Growing Up Sansei in LA
As we moved through different neighborhoods, my family stayed in a Japanese American bubble.
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Hand-Knit Sweater
The sweaters my grandmother made hung loose, so I could grow into them.
Protest Wear
Soft fabric shoes plus a large crowd equaled a big mistake. They were ruined by the end of the day.
Fishnets
She wore an electric blue wig and what I can only describe as a blue thong over fishnets.
Striped Shirt
I guess I wore that shirt a lot, though I never really thought of it as my favorite shirt.
Unitard
The unitard is a portal to existing only and fully inside myself.
T-Shirt
Where stakes are the highest, the shirts are called on to perform their very best.
Shiny Black Boots
I miss standing in them, stomping in them, and walking with that delectable intent.
Cotton Skirt
It sits high on my waist and pairs well with low heels.
Aligogoro
It’s the intricately hand-woven type, in purple, with generous gold accents to match her lace.
Green Pants
The pants were so extraordinarily bad that they transcended to a new category, becoming, in the process, a wardrobe staple.
Vintage Drop-Waist Dress
It was appliqued in black linen, with a pattern to rival the Chrysler Building.
All-Black Everything
The leisurewear was an attempt to subvert the nothingness by disappearing into it before it arrived.
Wedding Hat
It was beautiful, to be sure, it just wasn’t what I imagined. I felt like my hat was crying.
Fashion in Isolation
Considering the sentimental, contradictory, and inescapable relationships we have with what we wear.
Miscellaneous Files From Racial Justice Activists Around the World
Sylvana Simons, Rosebell Kagumire, and Amanda Adé use their tweets, screenshots, and Instagram videos to discuss how a time of momentous change has transformed their work.
https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-racial-justice-simons-kagumire-ade/
Project Paradise
Of course we could begin / with the moon, so famous
Miscellaneous Files From Racial Justice Activists in the US
Cat Brooks and Eric Ward use screenshots of Zoom-meetings, resource manuals, and policy proposals to discuss how this time of momentous change has transformed their activism.
https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-racial-justice-brooks-ward/
The Loneliest City
Laura Aguilar’s Southern California photography reveals the intimacy and the isolation that have always been part of the fabric of Los Angeles.
Ira Shor: Liberating Education
“They’re on strike against an institution which has subordinated them, underestimated them, and undereducated them.”
In the Dead of Night
If my daughter remembers anything from this time, it will be the waiting.
Mi querida Sanaë
How a mother’s journal revealed the woman I never knew
Poison Route
National Grid’s North Brooklyn pipeline will funnel fracked gas through largely low-income neighborhoods of color. Can it be stopped?
No Justice, No Peace
Voices from two weeks of Black Lives Matter protests in New York.
Baking Through a Plague
On one of her monthly brownie runs, my mom caught her first glimpse of the monster coming our way.
The Season of Children
After a series of hurricanes ravages one Central Florida neighborhood, three kids consider home, change, and the efficacy of destruction.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: DREAMer memoirs have their purpose. But that’s not what I set out to write.
The writer on taking control of her narrative, her telepathic connection to Stephen Miller, and the army of mutants.
How Three School Social Workers Do Their Jobs in a Pandemic
“Kids with more resources are adjusting well. Others have collapsed into themselves.”
https://www.guernicamag.com/how-three-school-social-workers-do-their-jobs-in-a-pandemic/
You Exist Too Much
I winced with fear and a fleeting disgust. A relationship with a woman meant failure: I had failed to get a man, failed to find something normal, failed to not be pathetic.
The Problem of White Efficacy
Striving for goodness is antithetical to reckoning with whiteness.
Parakeet
On the train, I scoured online listings for wedding dresses, and e-mailed the sellers. Shotgun wedding, I joked.
How We Drink Now
Eight writers discuss drinking during lockdown.
Ken Liu: “We get to define the stories we want to be told about us.”
Using photos of his text editors, mapmaking software, and 3D-printed prototypes, the writer talks about technology, myth, and telling stories during a pandemic.
Meredith Talusan: I’m Not Brave
The writer and editor on resisting the expectations for minority voices, her French-inflected prose, and the complications that make life worthwhile.
On Travel Writing
In the absence of travel, what is a travel writer to do?
You Shall Also Love the Stranger
On John Washington’s The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond
https://www.guernicamag.com/you-shall-also-love-the-stranger/
Imperfect
in art / there are so many more endings / that we can’t even imagine it.
Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib
Remembering an American girlhood.
Klara
To be on the receiving end of her lateness felt like betrayal.
