I’ve always loved Renoir. When I was given a pack of pastels at age nine, my first act was to recreate Two Young Girls at the Piano. This knockoff—stylistically crude but visually inoffensive—hung above the piano for most of my young life. When I finally made it to the Musée d’Orsay, just this past year, I shared a photo of the real thing with my brother. He cheekily replied, “Yours was better.”

The first thing I do in any museum is seek out the Renoirs. Thanks to his prolificacy, I am nearly always in luck. These artworks tend to be objectively remarkable, of course, but there is also a sting of nostalgia, of childhood, of love for something because it is beautiful and well made. Renoir’s painting of the Grand Canal is a compelling, evocative work, aligned with the artist’s usual palette, yet distinctly Venetian. It is also a painting of a place that is disappearing. Depending on the acqua alta, Renoir painted perhaps 30 centimeters of the buildings along the canal that will never be seen again.

Art offers an occasion to see the world through another’s eyes, and I am often pleased to see the world through Renoir’s. I laughed upon learning how differently Italy’s élite first received his vision—one critic called it “the most outrageous series of ferocious daubs that any slanderer of Venice could possibly imagine.” Such stories are common in art history. Artistic invention is, at the outset, often branded as heresy. But if we are fortunate, time passes, and what we once renounced hangs on the walls.

Acqua alta, or “high water,” refers to the periodic flooding of the Adriatic Sea. The floodwater can temporarily flood Venice.

A. J. Bermudez is the author of STORIES NO ONE HOPES ARE ABOUT THEM (University of Iowa Press, 2022), and is winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the PAGE Award, the Diverse Voices Award, and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize.

My friend Zoe died in the first wave of the pandemic, one of 20,000 New Yorkers lost in a period when leaders denied the virus, denied its power to empty streets and hollow out our lives. Americans have always been afraid of death, and in the hubris of those early days, when we didn’t have enough tests to diagnose the sick nor enough masks to protect the healthy, many still had the luxury of discounting the dead, the clearest indicator of our failure. It’s just like the flu, they said, you’re young, don’t worry. Meanwhile, New York hospitals overflowed; corpses were stacked on wooden racks inside humming, refrigerated trailers.

Zoe was thirty, and her final month on the ventilator seemed antithetical to her large, loud life. She was unable to speak or breathe, swallowed up by the machine meant to save her. Silence equals Death, AIDS activists used to say. I think of her now when I revisit Paul Thek’s “meat pieces,” a series of neon-yellow and turquoise-blue Plexiglas vitrines that house meticulously crafted, sinewy slabs of meat. The hunks glisten inside their boxes, threaded with tubes or stacked into ziggurats; cavities ooze black marrow, while African flies feast on exposed fat and gleaming tissue. The body horror of these pieces prefigured the horror of the AIDS epidemic, which eventually consumed Thek himself.

Amid COVID denial and cool, contactless death, the grotesque sensuality of these sculptures is oddly reassuring. The emotional heat of Thek’s “meat pieces”—marrow licking vitrine floor, flies dancing over flesh—bleeds through the sleek, inexpressive surfaces meant to contain them. Zoe, too, ran hot, breaking the constraints of decorum. She cursed and cackled; she overshared and encouraged me to overshare in turn. There’s so much I want to tell you, Zoe. I miss your hugs, your sarcasm, your messy humanity. But you’re not here, so I study the hairs that worm up through the lid of a vitrine, writhing, amassing, each hair desperate to reach out, to break free. And I pray, Lord, in your mercy, grant us our heat. Grant these most humble desires the breath of life.

Paul Thek (1933-1988) was an American artist who worked in a variety of media. The “meat pieces” comprise a series called Technological Reliquaries. Thek was born and died in New York City. His work is on permanent display at The Watermill Center on Long Island.

Steven Tagle is a writer based in Greece. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Institute of Current World Affairs, Fulbright Greece and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

I discovered the poem “Night Feed” by the Irish poet Eavan Boland too late. I had already weaned my youngest child and endured those hours of nether-world isolation and groggy mornings without Boland’s benediction. The late Boland’s poem describes waking at dawn to feed her infant daughter. Rereading it long after my children have grown brings me a new understanding of those hours cradling them.

