When I was a child, everything was perfect all the time. I was long planned for and executed with great care: my mother dressed me in tailored suits, flounced petticoats, buttons shaped like clocks, sheepskin coats, electric-blue felt, coordinated layers of hot pink and purple, drop waists, sequins, Peter Pan collars with scalloped edges, oversize …
I know an old man who lives at the edge of the world, in Alaska, a town called Bethel. The first people arrived via ice bridge. Now we fly on planes. The old man lives with an old woman, his wife. He built the house they live in. He builds other things too, boats, furniture, …
First thing to understand: its rhythm. The phrase should be scanned like “résumé.” • The fore, middle, and aft vowels are nearly identical, trafficking between the short a, e, and u—assonance achieved by way of obscenity. An R-rated schwa. • Which is to say that in Risky Business Tom Cruise is saying it incorrectly. • …
Her name is Miranda, and she’s an Engler on her father’s side, raised to be proud of the good her family did during a troubled time. To this day, at every family gathering, an ancient Engler is helped to their feet to tell the story of the weeks, months, years after the Battle of Gettysburg, …
And now your breasts are the stars! Lean this way, please, a little more to the right, that’s it, hand here, shoulder dropped, okay, beautiful, okay, don’t breathe, got it! Just one more. . . . The technician’s name was Penny. “Oh good,” Rebecca said to the beaky older woman with sensibly cut hair, “you …
When the fatigue finally hit, her sleep brought dreams of Don before he overdosed, and in these dreams his skin was made of colorful crepe paper that kept tearing off when she reached for him, until all that was left was a tumbleweed frame, a hollow yellow bouquet of him. And when she woke in …
One: Oscar Peterson’s Piano Is Out of Tune And he’s strolling—back and forth, back and forth—in front of a bank of impressive windows that look out from his penthouse in the Amedeo Court Apartments. He is alone. But if you were there, Bess, you could lean an elbow on the empty bar and watch him …
1 After dinner, the conversation turns to celebrity sightings. The table’s littered with bowls of chocolate-covered almonds and date cookies and glasses of wine and bottles of beer. Someone says he saw Neil Young in a bookstore where he was about to give a reading but that Neil Young left before the reading began, which …
Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen: What I admire most about this essay is the author’s courage in confronting a subject that is both deeply personal and, regrettably and even tragically, part of a wider cultural experience. Montgomery’s memories, lyrical style, skillful metaphors, and forthright engagement with a persistent and often frightening cultural problem are especially …
Artist’s Statement Folded Cyanotypes and Folded Palladiums are closely related bodies of work that use historic photo processes to create works on paper. In both cases the paper is folded, coated with photo fluid, then exposed to light. After that, I rinse the paper in fixative to reveal the image, simultaneously flattening it. The Folded …