with the first popular elections and counterfeit jeans, the Russian Wild Nineties had brought rumors of enterprising thieves who pumped sleeping gas through trains’ ventilation systems, and then went through the cars relieving unconscious passengers of their valuables. Local friends had cautioned us to keep our passports on our persons at all times. But at sixteen, I was short, shy, self-conscious, and prone to vivid imaginations. The prospect of strangers running their hands over my body—unconscious or not—seemed far worse than that of losing my passport, so I left mine in my bag on the seat as a decoy.

Don’t Step Off the Path
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In A Word

By MARC VINCENZ

For your ears, in your exile, in your comfort zone, in which you fly unscathed, unsheathed, into the scarlet reveries, in your scarf and hands where the hum of time seems like a downpour, or the dizzying heights of mountain crags, the sharp flashes of light that become visible in the no-longer-already night. Here in the deep darkening center, in the storm of spring or the silence and its willow tree, in the serenade on the veranda, or the poplar spires, in the furrows and the silt, do you believe the true believer may be risen from the dead? Hold the fire and the ever-transforming, the endless sky or the filthy sewage which spews out under the shadows, which they say settles the soul. You will emerge as you do, in all your manifolds, in the siege and in amongst the vagabonds and the wayfarers, the heavenly debate in the afterworld—all those among us searching for safety. Here we are heathens, the lamb and temples that rise over the hills. Yesterday had us back among you in the proud fight, where the stained glass was the mirror and shattered our pride. Earn your trust, they say. Weren’t we the ones who lifted the dead, who muttered their prayers accordingly, where every motion was a wavering—so estranged we were in the day’s end—the words, the word, the faces were etched in their smiles. Take the last sheaf of paper and hold it up to the window. Take the benevolence of any kindred spirit and let it arise. The book ends somewhere. 

In A Word
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