I have reached the stage of life, like arriving at a waypoint on a road trip without a map, where I know I’m nearly three-quarters of the way to the end, and may be closer than that. I ponder how my life might have unfolded differently, freed from the care of children. What might I have accomplished, what books written, with more time for myself? There are times when I grieve that it took me so long to come to the page.

“Night Feed” brings me back to the peace of the gray dawn nursings, when I was swathed by the ghosts of others’ dreams, soothed by the rustle of wind through the oak outside. Like the poet, I conjured a perfect world. I gazed into my daughter’s somnolent face and imagined that she would grow into adulthood unscathed. I envisioned a time when she would gather my tired body in her arms, prop a cup to my lips, and hold me as I fall back into sleep, while looking out at the oak, deep in her own dreams.

Boland concludes her poem when the feeding ends:

And we begin

The long fall from grace.

I tuck you in.

Boland went on to publish many volumes of poetry, but we were both to learn that the road can be long, potholed, and serpentine.

Well, I knew as a young woman that I wanted to be an ancestor one day. Boland reminds me that during those quiet nights holding my offspring, I was doing important work—strengthening the umbilical of my foremothers. And when my granddaughter’s granddaughter awakens in the night, I will cradle her, too. Time is illusion. The stories will come.

Eavan Aisling Boland (1944-2020) was an Irish poet, author, and professor. “Night Feed” appears in her book Night Feed (1982), and in the book An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. In 1994 she was the writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin.

Teresa H. Janssen is a retired teacher with four adult children. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Zyzzyva, Parabola, Chautauqua, Emrys, and other journals. Her debut novel, The Ways of Water, is forthcoming November 2023 from She Writes Press.

I always wanted to be a writer, a famous writer of course, but just couldn't sit still. After playing baseball for twelve years, I needed something and I was finding out something. I needed something to keep me moving and found out I had no qualms about dancing.

It's one of those things when you ask, "Why this thing?" and then you look back and realize you were doing “this thing” your whole life. And so with me. In high school, I would get on the dance floor in redneck Oklahoma City bars and dance solo improvisations while my buddies watched from bar stools, and unknown to me, were probably protecting my ass from the rednecks.

I was swirling the drain in San Francisco in 1976 when I met my first wife, a ballet dancer taking classes at San Francisco Ballet. It was on Van Ness at that time. I fell in love with her and ballet. We moved to Santa Barbara that year, and I still see that line of Eucalyptus as you enter Santa Barbara as the gateway to my life, to awakening from the slumber of a non-artistic life.

Dance saved my life, and in that sense, art was the opening to an authentic life. I was 19 then, I am 66 now, still dancing, still performing. I never gave up on dance because dance never gave up on me. Do things happen for a reason? Bet on it! I raised a family, worked full time, and danced. That's the way I had to do it. I wasn't paid much for teaching, dancing, and choreography, but I did it anyway, because it wasn't about money, ever. Dance saved my life because through this medium I was able to live a life without regret, never having to say, “I wish I had done.”

And to the naysayers and the naysayer in you, I say don't say nay, say yes–to yourself, to life, to the joy that comes from doing what you love no matter what. It is all you have that is real, everything else is pretend.

Russell Dawson began dancing ballet and modern at 19. Now 66, he has managed to dance and perform his whole life, even today, after raising a family and working full time.

Ochre, orchid, and olive – more colors than a 64-pack of Crayolas. Freight trains, once the lifeblood of American commerce, course the veins of our nation. Their brilliance stands out against summer’s drying crops. Ribbons of color trace the landscape lacing through tunnels across America. The colors of the boxcars blur together as I traverse the collage of states we call the USA at 75 miles per hour.

Gray – the color of quandary. Why am I surprised to see them here in America’s mid-section? My customary air travel takes me above them. I have forgotten. I am driving across the continent to watch the Yankees play ball. These roving galleries of color are not listed in my AAA TourBook. They’re unexpected; still, still I am glad they amaze my spirit.

Black, brick and brown – the various hues painted upon the rust-colored canvases only as high as the arm can reach. Like paint swatches in The Home Depot. Vandalism, I suppose, but somehow, lovely, alluring, belonging here.

Tan, teal, and tangerine – designed on rectangle shapes that remind me of bolts of fabric in the yardage store. They tease the thought.

Peach, plum, and periwinkle – artwork reminiscent of the kaleidoscope from my childhood – I welcome their intrusion on the landscape.

