Essays – Page 2 – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Diary as Workbench as Archive as Net

May 8, 2024 No Comments

Journal with pencil

Diary as Workbench as Archive as Net
by Stephanie Sauer

On Taking Note

There is a diary, which is to say a daily, in which I take note of the goings on in my work. Did I write today? How did it come? Did the words hide away? Did I edit? Was I surprised? Did I discover something new? Did this catalyze delight? Did an ending weave itself in a way I wasn’t expecting? Did I trudge through the hours unrewarded? Did the thing I tried fall flat upon the page? Did it crawl into the waste bin and evaporate? Did I give up early and go for a walk? Did the walk unearth something buried? Did I return to the work afterward?

Books, Essays, Featured

Ecocatastrophe Science Fiction Was Supposed to be a Warning, Not a Roadmap

April 29, 2024 No Comments

Blog Tour image

Ecocatastrophe science fiction was supposed to be a warning, not a roadmap. We need more hopeful stories of the future.
by Cat Sparks

A climate-rattled world, ravaged by extreme weather events, is now a popular backdrop for top-shelf fiction. From Booker shortlisted The New Wilderness by Diane Cook to The Coral Bones by EJ Swift, authors are exploring the dramatic possibilities of a post-apocalyptic future. There’s something decadent yet alluring about ruined landscapes littered with once grandiose, now crumbling structures – civilisation’s reset button having been well and truly punched.

Some reckon it’s no better than we deserve, but I’m not one of them.

Essays

Steak and Potato

April 24, 2024 No Comments

Bedframe

Steak and Potato
by Marin Kosut

I was born to vegetate. As a juvenile, I’d stare at my blank bedroom wall. I’d stare out at the driveway. Not even the sky or the ceiling. I’d lay on my bed looking down at the middle of my body and stay outside myself inside the house. I wrinkled with time on top of my sheets. Sometimes, admittedly, I flipped through the Pennysaver. I didn’t know nothing, but I wasn’t totally rotten.

Essays

Written in the Stars

March 6, 2024 No Comments

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.

Essays

Making the Graphic Novel Graphic

February 14, 2024 No Comments

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-Up, Suicide 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.

Essays

Silver Fingers

January 31, 2024 No Comments

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.

Essays

Pancakes

January 17, 2024 No Comments

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.

Books, Essays, Featured, music

Notes on Nudieland

January 9, 2024 No Comments

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).