ISSUES | winter 2023

Family Affairs   During the nineteenth century, observers from both sides of the Atlantic admired the relative looseness of American families while also criticizing a lack of multigenerational connectivity and…    read more

Eighteen People Every Hour Dennis McFadden    The first time he saw her, asleep on the sofa when he came home from work, he honestly thought of an angel. Of…    read more

Pink Feather Boa   She is pinching my son’s small thumb and index finger   around the petals of a buttercup, chanting   She loves me; she loves me not,…    read more

  Breathe! Marina Hatsopoulos    When my husband Walter and I arrived in the Intensive Care Unit, our twenty-five-year-old daughter Zoe was lying, eyes closed, under a nest of tangled…    read more

Motherlove  Elisa Faison  “I’m really sorry. No one told me you were here.” That was the first thing Lily ever said to us, that she hadn’t seen us. But now…    read more

Song Night  Robert Long Foreman  I thought about calling this “What We Do in the Basement,” because there are several things we do in our basement.   It’s a good basement.…    read more

Apostrophe My husband didn’t understand prayer. He said people who pray are deranged. Who do they think they’re talking to? Even with Bluetooth technology, do they not know how ridiculous…    read more

The Fourth State of Water   Everyone           some moment in their life  will need dark field   to recognize the peculiar shapes of their own tear  “The…    read more

Wish in One Hand  by Amanda Rea    At the biker rally, Blue bought tickets for midget wrestling. They were twenty-five dollars—too much, as far as Betty was concerned, especially…    read more

Fall My father put his head through a wall. Leaves fell in red and orange puddles, the house dropped on the market. After-school sunlight dwindled, the solstice loomed. My child…    read more

A Conversation with Andrew Leland   Andrew Leland’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other outlets.…    read more

Robert Henri: Art for Life’s Sake  In biographies of American artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Robert Henri’s name appears often. While he was known as cofounder…    read more

Eva Tanguay and the Art of Self-promotion “It has all been done before, but not the way I do it.” –Eva Tanguay    In February 1909, just before her Sunday…    read more

Writing about Mom and Dad: Four Literary Memoirs of Parents  Cynthia Miller Coffel    Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, my father, and me by Ada Calhoun. Random House, 2022, 259…    read more