Mint, maize, and mahogany – like the patches of a giant quilt. Today it rides through Oregon, tomorrow Montana, next week Kansas, then Kentucky. Only restricted by the rails it sits on. More offerings than the eye can capture – always changing, always moving, always captivating.

Salmon, shamrock, and silver – boxcars more colorful than a Norman Rockwell, more chaotic than an Edvard Munch, but art just the same; art that is an image from today’s culture. Speaking in the voice of the unemployed, the underemployed, the lonely, the bored and the desolate, of unrecognized talent and potential, of dormant energy and untapped imagination. Picturing both hope and despair.

Canary, carnation, and copper – let it ride the rails. Displaying great promise across the land. Color America with expectation and optimism!

Mason K. Brown is an author of inspirational non-fiction and humor. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, but travels the world collecting water and fodder for her stories.

Visiting the Hirshhorn museum, I didn’t expect to be enrapt by Willem de Kooning’s Untitled III, a bright, welcoming canvas unlike the terrific violence of the Francis Bacons I’d primarily come to see. Though I didn’t know at the time, it’s one of de Kooning’s later works from the controversial era in which he kept painting despite Alzheimer’s.

The diagnosis called into question the aesthetic merit of paintings made towards the end of his life. Judging art isn’t entirely objective, especially when faced with a reputation as historically established as de Kooning’s. I’m lucky I didn’t read the museum label until I’d sat with the painting long enough to annoy my companion, who eventually wandered off. Unlike the monstrous women of de Kooning’s earlier work, Untitled III has little interest in aggression or confrontation. There’s both depth and gentleness in its impasto, a dance of light and brush strokes inviting the viewer to breathe, wander, and play.

There’s no question that de Kooning’s work changed. I’d have dismissed his later paintings as mellow surfaces without any cohones when I was a young rebel. But by the time I discovered Untitled III I was ready to see beauty in openness and power in something bigger than rage.

Recently, a fellow author expressed the fear that they’d already peaked, that their best work was behind them. I thought of Untitled III and told them not to be afraid. The peak is a myth.

Good art and writing call us to be present, both as creators and connoisseurs. Aging changes our creative muscles. De Kooning outlived most of his contemporaries, several of whom committed suicide, and kept working through progressive degenerative cognitive impairment. He stayed present with impermanence. In the words of critic and friend Peter Schjeldahl, “He had forgotten to be anxious.”

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash at horrorsong.blog.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist painter best known for his Woman series.

“A man is always quite beautiful when he doesn’t frighten his horse.” This enigmatic line is from Jean Giono’s powerful, and for me necessary, Occupation Journal. The daily journal was written over a period of one year, started during World War II in 1943, and ending with Giono’s imprisonment a year later. He was accused of collaborating with the Nazis because he was an outspoken pacifist.

There is profound heaviness permeating the world today. Starting with the pandemic two and a half years ago, and now surging with the war in Ukraine, we are experiencing a time of relentless heartbreak. In this book, Jean Giono’s war journal, he recounts the ongoing shootings and deaths of his many friends. And yet, through it all, he keeps on working; writing two books, plays, and negotiating with publishers. He continues to lend out money even though he and his family have very little. Every day he gives solace and advice to the many people who seek him out.

Reading Occupation Journal inspires and gives us hope. He writes, “The night was absolutely calm. Not a sound. It seemed like perfect peace, like a cool fountain…as if all our misfortunes were over.” And then, the next day, “I’ve decided to evacuate my mother, my mother-in-law, and Aline [his wife]. At noon you could feel the fever in the air with eight planes flying over the rooftops … the house has become like a refugee camp.”

Giono’s journal, during that and this time of war and deep unrest, is strangely comforting. To share long moments with a great artist, to witness in real time the choices he had to make‒to flee or stay, to help or hide‒gives me a broader and deeper understanding of how to deal with the suffering in the world; perhaps even more important, a nobler way to make choices in the face of hardship.

War is long-lasting and so are the affects. Sharing these fraught times with Jean Giono’s wisdom and genius is a powerful antidote for pain. As he writes: “I read. I listen and watch for planes. I keep an eye on the house, making sure no one hangs the sheets out to dry, like yesterday.”

Small acts in a time of huge consequences.

