ISSUES | winter 2024

Sanctuaries are seldom absolute or universal. One person’s perfect place of safety may be quite private, but its individual, even idiosyncratic nature doesn’t make it meaningless. When I was a…    read more

I signed up for the chatbot study because I lost my job when everything shut down. People had been saying I was too old to be a barista anyway, that…    read more

Reasons for Staying I That I woke with the red shoulders of a blackbird. I tucked my wings, my most private brightness, and went on. All night I dreamed of…    read more

  Days after my eleventh miscarriage and eighteen days into the five-hundred-mile Camino Francés pilgrimage that I was hiking with my husband, I first spotted the white storks. As Nick…    read more

MOUSE Tate Gieselmann I find the mouse lying on its back outside my bedroom at 4:15, when I wake up for work. I almost trip over it, I’m so tired.…    read more

Authorization for Disposition of Infant Remains My memory sees her as faceless, the woman who came with forms into the sunny room as far away from Labor and Delivery as…    read more

There were tides in the ocean long before there was a moon.  Rachel Carson    It started when the Romans said, Take this with a grain of salt.   This act…    read more

Tractors   I was sixteen when my Aunt Barb came to live with us. Four months later, during a blizzard, she pulled me aside before we climbed onto tractors to…    read more

Once, up on the roof, the doorman told the boy, he’d spied Mrs. Foxfur sunbathing in the altogether.  In her birthday suit, he said, when the boy didn’t capeesh.   Naked?…    read more

Joan of Arc Like a razor scraping skin, I choose this final word of confession. I am not afraid now to be made bald, to let the fire of language…    read more

While aspiring artists might have been attracted by early twentieth-century Paris’s cheap living and liberal morality, their reasons for seeking sanctuary in the city were often more complex. Many were…    read more

Friendships between women in Hollywood are thought to be rare among the most visible players, such as actors and directors. In the early years of the industry, they may have…    read more

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” in Joan Didion’s famous aphorism, but are our stories choking us to death? In Seduced by Story, Peter Brooks laments “the plethoric…    read more