Artist: BEN SHATTUCK
When I first heard of the Nicaraguan Canal Project, I thought of the 19th-century artists Martin Johnson Heade and Norton Bush. It was winter, and I was driving through Wisconsin, early evening, listening to the news. The canal, the reporter said, would be three times as long and twice as wide as the Panama Canal. It would fit extra-large container ships. It might stimulate Nicaragua’s economy. Environmental groups were protesting potentially large-scale disaster.
Come see The Common’s Managing Editor Diana Babineau in conversation with editors of three other premier Massachusetts literary magazines. The panelists will present their journals’ identities: who they are, what they are looking for, and the process of getting published by them.
The Straw Dog Writers’ Guild––the panel’s hosting organization––is a collaborative open to writers, readers, booksellers, and editors alike, providing a vibrant network of resources to the Western Massachusetts writing community.
This month, we’re featuring two authors with new poems from Guatemala and Greece.
Book by CHARLES BAXTER
Reviewed by
A new Charles Baxter book is always cause for celebration. As a writer, I always learn a thing or two about craft while being provoked, moved, entertained, and unsettled. Baxter’s latest collection of stories, There’s Something I Want You To Do, serves his usual range of social commentary, humor, wisdom, and good yarn in multiple structures.
Baxter begins this one with an epigraph from Primo Levi’s The Reawakening about the Ten Commandments, also known as The Decalogue:
“…Nobody is born with a decalogue already formed… everyone builds his own… everybody’s moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to be identified with the sum of his former experiences, and so represents an abridged form of his biography.”
Baxter has called this ten-story collection his decalogue, and it feels like his own deeply personal digest of experience.
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 07 contributors Valerie Duff and Leslie McGrath read and discuss their poems “Folk Magic” and “In Praise of Prey.”
The Common welcomes parents, students, and the general public for a cocktail hour of poetry, essays, and fiction from The Common‘s special 10th issue. Join us in the Rotherwas Room in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Wine & cheese will follow. Join the Facebook event here.
This event is free and open to the public.
The BBF is New England’s largest annual literary event, boasting a street fair, live music, writing workshops, and other interactive events for both adults and children. Find out more about this year’s event at www.bostonbookfest.org.
There is something in me that loves an island. I live on one (Queens, New York, on Long Island, across the East River from the isle of Manhattan). I’m attracted to all kinds—those buried by volcanic eruptions; adrift in a blue void endless as the cosmos; locus of nearly extinct languages; and even the fictitious Island of Lost Souls ruled by the mad scientist Dr. Moreau.
CRISCO IN A BLOCK
I’m not really sure why it’s all so illegible now. The ink fades to nothing midway through and is gasping for breath where it’s visible at all. I have a vague recollection of the page living on one side of the fridge for a time (reminding us of its existence)—so perhaps the sunlight hit it just so. Or perhaps the pen itself was too weak, not up to the task.
By AVIYA KUSHER
Here, deep in the thickness of northern Germany, dogs travel glamorously, in their own spacious compartments. Apart from the dogs, who are large and meticulously groomed, there are only a few passengers on the local train heading north from Hamburg. I see a man with black hair, carrying a leather folder bulging with carbon paper—a traveling salesman, perhaps. There are two old ladies in pastel cardigans, their cheeks wrinkled and stern, and three tanned backpackers, loudly sharing Muesli and what looks like bottled carrot juice. Other than that, there is just my blue-eyed mother, nervously staring out the sealed window.
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