Dian Parker’s writing has been published in numerous literary journals and magazines.

Jean Giono (1895–1970) was a French novelist.

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On an exceptionally Fine New York May afternoon I walked over to the Met to see if I could find their Chang Dai-Chien paintings. After paying what I wished, I saw there was a Winslow Homer show on, Crosscurrents, that would do instead. I’ve had an on-and-off fascination with Homer since I studied art history in college, more on than off recently as his seascapes fit nicely into my Moby Dick obsession.

I didn’t read all the little information cards where the curators surely made their Gulf Stream connections but I suppose one of them made a link between Homer’s experiences in the war and his forthcoming solitude at his house on the coast of Maine. It was here that he painted his iconic seascapes along with The Gulf Stream which depicts a young black man in a long boat just only left floating in the lee of a storm. His ship far in the distance, mast splintered and the sea around him churned with the blood of his crew mates and the thrashing hordes of sharks feeding on them.

It will be a stunning painting as long as humans have eyes. Deeper into the show hung three paintings from his isolation series, if that’s a thing, which steal the show.

This set of close-cropped seascapes is void of any human presence. A gray sea breaks against black rocks, sending up plumes of spray in brushstrokes so loose and bold that the paintings approach the brink of abstraction. It’s as if Homer, a big mustachioed man, whipped these canvases up in a frenzy of paint to match the storm, delivering that power to the viewer.

I left the museum through a show of modern abstractions that seemed dull and fleeting after seeing the Homers. I literally snort laughed when I caught a Julian Schnabel in the corner of my eye. Back out in the sun, among the roving freak show that is New York, I felt emboldened enough by the paintings to bear the subway system.

John McMahon is a freelance writer/former art world schmuck who now lives on a beach in Thailand.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was an American Realist painter best known for his marine subjects.

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1.

Dinner Party, Hotel Chelsea, 1980.

Bottles of Bolla, Red Valpolicella

bought with silk on an absent mile.

Faeries slice French bread, crusts

of necessity; dead creatures baked in foil.

Warhol wears pale blonde, floppy, parted;

his cheeks polished in fond de teint.

Rounded crystal glass frames.

Walkman headphones.

Burroughs, off the junk,

varnished in pearl.

Nico—a skein of scars

in song, “Chelsea Girls”:

"Here's Room 506

It's enough to make you sick

Bridget's all wrapped up in foil

You wonder if she can uncoil . . ."

2.

An eight minute, thirteen-second section of “Chelsea Girls” plays in the background during a dinner party:

WARHOL (black suit, tie; headphone wires dangle): This is the first time I ever had *hair.

NICO (off-stage): Hair?

WARHOL: Um, yeah, I mean it’s really good.

GUEST (off-stage) What kind of hair is it?

GUESTS (simultaneous, off-stage): It’s a rabbit.

GUEST (off-stage): What is the official name of the meal?

NICO: Well it’s a hare.

WARHOL: Where did you find a rabbit?

NICO: . . . I had to order it.

GUEST (off-stage): Can you tell me exactly what chicken fried steak actually is made of?

BURROUGHS (sets down glass of wine): Well it’s just a thin slice of steak, uh, breaded, breaded and fried very quickly.

GUEST (off-stage): Why does it taste like mush?

BURROUGHS: Well, it depends on what they start with . . . . how it tastes. What I particularly like is the biscuits and gravy. (Picks up glass)

WARHOL: Gee, I never had chicken fried steak. It sounds like a good idea.

3.

*Hare, not hair.

Human, not fur.

4.

Mousy-brown in the 1950s,

then two-toned yellow-blond,

an underlay of cocoa. Uncombed,

ratted, sprayed with Sassoon.

Label:

An original by Paul Hairpiece,

147 W. 42 St., N.Y.

Handwritten receipt:

2 Hairpieces $850

Deposit $425

Balance $425

An artist is somebody who produces things people don’t need to have ~ Andy Warhol

Sherry Shahan earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught a creative writing course for UCLA for 10 years.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American visual artist best known for his contributions to the pop art movement. Chelsea Girls was Warhol’s first major commercial success.

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In the dozens of times I have visited the Art Institute of Chicago, I cannot recall a moment when more than six people stood in one of its tall-ceilinged, white-walled American Art galleries. There are sometimes small gasps of recognition around Nighthawks or selfies in front of American Gothic, but generally people don’t linger. I myself, for years, nodded along as well, strolling through with just enough time to seem like I understood the deeper meanings of these paintings without the aid of their placards.

