After evensong at the abbey, we walk circles
in the woods, weaving through deerflies
in kamikaze flights. The cerulean warbler
mates among these trees, we’re told,
so we keep vigil for blue flickers in leaves.
So far, nothing. On half-submerged logs,
turtles perch like hard-shelled gods—
We canoe to the deepest part of the lake
before we can talk about who we were
before the other existed as witness.
Welcome to the second installment of our new series on TCR’s blog, Then and Now, a column in which writers reveal and dissect earlier literary attempts which have helped form their current work. This week, John Schimmel takes a look back at an unfinished screenplay from 2006:
EXT. STANFORD UNIVERSITY – LATE AFTERNOON
ESTABLISHING – The glorious campus of one of the more interesting, forward-thinking institutions on the planet. Sprinklers water the ample lawns.
EXT. STANFORD PHYSICS BUILDING – LATE AFTERNOON
White, three stories, topped with Spanish tiles, wrapped in semi-Spanish arches.
INT. PHYSICS BUILDING – JANE GLEIZE’S OFFICE – LATE AFTERNOON
JANE GLEIZE (35), fit, focused, Stephen Hawking brain in a healthy female body, stands at her whiteboard. Clutches a black marker as she stares at neatly written if indecipherable equations.
A knock on her door. No reaction.
By Pallavi Yetur Early this year, New York magazine published a feature entitled “We Are Living in the Matrix.” The February 4, 2019 issue included several pieces about the lasting impressions left by The Matrix on everything from the way we think about and engage with the internet, to how it inspired fashion houses to send tiny-lensed sunglasses and billowing…
Celeste Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, was a national and international bestseller, and her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, now available in paperback, does not disappoint. The novel is set in Shaker Heights, a community planned so specifically that there is a siren on Halloween announcing the start and end of trick-or-treating festivities. Trash is picked up from each resident’s backyard to avoid the unsightly appearance of trash cans on the curb, and the city’s motto is “Most communities just happen; the best are planned.”
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Bob Dylan, musical legend and survivor
Fan, A music lover who may or may not be a journalist
SETTING
The play is set in a backstage corridor.
SYNOPSIS
A fan or journalist meets Bob Dylan in a backstage corridor and asks him a few questions.
BOB DYLAN IS WALKING DOWN A BACKSTAGE CORRIDOR WHEN A FIGURE STEPS OUT OF THE SHADOWS AND SPEAKS TO HIM.
Fan: What was it about Donovan that so upset you, Bob?
(BOB STOPS AND ALMOST STEPS BACK.)
Bob: Who are you?
Fan: I’m a fan.
Bob: Not from Rolling Stone?
Fan: We’re all rolling stones, Bob.
By: Kaia Gallagher Described by commentators as funny, big-hearted and joyfully obsessive, Steve Almond has been a newspaper reporter, an acclaimed writer of short stories, an essayist and the author of ten books over his twenty-year writing career. Almond’s published short story collections include My Life in Heavy Metal (2002), The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories (2005), God Bless…
Crow Cento
There was a broken jaw of light at dusk where the crows
pinned to each tree
the hammer’s shadow in the shadow of a hand.
Sound of a crow, pulling the one nail from its voice,
claim the far away in me—
a never air, the lens for being.
Every microcosm needs its crow,
and the crows are up to no good:
They invented the earth for people,
inventing pizzicato as they fled the horizon.
In a time filled with terms like “fake news,” when it can be hard to tell what’s true, Liliam Rivera’s Dealing in Dreams reminds us to be aware of the rhetoric that shapes our society and to be mindful of its effect on us.
Lars’ baby blue VW bug, rusty and dented, came to a stop in the rutted parking lot at the trailhead into Dark Canyon. Covered in nearly as much dust as the car, we both tumbled out into the scrub desert, already parched in May. Fable Valley had enough flash floods to make leaving our names at the BLM box prudent, though it was still early in the season. Eager to stretch our legs, we shouldered our backpacks and started down the steep trail into the valley.
We had driven down from Logan and stopped in Provo for a Saturday fair in the city park, where Lars did a brisk business drawing portraits of fair-going kids. He’d kept them captivated with stories on a rickety stool as he rendered their character in strokes of charcoal and Conte crayon. At midday, while families lunched and the kids trickled in more slowly, Lars had me pose for him, to pass the time and entice paying customers.
How do you assign a price to a human life? Are some lives worth more than others? In a world that is on the verge of collapse, do the rules of the living apply? In her second novel, The Flight Portfolio, Julie Orringer explores these questions.
The Flight Portfolio is a riveting fictional story of a real person, Varian Fry. In the novel, Varian, an American journalist, works for the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) evacuating artists and intellectuals from Europe during the second World War.
“EXCUSE ME, MISS! ARE YOU JEWISH?”
I had just moved from San Francisco to New York City. I was walking down Park Avenue, heading to the 6 train after a particularly grueling day of work, when I was approached by two young men from the Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish Hasidic movement, waving what looked like willow branches at me as they shouted and ran in my direction. I had that dark-haired “Jewish look,” I suppose, that they were eagerly scouting for in rush-hour Manhattan during Sukkot. They were very excited.
“It depends on how you define ‘Jewish,’” I answered. It appeared as if I were about to be blessed by their branches, and as a newly arrived New Yorker, I needed to be blessed.
Eckersley had a loopy artist in her guest room and a boy begging at her door. Both were proving to be troublesome. The artist was loopy in the sense that he was probably insane, but also because he was stuck in a loop. Like the beggar boy, he appeared one day at Eckersley’s door announcing that he had a new performance project that he hoped to rehearse in Eckersley’s guest room. Because he was an old friend of Eckersley’s he was allowed in. He refused to say much about the performance.
The beggar boy came to Eckersley’s door at least once a week asking for clothes, food, and anything he might be able to sell. Also money, of course. Sometimes, usually, Eckersley gave him something, but sometimes she didn’t happen to have anything on her, or was in a bad mood. Occasionally, she was simply irritated by this boy who came so regularly to demand things for nothing.