KATHLEEN MELIN is the author of By Heart: A Mother's Story of Children and Learning at Home (Clover Valley Press, 2008). Her writing has appeared in Split Rock Review, the Baltimore Review, Essay Daily, Barstow & Grand, and elsewhere. She lives on a farm in northwestern Wisconsin.
MY FRIEND and I veered east on Highway 48 in northwestern Wisconsin as we headed for a July writers festival in my secondhand 1995 Geo Prizm, its metallic pale blue hood mottled with dark splotches as if decomposing. The previous owners, the nuns of Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota, near where I live, had patched a hole in the front bumper with turquoise duct tape. I’d pulled it off, preferring the frank appearance of the puncture. A fringe of tape threads hung on and fluttered in the wind. The nuns had left a rosary in the glove box.
I’d named that car Subtle Power.
The day before the festival, my friend, a poet, had two teeth pulled and didn’t want to drive her somewhat better car because of the painkillers. She was working a factory temp job over the summer assembling insulin injector pens in rural Polk County. She had put the dentist’s bill on her credit card.
“I’ll have to work another couple weeks to pay it off,” she said. “School starts in a month, and then I’ll be tutoring again, up to $100 a day, as long as the students show up.” She’d left her adjunct teaching job and the long commute to the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire two years earlier and was now helping at-risk students with their coursework at the local high school.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