Four years ago, though, I stopped at Yellow Hickory Leaves with Daisy by Georgia O’Keeffe. I recognized her name but could not remember from what class or friend or calendar. The golden yellow leaves, giantesque and bold, held my gaze as I thought of the sunlight drenching the fall foliage, the kind people drive to New England to see. But the painting features a daisy in full bloom, its petals confident and its flower head the color of a proud hard-boiled egg yolk so that it captured, more so, the warmth and newness of warmer months.

What has brought me back to this painting is how O’Keeffe wanted viewers to slow down, to take the time to notice the beauty in small things they step on or walk past. The arrangement of the two elements resembles a larger flower, with the hickory leaves as petals and the daisy as its center. The play on size makes me feel as if I am stooping to the ground, where tiny things live. And in taking the time to pause, to really see, I am gifted with hearing their voices shout the joy and sweetness of high summer.

Winshen Liu is a former software engineer currently working on her first novel.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was an American modernist painter best known for her depictions of colorful flowers and New Mexico landscapes. She is recognized as the “mother of American modernism.” Yellow Hickory Leaves with Daisy (1928) is held by the Art Institute of Chicago.

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The rapidity of change seems to accelerate every year. Every month. Every hour. This change pushes our reality closer to the science fiction stories we watched and read growing up. Within four years, my iPhone 6 is obsolete and slowly being shoved out of relevance and functionality by ever increasing technological changes.

I had watched the film Arrival back when it was released, but never knew the source material for the film. Somehow I missed the name Ted Chiang and, when reminded of the film, I wanted to read more. I utilized an ancient institution called a library and found The Stories of Your Life and Others and took it home.

Three stories in, I found myself disturbed by a familiarity within the pages. A familiarity of man’s obsessive desire to advance even when that advancement could crush us. Reveal mysteries best left mysteries.

After finishing “Understand,” the second story in this collection, I saw our ascension and descension as humans. A man receives these injections that regenerate his brain cells and give him intellect beyond understanding. The blessing of higher thought and how, if given the possibility to achieve cognition beyond language, we would risk everything for discovery.

But when I turned this question inward, to my own life, I wondered if I would take that risk to achieve what no one else could. I want to say I wouldn’t, but there is a part of me that might and this revelation is what scares me the most about myself. Chiang opened a door and, if given the opportunity, I have to fight the impulse of my species. Life demands mystery and I have to accept that. We all do.

N.T. McQueen is a professor and writer from Hawai’i whose most recent novel, The Blood of Bones, was released in November 2021.

Ted Chiang (1967-) is an American science fiction author. His short story “Understand” was nominated for the 1992 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

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Sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.

Sometimes I know that I’m not doing the right thing, but I have no idea what the right thing really is. I’m always searching for myself, my goals, my aspirations, and rarely do I ever seem to find them for long.

This very sentiment is found within the poem “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitmam.

Included in the poetry collection Leaves Of Grass, the poem is one that wades through different territories, different emotions, and different people. It discusses the sexual fantasy of a woman who suffers from loneliness and isolation, it discusses how the fears of being looked down upon can shape our actions, control us, and who we present ourselves to be.

In presenting yourself as someone, something, that you are not, aren’t you simply robbing yourself of...yourself? Eventually, the person that you truly are will fade away, replaced by a hollow caricature which concerns itself more with thoughts of others than thoughts of oneself.

“Song of Myself” begins with the word ‘I’ and ends with the word ‘you,’ both signifying individuality. We are not just a collective, bound by the normality of the society around us. We are people, we have goals, we have aspirations, we have lives. I am me, you are you. We are both our own person.

The poem ends as such:

“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

What is the “I” in this ethereal stanza of hope? It could be many things—a new job, a lover, a home. In truth, it does not matter what the “I” is. It will be there, whenever it needs to show itself, it will be there. When, where, and why, all depends on you.

Alexander Sapien is a writer who likes to write and a filmmaker who likes to film.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is one of the most celebrated of American poets. He was born on Long Island and lived much of his life in Brooklyn, New York.