The Future in Catastrophic Times
As we navigate life during COVID-19, science doesn’t have all the answers. But queer theory might.
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-future-in-catastrophic-times/
Latitudes of Longing: An Epic of Ghosts and Glaciers
A debut novel reminds us that the earth itself is alive, and that even in our isolation we are members of a changing world.
https://www.guernicamag.com/latitudes-of-longing-an-epic-of-ghosts-and-glaciers/
Surprised by Grief, Soothed by Korean Television Drama
When my father’s death dissolved my life’s plot, I could only cling to someone else’s story.
https://www.guernicamag.com/surprised-by-grief-soothed-by-korean-television-drama/
good friday or second nocturne with the invisible shepherd
father is everything but a good snake / charmer.
https://www.guernicamag.com/good-friday-or-second-nocturne-with-the-invisible-shepherd/
Afterglow
To the school’s auditorium, the woman brought liters of Gatorade®, stowing them in her backpack the way a cosmonaut might carry extra air tanks.
Stephanie Danler: Empowered by Choice
The novelist and memoirist discusses generational trauma, developing compassion for oneself, and feeling empowered by choice.
https://www.guernicamag.com/stephanie-danler-empowered-by-choice/
Fear in the Time of the Javelina
A younger boy swore he’d seen one of the pigs standing on its hind legs, peering through his trailer window.
https://www.guernicamag.com/fear-in-the-time-of-the-javelina/
Will COVID-19 Strengthen our Bonds?
Living with chronic illness in the midst of a pandemic requires a new map.
https://www.guernicamag.com/will-covid-19-strengthen-our-bonds/
The New Troy
Reflections on closing borders, and the propensity of the world to change.
Pretend Nobody Died
These days, every day is the same: I play with my three-year-old neighbor. At night, I call the hospital. Before I go to bed, I upload my photos.
Quotients
The day of the bombings, July seventh, Seven-Seven, a day of doubles, Gavin Thomas, the fund researcher, had been unharried.
Becoming Animal
All of us touching our faces, touching habitats, dislodging species.
Back Draft: Miranda Popkey
The novelist discusses the shape of a narrative, and the value of retyping.
Celia Who?
The Cuban revolutionary Celia Sánchez remains an enigma, despite, or because of, her place at Castro’s side.
A Drowned World
“It’s quite a lot of sadness, in realizing that everything you love about the world is falling to pieces.”
The Worlds We Find Ourselves In: Mark Doty and Jane Hirshfield in Conversation
“At times when the outside world’s facts—or the heart’s facts—seem immovable, words still can move.”
Maisy Card: “There is this hazy quality to my family history that no amount of research can clarify.”
The author unpacks the archival finds and emotional reckonings behind a novel that took her 12 years to write.
The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets
In books and movies we’ve imagined it would take a gruesome virus to push working people to the edge. In reality, late capitalism is enough.
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-pandemic-novelist-has-regrets/
Is This Not Why You Are Here?
He didn’t see the flares / because our dreams are limitless.
High Ground
The shed is dark except for the triangle of dusty sunlight that reaches through the crooked doorway. You and Adam are huddled in the back, breathing hard. Notice the dark: darker than the empty baseball fields in moonless winter; darker than sleep.
Astrophotography and the Zeitgeist
Photos of Earth taken from space can teach us about how we think—about our home planet, and its place in the universe.
https://www.guernicamag.com/astrophotography-and-the-zeitgeist/
Cathy Park Hong: I’m So Sick of the Fact That It’s Not Changing
The poet and critic on “coalitional writing,” upending the avant-garde, and Asian American identities.
https://www.guernicamag.com/cathy-park-hong-im-so-sick-of-the-fact-that-its-not-changing/
Never Shalem
A dynamic new generation of Palestinian and Druze women artists is coming up in Israel.
Family Man
I never knew my uncle. But it’s the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.
Our Grievous Work
A review of The Crying Book by Heather Christle
Visitation
Light! Light! I hear her calling when she’s a block away as if she’s a monger of light.
Bubblegum
What little conversation there was in our cell had mostly to do with who might have called the cops.
The Porous Boundaries of Longing
Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness is consciously, cannily, canonical.
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-porous-boundaries-of-longing/
Ordinary Insanity
America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.
Push Play
It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me.
Notes from a Hypochondriac
The age of COVID-19 has a way of heightening our anxieties, though that doesn’t mean they’re new.
