Essays
June 13, 2011
Lighting the Way: On Mentoring and Being Mentored 3
by Edan Lepucki
I am thankful for each of my mentors and what they’ve offered me at different points in my life as a writer. I don’t want to imagine what I might not have attempted, creatively and professionally, were it not for their support and enthusiasm, their benevolent shadows.
June 9, 2011
Daughter of California 10
by Edie Meidav
Pitch dirt onto a parent’s dead body and in that second understand that bits of dirt just became as much part of the parent as any other bit you might hold onto: a snapshot, a clock with bent hands, shoes still bearing the imprint of feet, ties scented with stale aspiration.
June 8, 2011
Consequential Literature and Petty Theft 11
by John Brandon
The first time was nerve-racking, a rush, but by the third book I was already settling in. My browsing time shortened. My forehead didn’t sweat. I feared getting caught not because I was committing a punishable crime, but because I was committing a strange and possibly subversive act, because getting caught would force me to explain, to divulge my secret self.
June 7, 2011
Solving for X: Malcolm X and White Readers 4
by Michael Bourne
If the “angriest black man in America” no longer hates you, Malcolm X’s story seems to tell white people, then maybe you’re not all bad.
June 6, 2011
Pat’s Journals 7
by Victoria Patterson
Soon after I started dating my future husband, I discovered that his father had written unpublished journals, named for his sons and his first grandson. In them, I learned the truth is complicated and nebulous and open to interpretation.
June 3, 2011
Geoff Dyer, Gate-Crasher and Dragonfly 4
by Bill Morris
It was as though I’d been drawn to the Phillips de Pury auction house to visually complete the circuit of learning begun by Dyer’s revelatory writings. Which is not to say I wound up agreeing with everything Dyer had to say. Far from it.