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"Pick a card, any card" is the cliché that hounds the stereotypical magician, yet during lockdown, I have sought solace in this phrase.

As I pick up a deck of cards and shuffle them in such a way that the aces never change position, I think of the great modern magicians who have become standard-bearers for this ancient art form. The videos of Jason Ladanye, the sleight-of-hand artist, have become a source of peace during these turbulent times.

We are at a time when it feels as if control is slipping from our fingers, so to watch these magicians, sleight-of-hand artists, manipulators, mechanics, and all the other members of the magic family, is to be reminded that sometimes we CAN control what is in our hands.

We may not be able to grip the past, but we can have some control over our future. This is what comes to mind as I watch the artist deal a perfect poker hand using skills he has honed over decades.

I have now been working from home as an HR assistant for more than a year, and I clutch my playing cards like a life raft. When work or home life becomes unbearable, I use magic to put myself back in control.

I pause, riffle the cards, then make them change color, or move without assistance. It is a moment of meditation that calms me, as it does for the thousands of other magicians around the world.

Lockdown has been hard on countless people, yet rediscovering my love of magic has been what’s got me through, because if anything, it’s made me appreciate the power that “Pick a card, any card” can have.

Samuel Marshall is a writer, magician, and guitarist.

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In the Katama house hangs a copy of Willem de Kooning’s Queen of Hearts in the bedroom I still use for writing during the island’s famous summers. I grew up looking at the painting by the Dutch-American abstract expressionist since age 4.

The portrait’s bewildering qualities attracted me to, well, to her.

An event in my life was inextricably linked to the work. One Sunday school day a nun handed me a medallion of the Virgin Mary to say prayers to before bed. Countless nights I did so.

Eventually, I saw the Queen of Hearts and the Virgin Mary as the same woman; one in a classical style, the other in a weird style.

The charcoal outlines full of revisions or living alternatives, the pink veil, the skeleton-like face with translucent flesh and two sets of eyes, the disconnected arms, the screwed on conical breasts, the yellow dress on the seated mother without a child—to name a few peculiar features.

Same woman, same cosmic feminine force.

I had wondered which was more effective, which was right. But that wasn’t the question.

Humanity is forever searching for its expression and the Queen of Hearts tells me no matter how wild it all goes through the search and all the protean forms, she’ll always be there, the mediatrix power in everyone’s finite life, stable no matter into what depths plunged.

Oh yes, and to go for it!

When I take late night summer walks and look up at the horned moon I think of the Queen of Hearts and I think of the medallion and I think of all the other forms and shapes and I wonder what form can I create in these times for the empress of the night.

Joshua Sabatini was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and moved to San Francisco, California, in October 2002 where he earns rent money as a journalist.

The Katama house is a reference to the author's family home in that area of Martha’s Vineyard.

Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He was an abstract expressionist artist best known for his Woman series. Queen of Hearts (1943-46) is held by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

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The only thing I took from my grandmother’s house after she died was a painting of what I have come to call The Lonely Boy. These days it is hanging in my classroom, and every time my students ask me what it is, I say, it’s The Lonely Boy. I say it like that too, capitalized and italicized, as if they should know it. And they ask timidly, “Who painted it?” And I say, “My grandmother.”

In the whirlwind of the death cleaning, while furniture was being donated and mementos distributed among the relatives, I found this quiet painting behind some boxes in the back room. In a rectangular frame, the complete portrait of a boy in brown shorts and a short-sleeved shirt stands against the backdrop of blues and greens and yellows. Most curious, he has his hands in his pockets and he stares down at the floor in that way in which you know he’s trying not to look at you. But I was looking at him from the moment I walked into that back room.

For reasons I don’t fully understand and will likely take me a lifetime to comprehend, this painting is important to me—in that personal and familiar way, as if I were looking into a mirror. The boy looks nothing like me, in figure or temperament, but I have an idea why he might be looking down with his hands in his pockets. If he is in fact anything like me, maybe he was thinking (as I was) how unfortunate it is to grow up without a grandmother, to later embrace his wife’s grandmother as his own and learn to love her, only to lose her to misfortune and disease. All I can say is that I walked out of the room that day with my hand in my pocket and the painting under the other arm.

I don’t feel as I did then, when I look at him in the back of my room now. We still don’t make eye contact, but we understand each other and mourn our mutual loss.

