On Memorial Day Weekend The Common went public. A literary IPO. Our first offering featured Issue 00 contributor Ted Conover who read from his new bookThe Routes of Man and talked to a packed house about his unique on-the-ground journalism.
The Common makes its digital debut! We’re a new literary magazine based at Amherst College. Our mission is to publish literature and art that embody a modern sense of place.
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“Lit mag editors shouldn’t be the first people reading your piece. Early drafts, even if they have successful elements, rarely have the tight cohesion necessary to get an acceptance. Find readers you can trust to give you frank, helpful feedback, and work hard on revisions before you submit anywhere. Time is also a great editing tool; put aside your drafts for weeks or even months, so you can come back to them with clear eyes. It’s much easier to see the bones of a piece, and to spot weak scenes or characters, when you have some distance from the initial writing process.” |
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— Emily Everett, Managing Editor at The Common
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Spend a few hours exploring a place that’s fairly close to you but that you’ve never visited before. This might be a park or a historical site or it might simply be a grocery store on the other side of town. Take careful notes about this place and the people you encounter there, paying special attention to anything that strikes you as out of the ordinary. Then, brainstorm different options for how you might write a short essay about this experience. |
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Brainstorm a list of significant moments from your life that are connected to place. This might be a vivid memory from childhood, a significant moment from a trip, or simply a moment from your recent history that feels representative of the place where you currently live and what makes this place unique. Then, using the examples on The Common’s website, write a dispatch—a short written snapshot of moment in time that is inextricably tied up with the location in which it took place. |
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Research an occupation that takes place in an unusual or interesting environment that many readers are unlikely to know much about. This could be anything from a nail salon to a movie set to a horse track. If possible, shadow someone who works in this environment and take notes about the sights, sounds, smells, and vocabulary of this world as well as the work being done. Then, write a character profile of a person who works in this place. |
By L. S. KLATT
I leave the house unlocked & walk to the garage jacked to
The White Stripes. My mouth is a guitar; snow is in the sound hole.
Spring. I think it’s spring. The automatic door leaps
in its tracks & is music again. I record on my phone a soundwave
as the GTO convertible wheels out of its tomb, the driveway
chartreuse with maple wings. Tell White I’ll cut some garlic
in his mother’s garden; I’ll wear a rhinestone button-down
studded with garnets. Finger the fretboard with licks
& withdrawals. And toe-tap the pedal
if I don’t screw up again. If I don’t give up listening
to the leafing of lettuces. Won’t be long
before I could care less.
L. S. KLATT’s poems have appeared widely: The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Believer, Image, VOLT, The Southern Review, and Pleiades. He is the author of five collections, including Cloud of Ink, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and most recently Saint with a Peacock Voice.
By DANIEL TOBIN
Like a dog truant among the tended plots
it turns back toward us a considerate eye
as though sensing the disquiet of our being
lost here among all the unfamiliar graves
that would be landmarks proving the right way
if this were the way we’d believed it to be.
Empty streets, even our taxi
is missing, but the train station
is crowded. I comb
my hair, looking at
the reflection
in the ticket window.
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