M.C. Benner Dixon: Whatever is Lovely
I remember being a teenager, leaning across my dresser towards its large mirror and studying my face, wondering if I was beautiful or not. It was an indecent hope, and I faithfully dashed it whenever I could.
Paul Christensen: Where Summer Ends
My village lies there in all its stony composure under the first thunderstorm of fall. It meant cold weather was coming, creeping in like a procession of ghosts under the rumbling sky.
Paul Christensen: Messages from the Invisible
I am an outsider and always will be no matter how long I come and spend my summers here. I don’t mind; I like my existence framed this way, with enough sunlight to comfort my skin and aging body, and my ears thirsting to hear French laughter, and French whispers below my window.
Marco North: the falling boy (too bitter a fruit)
He was one of many trying to escape, grabbing onto the plane thinking they would let him in.
Paul Christensen: A Velvet Gloom Before It Rains
The rain isolates you the way not even silence can.
Rachel Hadas: Humble Herb is Rival to Prozac
The little notebook, its pages an eye-ease greenish tint, with my staggering penciled captions labeling every blessed thing, each flower picked and pressed and taped down to the page, contains more than specimens of wildflowers from a Vermont meadow. It encloses the first summer I remember.
Paul Christensen: The Changing Air of Nights
Night is a palace of memories, with the beams lashed to the roof and corded with fragments of childhood, vanished links of how we grew up, and faint traces of our mother caressing our hair and sending us up to bed after a rambling story about ghosts and goblins.
Rachel Hadas: What do the classics teach us about hope?
How do we weather this welter of bad news? How do we adapt?
Haya El-Refai: Laya’s first Eid
When war comes, it steals everything: souls, memories, homes, happiness, love and safety. Instead, it brings fear, blood, death, darkness and terror.
Video: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Earth’s Forests
Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet. I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world.
Video: What it’s like to have Tourette’s — and how music gives me back control
Listen along as Alwani explores the power of music and delights the audience with an ethereal performance of her piano ballad.
Paul Christensen: Late Summer
Time holds everything in its ghostly hands, like someone touching the hot wine glasses on a merchant’s table.
Video: Thandiwe Newton | Embracing Otherness, Embracing Myself
Actor Thandiwe Newton tells the story of finding her “otherness” — first, as a child growing up in two distinct cultures, and then as an actor playing with many different selves.
Christine Skarbek: Jocelyn
It soon became obvious she could not speak. Finally, after many attempts, I got her name out of her, Jocelyn and finally, she looked at me straight on and said in a whisper, “You know, I used to be pretty. I used to be smart.”
