‘But it seems I’ve said something stupid again, and blasphemous to boot.’
I first stood before a class in 1992, when I was thirty-one. For ten years I taught ‘bridge’ classes in Amsterdam to groups of students who had arrived from abroad and had to learn Dutch. This was long before the current, tougher approach to foreigners, gastarbeiders, immigrants, or whatever one…
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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.
‘His poetry sliced through the gender binary and left it gasping on the floor.’
Katherine Rundell on John Donne.
‘It’s a story that happens to you once and then lives with you forever.’
An excerpt from Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde.
‘Invisible borders are not the same as open borders.’
Taran N. Khan on Hamburg’s Steindamm.
‘We’re so much more than those things. Citizen or undocumented. Border Patrol or immigrant.’
Letters between Javier Zamora and Francisco Cantú.
‘I never asked myself if I loved P. But nothing could have kept me from going to make love with him at the Hôtel Casanova.’
Memoir by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer.
