I am sitting outside the dressing rooms exactly where my mother left me ten or fifteen minutes ago, after kissing me goodbye and dissolving into the Macy’s crowd, when the white man who is my father appears. On the couch to my left is what my mother would likely refer to as a whole heap of clothes, little kid shirts and little kid pants that have been discarded by shoppers before me and left in a state of complete and utter confusion. On the couch to my right is a girl who, I have learned, has reached the fourth grade. We have known each other for barely ten minutes. Yet we have formed the kind of immediate friendship that is possible only between children who are yet to discover that even at its beginning every path is an ending one.
Photos of LitFest 2018
More than 1,700 bibliophiles gathered on campus March 1-3 for LitFest 2018, the College’s third annual literary festival that included conversations and book signings with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz, 2017 National Book Award finalists Carmen Maria Machado and Min Jin Lee, 2017 National Book Award winner and Amherst professor Masha Gessen, and acclaimed Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among others. Additional activities included master classes, a poetry slam, panel conversations and tours of the Emily Dickinson Museum. The Common, the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and the Emily Dickinson Museum partner with the College on this event.
Click here for the full write-up and more photos.


Photos by Maria Stenzel and Takudzwa Tapfuma ’17.
2018 AWP Writers Conference in Tampa
& Marriott Tampa Waterside
Ireland’s Forgotten Borderlands

On my final day in Derry, a city barely inside the northwest edge of Northern Ireland, I hired a taxi to drive me past the city’s boundaries and across the United Kingdom’s border. Through the window, the Republic of Ireland was all endless rows of barley like coiled rosary beads. I wanted to see the Grianan of Aileach, a stone ringfort originally built almost fifteen hundred years ago by the Celtic king who then ruled Donegal’s hills.
Review: Wonder Valley
Book by IVY POCHODA
Reviewed by LISA ALEXANDER and JULIA LICHTBLAU
In Ivy Pochoda’s latest novel, Wonder Valley, we find ourselves amidst a scruffy, largely invisible subset of Los Angelenos: drifters, con artists, criminals, quack healers, the homeless. The few in their orbit who have money or a measure of success are in danger of losing their souls. Everyone is close to the edge, all the time. Yearning. Longing. Trying to get someplace. Anywhere but here.
February 2018 Poetry Feature
un/bodying/s
Poetry by TODD HEARON
Music by GREGORY W. BROWN
“I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true”
Geoffrey Hill, i.m., 1932 – 2016
1. The Meeting of the Waters
Sempiternal waters, sing-
ly sing, gush glottal-less & all
onomatopoetical your
triphthong’s liquid pluraling
through rock & ruck & rill
Ask a Local: Dilman Dila, Kampala, Uganda
With DILMAN DILA

Your name: Dilman Dila
Current city or town: Kampala, Uganda
How long have you lived here: Since 2011
Three words to describe the climate: Friendly, sunny, dusty
Best time of year to visit? All year. It can get wet in the rainy season, with flash floods, but that doesn’t normally last more than a few hours.
1. The most striking physical features of this city/town are . . .
The birds. Kampala is full of wetlands. My home is near one and I sometimes see ten different species in a day. There’s a species that thrives in the middle of the streets. The marabou stork, karoli, the garbage collector. In the past the city had poor waste management and this attracted the storks, but today they have fallen in love with the lampposts and tall buildings and won’t leave, though the council has tried to exterminate them.
Friday Reads: February 2018
Curated by SARAH WHELAN
Once again, The Common and Amherst College are honored to welcome a selection of visionary authors to our third annual LitFest–a weekend long series of events celebrating literary brilliance and nuanced expression. The talks, workshops, and panels will include, among other voices, 2017 National Book Award Finalists. This month, our staff and interns have chosen their reading in anticipation of our guests, and we present here our thoughts on just a few of these dazzling works. For more information on LitFest, please visit the Amherst College website.
Recommendations: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz.
Pulitzer Prize-Winner Junot Díaz Headlines Amherst College LitFest 2018
Featured authors include Masha Gessen, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Carmen Maria Machado, and Min Jin Lee

Amherst College will host LitFest 2018, its third annual literary festival celebrating fiction, nonfiction, poetry and spoken-word performance, on March 1–3. The event, co-hosted by The Common, features readings and conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz, 2017 National Book Award winner and Amherst College professor Masha Gessen, acclaimed Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and 2017 National Book Award finalists Carmen Maria Machado and Min Jin Lee, among others. All events are free and open to the public. All author events will take place in Johnson Chapel on the College’s campus and most will include an audience Q&A and author book-signings.
Winterscape

The day is drab and cloud-soaked, the sky a quilt of gray. I take the dog to walk on a path beneath the power lines near our house. Although it’s the first of February, there’s no snow. Everywhere I see brown, tan, dull green. Overhead the lines buzz and pop, the towers that carry them straddling undulating hills.