Beth Alvarado: Grieving in Dreams
Two writers discuss the “apocalyptic imagination,” finding connection through loss, and the liminality and fragility of the borderlands.
https://www.guernicamag.com/beth-alvarado-grieving-in-dreams/
A Country on the Cusp of Change
Hwang Sok-yong’s fictions delve into Korean class dynamics.
https://www.guernicamag.com/a-country-on-the-cusp-of-change/
The Optimist’s Apocalypse
What if the world can “end,” as your life has many times—and then begin again?
Your Name Means Garden
What does it mean to graduate / your way through the world?
No-Signal Area
By the time the war spilled over into the third country after a year, Oleg, like everyone else, was already inured to the gruesome news.
Apparition
Walt Whitman’s boundless self persists, even 128 years after his death.
Medusa and the Invention of Spells
A spell is most effective when you want something and can remember a time it already existed.
https://www.guernicamag.com/medusa-and-the-invention-of-spells/
Faery Land
“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.
Mark Bibbins and Paul Lisicky: Sooner or Later
The two writers and friends discuss the uses and abuses of nostalgia, cynicism, and trauma porn—and how their new books reflect their experiences of the AIDS crisis.
https://www.guernicamag.com/mark-bibbins-and-paul-lisicky-sooner-or-later/
Good Bones
I was unpacking dishes when it came back to me. It was so vivid in my mind and it stunned me so much that I lost my grip and dropped a plate.
Every Inch of Earth
Sebastian Meyer and Kamaran Najm co-founded a photo agency in Iraq and teamed up to document a new era in Kurdistan, a region with a long history of suffering. Until Kamaran was captured by ISIS.
From Environmental Crisis to Pandemic, Waging a War with Nature
What the 19th century American pragmatist William James can teach us in the age of coronavirus.
https://www.guernicamag.com/from-environmental-crisis-to-pandemic-waging-a-war-with-nature/
Out of Sight
Hope sustains the migrants living in a camp in Matamoros, Mexico, but everything is tainted by despair.
Meaghan Winter: Progressives Can’t Give Up on the States
The political journalist on the timidity of liberal foundations, the peril of ignoring local reporting, and whether organizers have succeeded where party politics has failed.
https://www.guernicamag.com/meaghan-winter-progressives-cant-give-up-on-the-states/
When All Is “Temporary,” Nothing to Hold Onto
Hilary Leichter’s destabilizing debut novel imagines a productivity-centric dystopia, not far off.
https://www.guernicamag.com/when-all-is-temporary-nothing-to-hold-onto/
Hurricanes with the Names of My Friends
We are disappearing into / the map’s folds. Small birds. Smaller ones.
https://www.guernicamag.com/hurricanes-with-the-names-of-my-friends/
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: “It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world.”
The political theorist argues that those whose worlds have been destroyed by five centuries of imperialism have the right to live near the objects that have been plundered from their culture.
https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-ariella-aisha-azoulay/
Ruff Reckoning
A look back at Kirsten Bakis’s 1997 novel Lives of the Monster Dogs
Mira Jacob: I’m Not Going to Hold It for You
The acclaimed writer and graphic novelist on the importance of owning your shame.
https://www.guernicamag.com/mira-jacob-im-not-going-to-hold-it-for-you/
Schrödinger’s Dog
The doctor talked about the operation: “Major surgery, but the techniques are well understood.” He spelled out the risks: 80 percent success rate.
The Cover of My Face
A trans author reflects on the fraught history of trans women’s memoir covers, and why she didn’t want her likeness on her own.
Pigs in Shit
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia, and naturalism after nature.
Keith Prime
Despite the warning not to get attached, I confess that I do have a favorite Keith.
Jenny Offill: The Doomy Bits
The author of Weather talks about confronting dread, navigating hope, and how to not write a bad book about climate change.
The Terrarium
The flat earth community has been on a fast, upward climb.
In the “Low”
In Jeet Thayil’s newest novel, the Narcopolis narrator returns to a transformed Bombay, in search of oblivion.
Darcey Steinke: How to Be in a Body
The writer embraces menopause, matriarchy, and the language of the body.
https://www.guernicamag.com/darcey-steinke-how-to-be-in-a-body/
Recognizing Blackness in Chile
How the rise of the #Chiledespertó movement has created space to discuss the country’s whitewashed constitution.
[You button this coat as if one sleeve]
making room for the night sky / the dead try on
https://www.guernicamag.com/you-button-this-coat-as-if-one-sleeve/
Theater of Shadows
Beneath or beyond the performances lay the fascination of the shadow-world itself, with its hiddenness, its refusal of color, its indifference to familiar effects of visual precision and detail.