Posthaste

Una Chaudhuri

The lockdown seemed like a good time to return to one of our most famous literary recluses (and one of my beloved goddesses): Emily Dickinson. As luck would have it, there’s a new biography just out, with an inspired structure, inspired by Emily’s own method of distillation: These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, by Martha Ackmann. Besides needing Emily’s distilling intelligence near me right now, I also bought this book because a numbered list sounded like something I could manage […]

Sarah Jane Weill

I’m in a house that doesn’t have a mailbox. Our closest neighbors are maple trees. For the first time ever, we tapped three of them in March and boiled their sap into syrup.

The walls around me are becoming strange. This house has always been a home, but now it’s a fortress. It enforces the distance between me and the suffering I read about daily. I try to mourn along with the rest of the world. I tell myself I’m doing my part by hiding. I spend too many hours looking out […]