PH1

Valeria Seminario

Orbiting Corners

Valeria Seminario

Quarantined in a hotel room.

Jo Fekete

“Tragedy is the chrysalis of consciousness.”

Holly Van Hare

I couldn’t think of what to write. During the coronavirus shutdown, in a time when many of my friends were writing,
in a time when braggarts were going on about their prolific feats of authorship in quarantine, I was sitting on my
living room floor filling in a fucking paint by number. And I am a person who draws. And paints. And I am creative
and interesting and angst-ridden and perforated and empty lately, apparently.

I am a sponge—always have been. I seep insight from my surroundings, breathe in air from others’ lungs, suck in
sharply when you speak. […]

Emily Hope Huber

During quarantine I:

• Learned how to cook seared duck
• Cleaned my apartment
• Learned how to make margaritas
• Got back into Italian
• Took up painting
• Finished writing a book
• Participated in a cutest dog ranking contest
• Saw some awful movies; saw some great tv
• Watched the sunset over New York City from my rooftop
• And none of it felt quite right because I did it all alone

Colin Stragar-Rice

On the cusp of losing her lover and partner, Angela Abar despondently asks John cum Dr. Manhattan cum Cal, “Where are you?” Right before Lady Trieu vaporizes the American God, Cal answers tenderly, “I’m in every moment we were together. All at once.” See—the way he experiences time is unique. In the simultaneity of his experience, causality and necessity are all bound up with one another. Everything that happens must happen. Everything that is going to happen is already taking place. In an episode prior, Angela prepares to defend Cal from being […]

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 […]