stretchjournalemerson

[stretchjournalemerson]

Introduction to Issue VI

Perhaps you’ve heard of this before: When giving someone feedback or critique, never follow a compliment with “but”; use “and” instead. Using “but” somewhat negates anything you’ve said before. Therefore, it would be foolish of us to say something along the lines of “quarantine has sucked, but,” because that’s simply not true. The loss undergone as a society and at the personal level cannot be ignored or overlooked. Instead, we’ll use and. Quarantine has sucked, and we have all lost a lot. Quarantine has sucked, and it has also given us time and space for self-exploration—whether we wanted that or not.

This 2021 Issue of Stretch is a collection of works from our enhanced writing class, and also from first year students outside the class. The predominance of memoir in both our internal and external submissions confirms the reflective nature of much of our first year at Emerson. The academic, personal, and political repeatedly collide and influence each other; it is clear that many of us have been processing our rapidly and dramatically shifting dynamics in the form of self-exploration in our writing.

As avid writers and generally creative individuals, many of us used art as a vessel for managing the deliberation of the self. Whether it was creating or consuming visual art, literary works, music, we looked to art to then look in at ourselves.

Does that sound pretentious? Maybe so. Regardless, our experiences and the ways we work through them are valid, and we can acknowledge our limits without invalidating ourselves. In this issue, we are doing what we can in the capacity we are able: It is the truth, and it is enough.

Stretch Editorial Team, 2021

[stretchjournalemerson]

Her First Word Was “Hello”

By Catherine Middelmann

I am standing in the driveway. Sloping down to the road, our driveway bends and cracks: imperfect. The wind pushes my hair back. I squint at the sun as it lollygags in the sky; aloof and obnoxious. The van turns into the driveway and pulls to a stop with a series of beeps. Bare feet on the pavement, I clomp down to the side door; the handle is at eye level, and I yank it open. The van smells weird, it always does. Some days it’s just faint gasoline, other days it’s like shit. Two pairs of eyes stare me down the way they do every day, as if they’re surprised to see me. Maybe they should be. Leaning out to see me, a third set of eyes catch mine.

Hello Catherine!

Hello Lizzie! Grab your stuff! The little fuzzball unbuckles herself and grabs her backpack—it’s nearly half her size. She walks over to me and I take her hand, helping her down like she’s a princess climbing off a horse.

Bye, thank you!

You’re welcome! Despite our pleasant exchange I slam the door—not because I want to, but because that’s the only way it will close. We turn to trek up the driveway.

Hey baby, how was your day? Her response varies, but the pattern does not.

This story could be from when I was ten or when I was eighteen and—save for seasonal differences—it would be the exact same.

When Lizzie and I are out in public together, sometimes people think they can guess our age difference. I don’t know why, maybe because humans find comfort in patterns and numbers and predictability, but if you take anything away from Lizzie and I, it’s that we are not predictable.

For most of my life, from when Lizzie was a toddler to when she was about 14, she was the same height as me when I was on my knees. That’s probably as predictable as we get. That proportion doesn’t hold true anymore, though.

No-one has ever been as wrong as that one woman at Market Basket. My goodness that woman. Don’t ask me to describe her, I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter. Let’s say she was a white woman about 5 foot 7 with a short brown bob and an infinity scarf. Let’s say her name was Sharon or Shannon or Sharlene or chartreuse or chameleon. Remember Ms. Chartreuse.

My mom, Lizzie, and I were on the highway. No we weren’t, but we might as well have been. Market Basket on a Friday evening gets like that sometimes. She turns to me.

Why don’t you and Lizzie go get the Oreos? I’ll be in the next aisle.

Okay! I grab Lizzie’s hand and we march to the bread aisle (It is also the Oreo aisle, we weren’t going rogue, don’t worry). At this point I am about five feet tall, and Lizzie is decidedly not; with the confidence of Napoleon invading Russia in the winter, we turn the corner into the bread aisle.

We are not deceived like Napoleon, no no no, we know Russia is cold in the wintertime, and we know all the bad bitches at Market Basket love the bread aisle. It is crowded, but we have a mission. Don’t get distracted by the Nutella! Or the Smuckers jams with their quaint labels and their with-a-name-like-that-it-has-to-be-good attitude. There are Nilla Wafers and Market Basket brand sugar wafers that taunt and tease claiming “It is balmy in Russia this December.”

Lizzie’s tiny hand holds mine, but really she could just hold my pinky finger, her hand is so small. I don’t think Lizzie even knows what Russia is.

At last! Our prize! The blue wrapper, milk’s favorite cookie, the most delectable sandwich ever: Oreos. Ya, the entire wall of Wonderbread and Rye bread and bread bread scoff at us, but we know Oreos are the real bad bitches of the bread aisle. Triumphantly, I pluck the Oreos from the shelf and present them to Lizzie. We rejoice! We proceed down the bread aisle opposite the way we came in.

Oh hi Lizzie! I stand corrected: Lizzie is the baddest bitch in the bread aisle. This random lady knows her from somewhere, somehow. The woman, this woman, Ms. Chartreuse, looks at me, a twelve year old definitely wearing something from Justice, and asks: Are you her mother?

Did this woman really just ask me if invading Russia in the wintertime is a good idea?

