‘Staring out at the endless gray, Mary wrote a letter to her mother and told her she'd named the baby Jane, the name she'd years ago given her only doll.’
Jane was born in Gray Star, a settlement in remote Eastern Oregon, where her cries were lost in miles and miles of orchards stilled by a constant rain. One of the people who lived in the commune drove to town to wire her mother Mary’s message to Tom Owens. Eight days later she’d heard nothing. S…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘He took my left hand and banded a cleft rose petal over my third finger. I knew before looking in the book. ‘Marrying,’ he said. He’s so young, I was thinking.’
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
‘I have driven a car on acid, carried my mother drunk upstairs and slept with numerous men and one woman to no consequence.’
‘One did not have high hopes for Gettysburg. Nor for Pennsylvania in general. Having grown up in Indiana, Diana felt she’d earned her condescension.’
Fiction by Jessi Jezewska Stevens.
‘Although I was trying for the big-city and suburban realism of Yates, I didn’t mind adding a bit of fairy dust in the dialogue.’
