Massachusetts | The Common

Summer People

March 12, 2024 Essays

Most of our old family photos are from the beach, and most of them are of my father. In them, he is always grinning, gleaming from the Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil that scented the denim shirt he wore every summer. My mother loved the beach, too, but did not like to be photographed. In all those years, Dad caught Mom on camera only once, on a boogie board riding a wave, still wearing the sunglasses that stayed on her head all summer, even after dark. She preferred to float, read, and take pictures of my brothers and me. Blindingly pale or perilously pink, like “before” ads for skin cancer, we’re inevitably chewing or punching or blinking, ruining the picture. My father, however, always looks perfect, natural, exactly where he’s supposed to be. His hands are on his hips, superhero-style, as if he’s won some high-stakes game and the beach now belongs to him.

On Tenterhooks

August 17, 2022 Dispatches

By ERICA EHRENBERG

Stockbridge, MA

A Road, the Sun

June 8, 2022 Dispatches

By CAROLYN KUEBLER

Ashfield, Massachusetts

She remembers a road that she walked along. Something about joy, maybe, something about light. It was her own lightness, or maybe it was the road’s. She walked it more than once, that week in September, a year past. There were rock walls fringed with pale asters. Tiny white butterflies hovered in sunlight, and the hills were green. That’s all that remained. A year ago, and it has faded.

Lost Farm

June 17, 2021 Essays

By CHELSEA STEINAUER-SCUDDER

Before the arrival, there was a departure. A view of an airport gate through an airplane window.

I was eleven years old; my brother Nathan was eight. We had just completed the drive from our home in Norman, Oklahoma to Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City. I was eager to board the plane and get to my seat so that I could look out the window, back toward the gate. My best friend Rachel had come to the airport with us, back when you could hug someone goodbye right up to the boarding doors. She had promised that if I looked out the plane window, she’d make sure I saw her waving to me, and she promised to keep waving until after the plane had pulled away from the gate and Nathan and I were far above the place where we’d grown up, in between two very different homes, two parents, two lives. I held onto this promise tightly, as if looking back to see Rachel waving was as far as I was going that day: boarding a plane just for this small moment.

My Life as a Sardine

May 16, 2019 Essays

By BENIGNO TRIGO

My grandfather, Luis A. Ferré (1904-2003), was the third governor of Puerto Rico and the founder of the Pro-Statehood Party. When I was little, he used to say it is better to be a big fish in a little pond than a sardine in the big blue sea. It was a reminder of how good we had it on our little island, and a warning against leaving it in pursuit of a bigger and impossible dream.

Dread

March 7, 2019 Essays

By JULIA PIKE

I lived on Dread—
To Those who know

Emily Dickinson

In Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, a white house dress hangs on a headless mannequin in front of the tiny writing table where she penned 1,789 poems.

That Awkward Unbalance that Becomes the Beautiful: an Interview with Archibald MacLeish

March 29, 2017 Interviews, Podcasts & Audio

TOM FELS interviews ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

In May 1965, Amherst College student Tom Fels ’67 interviewed three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish. The below interview, conducted at MacLeish’s home in Conway, Mass., is adapted from their conversation, a portion of which originally appeared in the town newspaper the Amherst Record.

Archibald MacLeish, one of the best-known American poets, playwrights, and public intellectuals, was born in Illinois, and educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, later taking a law degree at Harvard. After participating in World War I, he forsook the life of an attorney to focus on poetry, making his living for several years as an editor of Fortune magazine. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, he was for five years the Librarian of Congress, and later, during World War II, an assistant Secretary of State. After the war he taught at Harvard for thirteen years before taking the position of Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College (1963-67). MacLeish was the author more than fifty works of poetry, nonfiction, and drama.

Tom Fels is a curator and writer based in southern Vermont. His work in the arts includes exhibitions at the Getty Museum in Malibu, CA, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as well as numerous articles and books. He is the author of two books on the 1960s, Farm Friends and Buying the Farm. Fels met Archibald MacLeish after the poet’s delivery of his convocation speech at Amherst College’s Frost Library in 1963. This interview was the first of many that have played a part in Fels’s writing and research. Among the latest is a conversation with MacLeish’s fellow former Harvard faculty member Daniel Aaron in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture (June 2013).

Listen to a recording of the interview here, or scroll down to read.

Looking for Ice

November 1, 2016 Essays, Issue 12, Issue 12 Essays

By RALPH SNEEDEN

At the boarding school where I teach, my campus residence bears a plaque with the name of an English teacher who drowned after falling through ice. He had been skating on the river after the year’s first deep freeze, which had been followed by a snowstorm. I was told that once his pickup hockey game had ended and the players dispersed, he made the choice to remain behind, to skate upriver, enticed, perhaps, by the beauty of new snow, to explore the transformed hemlock-banked waterway alone. This happened the winter I was hired, before I started teaching the following fall. Our paths had crossed briefly during a fellowship in New York City and at a cookout in New Hampshire with friends we had in common. I didn’t know him well, but liked him immediately, and afterward I felt as if I’d lost a friend, a kindred spirit. I appreciate what he might have felt. The power that could have drawn him onward along that white, unblemished path until it betrayed him.

The Company of Strangers

July 2, 2014 Dispatches

By NAILA MOREIRA

Two men scrape blue paint from the wall of the building across the street. They sit cross-legged, each plying his scraper with energy. The one on the right is thickset, wearing a gray t-shirt stained with sweat. The one on the left is more striking. His tight white t-shirt rides up his torso, baring his muscular lower back and the crest of black underpants. His long army-green shorts droop, exposing still more of that black arc. His hair is black and spiky, sideburns visible when he turns his head.

The Common Statement

April 4, 2014 Issue 07

The sidewalk in front of my house unfurls enticingly to the north and south. Though its seams have buckled after months of gravel and salt, the walk still leads me to my neighbor’s porch, where I pull eggs and goat cheese from the fridge, take honey from the shelf, and leave cash in an unlocked box. The snow- and ice-narrowed path also still ferries a friend and me to the Bookmill, where we drink wine in the afternoon and squeeze up tight next to the stacks to peer down on the rushing creek below. If the walk’s covered overnight by a hard snow, Don blasts his snowblower through, the cranking assault of the motor a reasonable price to pay for the favor. For the magic of having one’s way into the world restored. That I have a sidewalk outside my door is a fairy-tale luxury, an enchantment.

All posts tagged: Massachusetts

Summer People

On Tenterhooks

A Road, the Sun

Lost Farm

My Life as a Sardine

Dread

That Awkward Unbalance that Becomes the Beautiful: an Interview with Archibald MacLeish

Looking for Ice

The Company of Strangers

The Common Statement

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