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Pacific
About eight years ago, my father was heavily sedated after undergoing an operation to correct a deviated nasal septum. My mother and I sat on the opposite side of the room from his bed, reading while he slept. When he awoke, he looked over at us, and asked me in a groggy voice: “Kel, have you ever seen the Pacific Ocean?”....
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Appetite for Destruction
Sometimes when I drive, I smoke Marlboro Ultra Lights and pretend they are Marlboro Reds. Then I pretend I am in a gritty, independent film wearing a lot of eyeliner and greasy hair. I picture myself as an emaciated drug addict, but a pitiable and gorgeous one....
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The Leaden-Eyed
I grew up in a home with a map of Narnia on one living room wall and a map of Middle Earth on the wall facing it. As a child, I knew the difference between a nymph and a satyr, between a centaur and a faun. I knew Gollum and goblins and orcs and Aslan. So I was given every opportunity to become a hopeless Romantic from a very early age, and I suppose I still mostly am.
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My Catcher in the Rye
Maybe it’s because my students and I are discussing Holden Caulfield this week—this sweet kid who genuinely wanted to know where the ducks went in winter. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Salinger and teaching once again at a rigorous prep school. Maybe it’s because I’ve just moved back home to Mississippi....
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Undoing our Undoing: Reva Williams & Gretel
For two years, I lived in an artists’ colony in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, just on the outskirts of Boston. We set up house in a drafty three-story Victorian—me along with six musicians, one painter, one sculptor, and one band manager (in addition to a steady stream of guests, most of them of the musical variety)....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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