Eduardo Barreto is a teacher of English Literature and a writer in Miami, Florida where he lives with his wife and three kids, and a dog who refuses to die after 15 years.

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I read “Living Like Weasels” years ago, for a class. I’d long forgotten everything there is to remember about the piece. Dillard’s brilliant descriptions of a weasel’s jaw strength, her dazzled recounting of looking into its eyes. I’d forgotten everything but the title. 

I don’t know anything about weasels. Before I read Dillard’s essay, I envisioned a weasel as squished. I pictured small rat-like mammals burrowed deep into the ground, living in a pile, squirming around one another in an attempt to go about their business. 

This is not, however, the picture Dillard paints of the weasel. Dillard’s weasel is dignified and tenacious. It is principled. Propelled forward by instinct, it blankly knows what it wants—what it needs rather—and seizes it. As Dillard writes, “a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.” 

From ignorance my image of the weasel was born and to amnesia it returned. I forgot everything I learned from Dillard’s piece, until one day, I couldn’t get the title out of my mind and I gave the essay a second read.

“Living Like Weasels” is a piece for the beginning chapter of the 2020s. One would think that instincts are driven by self-preservation. But self-preservation shouldn't stop at the outer limits of one's own singular body. It should extend beyond, pushing us to preserve not just our own lives but also those of others in our species. If that were true, the past few years might have gone differently. We seem compelled to preserve the lives of those we care about, except when we don’t.

The weasel is singularly driven by instinct, not self-preservation. The image of the weasel painted by Dillard is a reactionary creature, relying on its instincts and frequently meeting a premature death as a result. Its instincts are off; there’s a glitch in the algorithm. Maybe we aren’t all too different from the weasel. Maybe the binary that Dillard constructs between choice and innate compulsion is inaccurate. But then again, maybe our instincts are just off.

Toella Pliakas is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. You can find her on Twitter @ToellaPliakas.

Annie Dillard (b. 1945) is an author best known for her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

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I've been told the bulbs resemble trees or clouds, light forms shifting in the wind either way. The jagged line to their left is a mountain range, they tell me, the fleeing curves to their right a riverbed's white sand silhouette and the water's fleeting shadows within.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers and desert landscapes are well-known, and as beautiful as they may be, it was one of her early charcoal works, Drawing XIII, that truly grabbed me.

My lasting fascination didn't stem from the drawing's artistic merits, as undeniable as they are, but from the space I found within, a space which I felt to be wholly my own.

Let me be clear, I understand how and why the drawing evokes images of landscapes in many viewers, and I am even quite sure that O'Keeffe herself had her beloved mountains, trees, and rivers in mind while drawing the piece, but the chasm between this very understanding and what I feel when immersing myself in Drawing XIII is the root of my enchantment.

A row of mute, huddled creatures, hunchbacked, both naked and hidden from sight underneath heavy black cloth. They are aware of their similarities, after all, their reasons for wandering are the same, only their jagged thoughts do not reach for one another, but out into the ether and therefore isolation instead. One might think these drifting creatures doomed, and there is no point in denying a pervading sense of dread, but there is a third element not yet discussed.

There is a winding path to their right, and even though not a single one of them dares walk on it, they all walk along it, and in the end it is this path they all deny that elevates their singular solitudes to a collective yearning, an unarticulated hope of going somewhere, finding something.

Georgia O'Keeffe has made many beautiful things, but Drawing XIII is the one I return to most often to remind myself of our shared loneliness.

Felix Farwick is a German writer. He works in Leipzig and London.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was an American modernist painter best known for her depictions of colorful flowers and New Mexico landscapes. She is recognized as the “mother of American modernism.” Drawing XIII (1915) is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

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In a world that can be the carrier of cold indifference, which has from time to time obliquely skewed even the most revered comfort from my life. I found refuge and a measure of solace with a piece of white copier paper and black Bic medium point pen.

Where spoken language in all its manifold forms fell short or utterly failed to give substance to the abstract emotions that roiled within us, without form, I found a vehicle to coalesce and frame feelings that could never be shared or expressed by mere words.

I understood that this form of art was the voiceless expression that allowed the conveyance of an emotional state in a manner that offered personal catharsis without a rebuttal or analysis by those whom before I might have tried to explain my conflicts and turmoil.

