Issue 141

TIME TO TALK OF MORE CHEERFUL THINGS:

 in which we find love at a Purim party, meet an Ethiopian filmmaker on the train, challenge an upstart student, and stand naked in front of the refrigerator.

FICTION Trevor Corkum, Alicia Elliott, Kathy Friedman, Liz Harmer, Elisabeth Harvor, Stephen Maude, K.D. Miller, Pamela Mordecai, jp rodriguez POETRY Sharon Black, Jessica Hiemstra, Isabel Huggan, Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Mallory Tater, Sarah Tolmie, Lucy Wadham ESSAYS Isabel Huggan with Sharon Black and Lucy Wadham, Kathy Friedman and Jessica Moore PLUS Tristanne Connolly in conversation with Steve Noyes, Heidi Reimer in conversation with Suzanne Alyssa Andrew, Maria Meindl and Carrie Snyder

“I’m writing. I need to write. It’s like love or devotion, it must be expressed. But does it need to be published? Maybe I’m not writing anything that should be made public. Maybe that’s acceptable. Maybe that’s not shameful, even for someone who hoped to make her living as a writer. I would like to accept it, because I sense that acceptance is the only way through – to being a better person, a more grounded, humble, generous person. It’s hard to set aside ambition, after fighting so many years to get here. But my ambition is a glutton and will never be satisfied. I would like to accept myself as a writer, no matter where my writing takes me, no matter what it gives me.”

– Carrie Snyder, “The Shadow Side of Success”

“Even though we hadn’t slept, Lawrence and I were fitter than most of the other kids and we were the first to reach Masada, the hilltop fortress where a group of Jews resisted the Romans after the second Temple was destroyed. When Masada finally fell, the Jews committed mass suicide rather than give up. Who’s to say what makes one race of people, or even a single person, tougher than another? Lawrence told me that his sister was fearless as a kid. She’d do anything on a dare: swallow a live earthworm from the backyard, show her underwear to the boys across the street.”

– Kathy Friedman, “Masada”

“Our household was a constant symphony of Indian music, rhythm, and language. Between my mother’s prayers and my father’s poetry, we played cassette tapes of Yesudas singing Malayalam devotional and popular songs. We listened to Shakespeare’s Othello in Malayalam on an old reel-to-reel player, and we watched movie versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Hindi (another language I didn’t understand, but the familiar stories were easy to follow).”

– Sneha Madhavan-Reese, “My Poetic Education”