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#Featured Reads3

Issue 165

The Paradise Motel

The real center of The Paradise is the laundry room where Pauline, the housekeeper, controls the washers and dryers with a communistic zeal. She manages the chambermaids, and none of us are allowed to touch the dials on the machines. It is forbidden. It is late summer, and the heat blasting from the dryers overwhelms, and I don’t know how Pauline stands it. We clean the rooms, while Pauline runs in-between the laundry room and our cart, fetches assorted dirty linens before she returns them washed and warm, and, of course, checks on our progress. Read more.

Rea Tarvydas in
Issue 165

This is Not a Poem!

What I recall is this: I dared to voice an opinion, not unlike another white student had. I, too, was dissatisfied with something or other, saying something is stupid. Not someone is stupid. Miss Hirabayashi spat, Detention! Read more.

Karen Lee in
Issue 165

The Language I Write In Now

Immigrating is, in my view, a little like learning to walk with a prosthetic leg. The ghost limb is your faraway land, ever present but unseen—felt but not to be touched. It hurts. But once you learn to run again, you are a whole new, stronger person. And that is an important lesson to learn: to know what loss tastes like, and using that feeling in order to better enjoy the taste of choice and possibility. For me, this process involved finding the way to make my blood flow (and boil) in English as naturally as it does in Spanish. I knew that if I accomplished that, I would truly belong here. Read more.

Martha Bátiz in

#Online Exclusives3

The Writer’s Corner

March 28, 2023

What is Martha Batiz Reading?

Reading time is precious to me, as during the academic year I seldom find the chance to read anything besides my (many) students’ work. I wish I had the energy to devour books during these months at the same pace that I do during the summer, but if I have learned something since I migrated […]

Martha Bátiz in
March 23, 2023

Finding the Form with Noriko Hoshino

I often start writing about the things or the people I know. Occasionally it works, but I usually end up producing lame stories. I suck at writing autobiographical stories or something that is related to my family because I tend to make me look like the nicest person on the planet living with an ideal […]

Noriko Hoshino in
March 16, 2023

What is J.R. Patterson Reading?

On a recent journey through Morocco, I read André Gide’s short novel Strait is the Gate. The story of two adolescents, Jerome and Alissa, on the Normandy coast falling in love and failing to court one another was at odds with my surroundings—dirty souks, rattling trains, the call of the muezzin. The discord was comforting; […]

J.R. Patterson in