A journal of rediscovery
A film recently came out starring Steve Carell and Emma Stone titled Battle of the Sexes. It’s a dramatization of a famous tennis match in 1973 between men’s tennis player Bobby Riggs and women’s tennis player Billie Jean King. Spoiler alert: King won the match, and that victory was a
by Christina Kinsella It’s amazing to think that there was a time when cultures and countries relied on mailing letters as their sole method of communication. When we discover old family letters, it is as if some exciting new world has opened up for us. If we can still find
Continue readingPutting Pen to Paper: the Simplicity of Letters
By Diane Van Hook Giant islands of plastic garbage are floating in the ocean right now. Within the five major ocean gyres, or large systems of circulating currents (North & South Pacific, North & South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean), plastic refuse that has washed out to sea has accumulated into
By Melissa Johnson Despite humanity’s eager search for life outside of Earth, space continues to present itself as an inhospitable, frozen vacuum whose only sources of warmth and light are the countless stars scattered across the universe. It can be tempting to anthropomorphize these balls of fire, to project life
Continue readingStellar Companions and Objects in New Contexts
PY: Space is clearly an overarching theme in “A Lunar June.” Is it a frequently occurring theme in your other works? BH: This story, I suppose, marks the first time that I have written about space. I guess I always had the sense that a space story was going to sort
Continue readingPerson Behind the Prose – A Q&A with Brandon Hansen
I was digging around the house recently for something old and vaguely interesting, when I uncovered a white box in the basement. In this box were numerous photographs, some in color, most in black and white. While all of them were rather eye-catching, one in particular caught my attention. It
Continue readingUncle Aron, His Chairs, and a 103-Year-Old Postcard
by Melissa Johnson If you want to send a message to your enemy, a tower created with nearly 1,000 of their skulls is a powerful one. In the city of Niš in Serbia looms a fifteen-foot-tall stone tower embedded with human skulls. The Skull Tower, or Ćele kula, was built
PY: How did you first hear about the Skull Tower of Niš, and what about it inspired you to write this poem? JS: In all honesty, I went looking for it, but I didn’t know what it was. I wanted to find something worth knowing about with a lot of
Continue readingPerson Behind the Poem – A Q&A with Jake Sheff
One day, a random conversation with a friend named Joukje—pronounced “Yaaook”—led to a discussion about birth certificates. Joukje was born on February 17, 1947 in the Netherlands, exactly a day before the birth of Princess Christina of the Netherlands. To celebrate the birth of the princess, her mother, Queen Juliana,
Cindy Davis is a retired third-grade teacher. When she began her retirement three years ago, she turned her attention more fully toward the exploration and documentation of her family genealogy. One piece of the puzzle was finding the tombstones and burial sites of her ancestors and photographing them for inclusion
Continue readingA Local Act of Conservation: Remembrance Through Digital Memorials