Essays – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Inventory of my Bag

October 3, 2018 No Comments

Inventory of my Bag
by Alice Riddell

‘Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.’
George Perec, Species of Space and Other Pieces

My handbag (as stands at 13.05 on Monday 14^th May 2018):

Black wallet (containing x2 ID cards (UK driving license & UK discount railcard), x3 debit cards, magicians business card, x3 metro cards, laundry card, Chase business card, political party membership card, NYU health information card with brand and model of glasses written on it, British Airways bronze membership card, Guggenheim dual member card…

Essays

Methods of Transport

September 12, 2018 No Comments

Methods of Transport by Sarah Van Bonn Car. A car is a privacy that stacks itself upon the privacies of others like blocks, like the wooden blocks of that endless tower game—you know the one. The tower isn’t endless, but it also never really ends, even after it falls; that is the point of the game. My childhood was car-based. It had to be. I was born near where the car was invented. If not the physical object of […]

Essays

Our Version of Sweatheart

August 29, 2018 No Comments

Our Version of Sweatheart by Andrew Bomback A sheep dog greeted us when we arrived at the first farm, and Juno immediately roped the dog into a game of fetch using a pine cone. Xenia and I brought our bags and food inside, and I set up Mateo’s portable crib while she nursed him. It was nearing his bedtime, so while Xenia put Mateo to sleep, I took Juno for a walk around the farm to scope out the animals. […]

Essays

Caricatures

August 15, 2018 1 Comment

Caricatures by Nate Waggoner “I ate all your marshmallow fluffernutter. Put it in your memoirs.” -Jai Waggoner I’ve just moved across the country to Berkeley, California to attend a post-graduate creative writing program at San Francisco State University. I live with my aunt Jai, who is an art teacher and assistant principal at Malcolm X Elementary. In Jai’s art classroom, eighteen little buddies watercolor at four tables. Ephemera covers every inch of the room’s walls: kachinas, Dia de los Muertos […]

Essays

Suit

August 8, 2018 No Comments

Suit by Daniel Bowman Jr It’s Valentine’s Day. Sub-zero winds blow snow across the stubble of Indiana cornfields. We hunker down for a weekend of books and movies, blankets and tea. I make a checklist of chores. It includes dropping off my suit coats at the dry cleaner. I own just a few and they aren’t much to look at, but I wear one to work, with jeans, most every day.

Essays

Dress Up

July 18, 2018 No Comments

Dress Up by Angela Brussel Your hairs fell with great, thunderous thuds to the floor, the volume of their import far exceeding the barely audible sound they actually emitted, and you smiled. I watched the bunches gather, the heaviness of our history in them, by my feet like little carcasses, the linoleum a mottle of brown and regret, and I grew flush with despair. It took everything in me to not bend my knees and forage for every last wisp.

Essays

The Great Love Ambush

July 5, 2018 No Comments

The Great Love Ambush by Vanessa Blakeslee By thirty-five I had figured out two things about myself for sure—that I am the type of person, bluntly honest and eccentric, who requires getting to know slowly, over months, before a romance has any chance of succeeding, and secondly, that I needed to stop chasing, stop obsessing, stop pining after the clever, charismatic men with whom I’d always felt instant sparks. The latest had been an impressionable debut novelist I’d met at […]

Essays

Places

June 20, 2018 No Comments

Places by Stephen Green I didn’t know what the feeling was, but as I stared up at a man in the bucket of a bucket truck taking the sign down letter by letter – P A T H M A R K – I felt something. How were they held up there, I wondered. Even as I watched I couldn’t figure it out. They would be gone and there would be just a wall. But as the bucket lowered, I […]