In Person
June 4, 2013
The Bee Years: The Tales of Two Spelling Bee Hopefuls 0
by Laura Goode
The 1998 Minnesota State Spelling Bee. Only five competitors remain on stage, including me. I approach the microphone and listen for my assigned word: “nascence.” I fumble it. It’s a clear-cut defeat, but it’s also an escape, a leap into freedom, a birth. I am born, so that I can be reborn.
May 31, 2013
Losing My Book Fair Virginity at the BEA Swag-A-Thon 3
by Bill Morris
The vast autograph area at BEA brought to mind the cattle pens in a Midwestern feed lot. Indeed, many of the people waiting in line looked like beasts of burden, draped with bulging bags of swag and hankering for more.
May 7, 2013
Zora Neale and My Sister 0
by Jeffrey Colvin
Before my trip to the birthplace of Zora Neale Hurston, I had a vague notion of what manner of suffering might make a person accept death. Love, I suspect — or at least companionship — sustained my sister after the return of her cancer.
April 26, 2013
Young Novelists, Old Institutions: Granta at the Book Club of California 3
by Lydia Kiesling
The Book Club is not hip, but on Monday evening, I felt the spiritual glamour of a place, which, despite its age and sometime pokiness, is founded on the fundamentally sound principle that if you have three glasses of wine in a plastic cup and listen to something beautiful or see it, it can change the whole complexion of the world.
April 17, 2013
After the Marathon: We Contain Multitudes 1
by Holly LeCraw
I had to keep making noise. Because they kept coming. We were standing at the top of a hill and you could look down Comm Ave. and see a river of people with no end.
April 5, 2013
Now She Has a Name: When a Serial Killer Visited My Small Town 4
by Deji Olukotun
My parents reassured me that we were safe. But there were deeper questions: Why hadn’t anyone noticed that a head was missing? Wasn’t the family looking for the head? The thought that no family member cared enough about this person’s head to claim it back was even more terrifying. If your family can’t search for your missing head, then what good are they, in the end?