Where We Live: A Literary Magazine Focused on Place

The whole of The Common is easier to appreciate given the template provided in editor Jennifer Acker's introduction. She subscribes to Charles Baxter's idea that  “objects and things surrounding fictional characters [should] have the same status and energy as characters themselves."

I decided to review The Common because Phillip Lopate's essay, “Above  Grade: New York City's High Line” caught my eye. As it turned out, this was fun to read and even prompted me to make another visit to see the park through his eyes. He's right, I think, that the High Line--a new walkway that winds through Manhattan's west side--is a modest enterprise and doesn't dazzle by its own monumentality. Rather, it is wonderful because it frames the cityscape which in this part of town is mostly old industrial buildings, private tenement yards and rundown garages. It was a delight to revisit this space with Lopate's ideas in mind.

A second essay about a natural area, Sarah Luria's evocative “Realism in Nature's Garden,” with photographs by Daniel Jackson, expresses admiration for the Houghton Garden. The architect took advantage of what was already there and left the groundcover as well as the contours of the land intact.

This issue of The Common--their second--carries four drawings from the Ingres exhibit at the Morgan. In an online interview curator Esther Bell explains that particularly in “Odalisque and Slave” Ingres showed sensitivity to the sentience of objects. The woman's room in the picture breathes with the smell of tobacco, you can feel the cool mosaic tiles and hear the water falling from the fountain and the music coming from the slave's instrument.

“A Home For All” by Michael Kelly is about Orson Squire Fowler's advocacy of octagonally shaped homes, schools, churches and barns. He preferred the octagon to the square because it is more aesthetically appealing, encloses more space, accesses better natural light, heats up easily in winter and stays cool in summer.

I enjoyed the several folktales by Ilan Stavans illustrated with playful images by Teresa Villegas. There is an animal and a significant location in each tale. Sometimes the animal, sometimes the human makes a wise observation at the conclusion.

On the last page of the journal there is a quotation from Flannery O'Connor  which echoes editor Acker's call for the primacy of setting in literature and art. O'Connor writes that the fiction writer doesn't “create compassion with compassion...he has to create a world with weight and extension." The fiction writers in TheCommon certainly do this.

In Philip Nikolayev's translation of Katia Kapovitch's short story "The Smuggler,” the object at the forefront is a checkered coat which the narrator wears for six winters in a row. This is a delightfully rambling tale; there is much ado about the narrator's assignment to go to Comrat to buy sheepskins.

“The Long Gone Daddies” by David Williams is about a whole family but the guitar named Cassandra which was in the family for three generations is the centerpiece.

Susan Stinson's, “Elisha in The River,” like many of the short stories in this issue, was taken from a larger work; in this case, Spider in a Tree. The river in the story is evocative of many things: cleansing, flight, childhood.

“Geometry” by Martha Cooley is divided into sections depending on where the action takes place. In the first scene, an urban garden, a party is going on. The action switches to a subway train, then to a subway platform where all the characters meet--husband, wife, tall, slim man, other woman. Then the story returns to the urban garden. Eventually the story heats up and the characters find themselves in a complicated predicament (when the husband and wife start to have sex, the slim man opens the bedroom door and sees ex-lover in bed with his current lover's husband.)

My favorite short story from The Common is "Birds" by Jessie Marshall. The action takes place in Metropolis, a London strip club. The narrative is from the point of view of a pretty woman who works in Metropolis. "Birds" takes us through the details of the woman's life with language that is fresh, evocative, and bold.

“Gypsy” by J. Malcolm Garcia is fiction which reads like non-fiction. The setting is a detox center. I particularly liked the description of the food--- how the soup was stretched so that large grease blobs were on top, how the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made in the morning were either hard or mushy by the afternoon.

As with the fiction, the journal's poetry allows objects, things and places primary importance. There are “serpentine river roads” in Corinna McClanahan's Shroeder's poem“Miss Ohio Teaches You To Drive." You can almost feel the wind in her description of the ride.

In Major Jackson's “Cries and Whispers” the narrator lies in the “jury box” of her bed and watches the day start and “the streets begin their warm breathing."

And speaking of objects, the journal includes, “The Net” by Daniel Tobin, a loose translation of a poem found on an Akkadian tablet discovered among the ruins of Kush.The poem begins beautifully: "God of the first waters, Ea, listen."

Also emphasizing a sense of place is Steven Hanen's ironically titled poem, “Land Rush,” about the cemetery where he walks his dog.

Also of note is Arvind Krishna Mehrota's “The Sting in The Tail," a second-person description of someone sitting in an enclosed porch, wearing his light cotton, reading John Ashbery. The punch line is a terrific one--the thwack to a fat mosquito.

Nathaniel Perry's poem, “Functions of Water” is unabashedly sweet and sentimental, a paean to his family and his home.

. . .I need you here

beside me, to see this place filled

by something that is not us, our every

acre ringed and shrouded and still.

“Boys” by Cralen Kelder tells of a music group which sets poems to music, most poignantly “Civil War Sonnets” which were the soldiers' letters from Vicksburg.

On their online site The Common editors explain that dispatches are poems, notes, news or impressions from around the world. “California” by Cralan Kelder is a prose poem, a dispatch, told in the first person about someone's visit to a friend in prison. The swell telling is in the details and the dialogue.

I enjoyed my look at The Common Issue 2, a literary review with strong intention--to present stories, poems, essays, dispatches and art that contain a sure sense of place. They do it well.

See more reviews