In early October 2020, my partner Greg and I drove at sunrise to Zion National Park in southern Utah. On the way I swigged coffee and snapped photos of sandstone cliffs dip-dyed red by the sun. They dwarfed what I’d imagined while planning our pandemic-adapted vacation – a national park tour via road trip, starting…
Tag: Essays
Lemons – Victory Witherkeigh
“You made it, Grandma!” I said as I gave her a hug. The gold tassel swished in my face from the graduation cap I hadn’t removed yet. “I’ve been to all your graduations, Iha,” she replied in a huff, “And, I’ll be at the next one.” I gripped her hand as she steadied herself with…
It’s Always Going Away: Losing the Places We Love – Nina Smilow
New York is often unfairly maligned for being unfeeling, but that’s just what we call uncontrollable things, which the city is. It tumbles on, transforming a million times over the course of a decade before remaining stagnant for far too long. Occasionally, shifts rise rapidly from seismic events. I’ve seen sudden pivots in the wake…
Heaven-Born Things – Sally Gander
What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.Marcus Aurelius ‘It’s about a third full,’ I say, clutching the mobile phone to my ear as I hang my head into the water tank, my voice bouncing off the metal sides and echoing back at me. ‘Does the pipe…
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner that Held Them: Managing Isolation and Becoming the Fabric of a Place – Joanna Mason
January and the New Year are often dreaded in their insistence that we look back on what we have achieved, or what we meant to. This year, the looming of March feels the same, with its marking of the anniversary of the initial lockdown. It is easy to be hard on the progress you have…
The View from Here – Lettie Mckie
A version of this piece first appeared on Trampset In April, the reality of the pandemic fades into the background as my family deals with our own internal crisis. The house is in Kemsing, a southern English village in the Kent countryside. It is nestled on the slopes of the North Downs, a range of…
Diamonds or Snow – T.S.J. Harling
Image by Alex Avalos, via Unsplash This is the place you go to bury or burn the person you love. – You are in a cinema with friends, or a boyfriend, or your family. No-one is ill, no-one is cross, and you have enough money to waste on a cinema ticket and popcorn and fizzy…
An Ode to Cross-Dressing – Clara Schwarz
I tightly pull back my hair into a slick, low bun, parted far on the right side of my skull. With a several pumps of hairspray, I even out the edges and create a stiff look. I squeeze the top button through its hole and stand up straight as I clip the bow into its…
One Book: What Would You Save From Being Destroyed for Ever? – Hunter Liguore
If all the books in the world were being burned in a fire and you had the chance to save just one, what book would you save? For some this might be an easy answer; for others, this question might need the utmost consideration—as an avid book reader, with piles of books lining all corners…
Body Positivity and Fat Acceptance – Changing the World to Suit Personal Grievances? – Catherine Drysdale
I originally wanted to write an article about how different diets suit different people, and how breaking away from my father’s belief in the Atkins diet and doing my own research was liberating for me. I had hoped that those reading this article would find a similarly freeing effect, and it would give them hope…
Where I Lived – Robert Boucheron
Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, NY. He has worked as an architect in New York City and Charlottesville, VA. His short stories and essays appear in Bangalore Review, Fiction International, The Fiction Pool, Litro, London Journal of Fiction, New Haven Review, Short Fiction. Where I Lived As the Great Recession brought construction to a standstill…
Witchcraft and the supernatural in the work of Thomas Hardy – Georgia Tindale
Hardy himself describes this fictionalised Wessex as ‘a partly real, partly dream-country’ in his preface to Far from the Madding Crowd. It is this combination of the ‘partly real’ and the ‘partly dream’ which connects Hardy’s supernatural to his Victorian society.
Porridge 