These Are The Things You’ll Pass Down

Hospital

“Mom was at Bridgeton Psychiatric Hospital, four years before I would be, waiting for a bed at Seabrook House, a drug-rehabilitation center that still sees success in South Jersey, where we grew up. Where thinness moved me, heroin moved her.” A new essay by Jacquelin Winter explores mental health and generational trauma.

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When Art Explains Art

"Waiting Room" cover art

When Art Explains Art
by McKenzie Stubbert

For my album “Waiting Room,” I commissioned the painter Zachary Johnson to create the original cover art. It  could have simply been a beautiful piece that, like many album covers, was incredibly vague. Instead, I got a portrait of myself that reflected back to me exactly what I had made: something far more autobiographic. Like a lot of music, my album drew inspiration from many places. But I never expected the album art to reveal to me what I had been trying to uncover.

This album took me seven years to complete. It began as a handful of unrelated pieces I slowly tinkered with, trying to find my so-called “voice.” I struggled to understand what I was making and what connected them to each other. Much of the music originated in film and other visual projects. I have been a full-time freelance composer for about fifteen years. Over the years, certain elements, moments, or, in some cases, entire works jumped out to me as rather personal and something I wanted to use for myself.

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Sounds of an old house: a haunting memoir

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Sounds of an old house: a haunting memoir
by J. Ashley-Smith

I’ve moved house maybe fifteen, twenty times since I left home, but my parents have never moved. They still live in the house I was born and grew up in, on the outskirts of Cambridge in the UK.

It’s the only detached house on a street of Edwardian terraces and townhouses made of bricks that must once have been a chalky yellow, but are now grey with age and the soot of a hundred years-worth of car exhaust fumes. White and pink rosebushes line the short path from the pavement and trail around the front door, partially obscuring the name etched into the sandstone lintel: Rose Holme. It’s a small, simple, beautiful house. The inside front door has panes of green and red stained glass, and blue glass corner-pieces with white stars. In the afternoon, sunlight shines through them and paints coloured shapes on the walls and floor of the entrance hall. The house smells of books and old wood, of the drying hop vines my mum hangs from the bannisters.

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Why I Like Amusement Parks

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Why I Like Amusement Parks
by Jeremy C. Shipp

Picture me in the attic, dusting headless mannequins and possessed marionettes and a rocking chair that rocks itself every night at 3:33. These cursed items aren’t going to clean themselves. As I’m dusting, I come across a cardboard box stuffed with old papers. At the very top of the pile, there’s a tiny one-page essay I wrote in elementary school entitled “Why I Like Amusement Parks.” 

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Farewell Brooklyn

Bookmarks

Farewell Brooklyn
by Ashley D. Escobar

I had never heard of Domenico Starnone until I picked up a copy of his slender green novel Trust in Posman Books at Chelsea Market. My friends had left me to look at the miscellaneous items by the cashier––juvenile pins, scented-erasers, and animal figurines. I rolled my eyes as Penelope looked for a rainbow ribbon to wear on Valentine’s Day. College, with all its secrets and façades, seemed like another world. We had gone to so many bookstores already, our feet hurt, and we were hungry, but when I saw the word “trust” in large white letters accompanied by a couple, not exactly in an embrace but close to one another with a single hand in the air, I knew I had to buy it. I was tired of solitary brooding after finishing Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. The next minute, I was out the door with Trust safely tucked away, acquainted with the insides of my Paris Review tote bag. 

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My Sidewalk Stage

Guitar

My Sidewalk Stage
by John Yohe

Strange, almost scary, to stop on the sidewalk, put my guitar case down and opened it. People passing glanced, curious, as I slung guitar strap over shoulder and strummed an open E chord, fine-tuning strings. Part of me even expected cops to show: “Alright buddy, move along!” Perfect day though: Sunday, early Autumn, sunny, a few clouds. Not too hot or humid. I was standing at my favorite two block section of Ann Arbor, in the world really: the T where Liberty runs into State, right outside Border’s Books & Music, across from the Michigan Theatre where they showed good indie films, and with the lingerie store next door, so I was comforted by all my favorite obsessions. Also, it was a strategic location: Liberty a main pedestrian route between stores on State and stores farther west on Main. Plus, relatively quiet, less traffic, and Border’s took up the whole block, so I’d be visible, and hearable, for a long ways either direction, giving people, I hoped, more time to listen to me, more time to maybe form a favorable opinion of my singing, and more time to consider making a donation.

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Middle

Ocean

Middle
by Hantian Zhang

On the map, Todos Santos sits in the ocean’s middle, the tip of a peninsular hugged by the blue from all sides but the north. From the airplane, its precise location is hidden in the surprising green, a carpet of shrubbery crisscrossed by dry riverbeds of sandy yellow. On the ground, as Cabo’s crowds and resorts recede from view, vistas of shimmer lift the spirit, rendering an alacrity that something might come out of this trip after all, some new ideas, a new path.

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The Wild Bride of BKLN

Brooklyn Bridge

The Wild Bride of BKLN
by Amy Bobeda

Cities were once built for walking; it was not until the Enlightenment that ceilings became white when we tried to dispel the evil diseases of the forest. There’s an old ceiling in the financial district reflecting summer light. Tainted plates of a sun, two pelicans, other animals I don’t remember. The Fearless Girl in bronze stares at the Stock Exchange, hands on her hips, defiantly she shimmers; I shimmer sticky pores.

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