The juxtaposition of only black and white was a profound statement in itself, that the essence and forms that flowed onto the paper captured the diametric polarity and comparatives I sought in order to frame a fleeting glimpse, and sense of my psyche.

Reflective art that mirrors the artist, each piece containing a fragment of the soul. The vehicle in which my unfulfilled wishes and greatest fears could reach out without the menace and emotion of the spoken word. A statement of the abstracts into a tangible form that could be shared without revealing intimate content.

Even as I write my thoughts here to share with you the reader, I would find it difficult or impossible to map the evolution that lead me to use this type of art as expression. It manifests in all children to some degree and either is embraced and taken forward In life as part of our spirit or simply discarded and forgotten at childhood’s end. Such a pity.

Donald Guadagni is an international educator, author, and writer currently teaching and conducting research in Beijing China. His publication work includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, academic, photography and his artwork. Former iterations, military, law enforcement, prisons, engineering, and wayward son.

On a moonlit night in the winter of 1835 a Russian highway man halted the carriage of Marie Taglioni, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive this meaning of this adventure so precious to her, Taglioni formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, it evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.

— Joseph Cornell

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When I encountered Joseph Cornell’s Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, I was immediately intrigued. It appears to be a jewelry box. Yet, it’s a work of art. Each item in the box plays a role in constructing the tale of Marie Taglioni, a legendary 19th-century ballerina. I imagine that Cornell created this box to live in Taglioni’s romantic period, or in her cultural memory. Just like Taglioni’s dancing created magic on her stage for her audience, Cornell creates magic for his viewer.

Cornell discovered Taglioni in art shops in Manhattan, in old books about the Romantic period. Through images of her fairy-like form, he was enchanted and transported. In Cornell’s story there is a delicate weaving between his imagining of Taglioni and her real past. He recreates her legend via his box. It’s similar to a literary writer’s re-creation of autobiographical details—using life to create story. Cornell’s work blurs fantasy and realism, and interweaves the ordinary and the extraordinary. He layers the flesh and the spirit. This box reflects his adventure into New York City—a discovery of romantic ballet traditions.

Cornell takes a real story about a ballerina and, as he recorded in his diary, he witnessed ice being spilled along the street in Manhattan, and this sparked the fantastical arrangement of objects in Taglioni’s Jewel Casket.

Lorraine Martindale lives in Los Angeles and has an MFA from the New School.

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was an American artist and filmmaker. He is one of the pioneers of assemblage. Tagioni’s Jewel Casket (1940) is one of many assemblages the artist created to commemorate famous ballerinas. It is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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I could never name my existence. How moments of joy could be tempered with despondency. How shortened steps in a crowded room translated into shortened breath. How a sixteen-year-old boyfriend, confounded, could ask me where I went, though I had been sitting there the whole time. When I read Jane Kenyon’s poem“Having It Out with Melancholy” for the first time at age seventeen, something within me was named.

Melancholy, however, as Kenyon explains, is a mercurial adversary, rife with insurmountable tricks of sorrow, and pacific gifts of genuine joy. But it is the isolation from others that is the most damaging. For years, I have pulled the poem over me like a weighted blanket and micro-dosed myself with Kenyon’s imagery of our shared anxieties, fears, and weary longing for peace. During this pandemic, lines from it have often whispered to me, consoling and assuring me that pain means life.

Isolation has become a shared human experience. We are together in our separation. Some of us are deep within ourselves and have often been, and some of us are sheltered in our homes, ready to emerge from seclusion for our first time. We are suspicious, cautious.

Kenyon, a lifelong sufferer of anxiety and depression, often lived the solitude, and seemingly speaks of our hesitant hope in vaccinations and each other:

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work

but I believe only in this moment

of well-being. Unholy ghost,

you are certain to come again.

We are partakers of the same weary hope and paranoia. What will come? How long can we endure? “Having It Out with Melancholy” gives us the encouragement that we can endure indefinitely until, like Kenyon, we are reunited and “overcome//by ordinary contentment.” Greeting with a kiss, trying on the dress, a clear, unambiguous ending like a “bright unequivocal eye.”

Jennifer Moore is a writer living in Steubenville, Ohio with her husband and three precocious daughters.

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was an American poet whose late work examined depression. She served as New Hampshire’s poet laureate and won the 1994 Voelcker Award for Poetry.

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