Written in the Stars

Stars

Written in the Stars
by Richard Scott Larson

I’m in Red Cloud looking at the stars. Hours after dark, the Nebraska prairie just south of town sweeps out toward faint distant lights marking the horizon below the glittering night sky. The darkness at this late hour seems flattened to the ground and cowering from the enormity of the cosmos, our bodies just shadows to each other as we crane our necks and try to see it all at once: the Milky Way and the Big Dipper looming over the whispering grasses, Cassiopeia on her throne. One shooting star, and then another. Someone finds Venus hanging low in the distance and each of us turns to look as we brace our bodies against a cold wind. 

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Making the Graphic Novel Graphic

Brushes

Making the Graphic Novel Graphic
by Francis Levy

The Wormhole Society began 6 years ago. I signed up for a writing workshop which took place at Arthur Nersesian’s apartment— every Monday night at 7. Arthur who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up on First and Fifth is the author of The Fuck-UpSuicide Casanova, Chinese Takeout and most recently The Five Books of Moses (e.g., Robert Moses) which weighs in at 1,504 pages.

I was going to work on the rewrite of another novel, Tombstone: Not a Western, but I decided to start something new. 

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Silver Fingers

Book

Silver Fingers
by Ellie Eberlee

It wasn’t meant to become a habit. I’d read the novels before. The essays, too—everyone has. I owned multiple copies of each actual book: the shelves of my bedroom back in Toronto housed three editions of The Voyage Out, two each of Night and Day and Jacob’s Room, five of Mrs. Dalloway, six of To the Lighthouse (including a beloved, rare hardcover edition with watercolor illustrations I’d been given for my twenty-third birthday), and one of The Waves. With me in Brooklyn I had Night and Day, Dalloway, and Lighthouse downloaded on my Kindle. Hell, I had the whole collection on my phone as audiobooks, not that I’d tell anyone—Woolf obsessions are a bit of a cliché among queer white women. 

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Pancakes

Pancakes

Pancakes
by Judith Sharlin

My husband David called them “Best Pancakes.” On Sunday mornings, we had my creation—whole grain pancakes with sliced bananas.  Our son Hillel enjoyed them with chocolate chips. At times, he had them with both chocolate chips and sliced bananas. 

I had handwritten the recipe on an index card that became soiled from the flour and eggs used in the pancake batter ingredients.  Then, later, I typed it out because David urged me to make it more permanent and include it in my “next cookbook,” he said.  I taped the recipe to an index card. 

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Notes on Nudieland

Closetalker live

When I was finding my way into worlds of music beyond the Top 40 and classic rock of my hometown, I thought it was immeasurably cool that Ian MacKaye from Fugazi had also been in Minor Threat. Or that Vernon Reid from Living Colour had also been involved in the downtown NY jazz scene. The first hat trick I recall was realizing Erasure’s Vince Clarke had also been in Depeche Mode and Yaz(oo). 

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Black Punk Now

Guitar amplifier

Black Punk Now
by Camille A. Collins 

Punk at its heart is a search, a demand, for truth. Beyond the cliché emblems of studded chokers and spiked mohawks lies a creed that has served the angst of young working-class white men in Britian in the 70s; cool east coast girls of the same era, like Patti Smith and Joan Jett; and Black youth. Black tastemakers have been active in punk from the very start. 

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On Seeing Someone

Lens image

On Seeing Someone
by Cole Cohen

 The glasses that were supposed to mimic loss of central vision arrived while you were away; first at a work conference in Baltimore you hadn’t told me about and then another conference after that, I forget where now. I waited for a couple of days to pick the package up from the mailroom, until I felt more like seeing the world from your perspective. My work as a writer feels so abstract compared to being a doctor. We’re both working on the problem of cognition just from different ends, and anyway anyone who has tried to heal knows that it’s also an abstract art, with its own setbacks and triumphs often appearing out of order and without warning.  I thought that I might be well suited to care for the person who cares for all of the other people, or at least it felt nice to think of myself as someone like that. 

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Shapeless

People walking

Shapeless
by Emily Alexander

Late summer soon after moving to the city, I take the train and wander until I have to pee. The streets smell vaguely of garbage and excrement. I don’t know where I am. Sunglasses, cobblestone, the sure strides of locals and the tourists’ chatter, wide eyes. A cop car parked on 5th Avenue has its windows rolled down, cigars attached to the arms of faceless shadows hanging out of them, smoldering into the heavy air. A woman with bright pink sneakers jogs by.

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