I’m her sister, I say in my bootcut jeans and graphic tee shirt. Lizzie is holding the Oreos, a blank expression on her face. Sometimes when we see someone who knows Lizzie, we’ll ask her after they leave how she knows them, and she usually just shrugs. Lizzie is holding the Oreos, this woman and I are standing uncomfortably, and the bread is sneering at us. Well goodbye! I assume I say politely as we shuffle away.

I am twelve. I am twelve! Maybe ‘I’m a delight to have in class,’ maybe I’m ‘mature for my age,’ maybe I’m ‘such a role model,’ but I am still twelve. I know how to navigate a supermarket but still freak out when I’m separated from my mom.

Someone always knows Lizzie. We’ve been a town over, across state lines, on the moon—well maybe not on the moon—and we will always hear: Oh hey Lizzie! It is always ‘I know her from class,’ ‘I eat lunch with her,’ ‘My cousin Atlantis has a dog who knows her,’ something like that, wherever we go. We were at a Patriots game—tickets courtesy of my grandma who won them from someone somehow (I didn’t ask)—and you bet your ass we were halfway into the first quarter when we hear: Lizzie? Lizzie! Lizzie! Sure enough, there was a girl a few rows back with long blonde hair waving and smiling at this little blue-eyed girl I’ve known her whole life.

Lizzie doesn’t realize how cool she is. She doesn’t realize that not every little girl knows just about everyone in town, not every little girl takes pictures with Elizabeth Warren (even if they are both named Elizabeth), not every little girl gets free things from stores because she is ‘just too cute,’ not every little girl has this otherworldly ability to brighten peoples days.

When I was little, and Lizzie was even littler, we had a small team of physical therapists come to our house. At the time, I thought they were just some ladies coming to play with Lizzie, and was repeatedly confused and a little hurt as to why they wouldn’t play with me too. I was only three years old, almost four, in September of 2005 when Lizzie was born. It took me a while to pick up on some of the things that made Lizzie and I so different, but once I did, I caught on quickly. I’ve learned my responsibility, my role to play, in the family dynamic and I rarely ever stray.

I was on the highway. No I wasn’t, but I might as well have been. Market Basket during a pandemic gets like that sometimes. I turn to the list. I’ve been away for about three months, at college, and now I am back.

My mom, Lizzie, and I always referred to the dairy aisle at Market Basket as ‘the crazy aisle.’ Pandemic or no, that aisle is always—as the name suggests—crazy. Forget the six feet, the one direction aisles, and hope people are at least wearing their masks correctly, but don’t count on it: just try and find whatever it is you’re supposed to be looking for.

I like the dairy aisle—the crazy aisle. It is a very wide aisle, with waist-height freezers in the middle of it sporting varieties of frozen ‘chicken.’ The ice-cream is actually on the opposite end of the store for some reason, don’t ask me, I’m not Mr. Basket. The tile pattern on the floor is the trademark reddish-orange evenly spaced-out between the off-white tiles. It’s simple, it’s organized, it’s predictable. When I was younger I would look above the aisles to the seasonal paper decorations hanging from the ceiling, or to the oversized cereal boxes: Toucan Sam overseeing the empire of fridges filled with butter and cottage cheese—Kellogg's decor, if you will.

I’m meandering around the aisle and I hate it. As I frantically search for whatever-the-hell I’m supposed to be here for, my anxiety increases. You can’t let these people know you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve been here too long. You look so stupid! Why can’t you find that frozen sausage your mother told you to get?

Really, it’s a question of “Why can’t you meet these expectations you’ve set up for yourself based on what you think people expect of you?” Such a delight to have in class, such a mature young lady, such a role model. I will continue to try and meet these descriptions, these expectations, consciously or unconsciously, forever. I do not ever see myself not caring what people think, not feeling the need to please people. I am a delight, a role model, and oh so very mature.

I finally find the stupid frozen sausage I’m looking for, supressing the urge to hold it aloft and say “I’ve found you, you son-of-a-bitch!”

Later that week, I’m cooking dinner for my family...again. We needed that son-of-a-bitch sausage because I wanted to have one of my favorite meals, pizza casserole, before I went back to school. It’s made with tomato sauce, ground beef, sausage, pepperoni, lots of cheese, and noodles. I love it because it’s a crock-pot meal; something you start and then leave for a few hours and then it’s done (There are a few more steps, but if you want the recipe I can get it for you). It’s simple, it’s organized, it’s predictable, it’s a delight; a role model of a meal. So I’m cooking it for my family...myself.

I never really feel this way, but I kinda feel like a nanny. A nanny involved in family drama to an unhealthy degree perhaps, but a nanny nonetheless.

I am nineteen. I am nineteen! Now I can freak out in the supermarket all on my own.

At present, Lizzie can only cook one meal: microwave Mac and Cheese. Mac and Cheese is her favorite meal—it’s no pizza casserole, if I’m being frank, but she loves it. It’s her favorite meal the way Oreos are milk’s favorite cookie: an undying love.

Whenever we go out to a restaurant as a family, we always make sure there is Mac and Cheese on the menu. If they don’t have that, then they better at least have pasta with butter. Sometimes, when I go out with just my parents, we’ll see Mac and Cheese on the menu and say to each other: Oh! We can bring Lizzie here next time! I should clarify that we don’t go out without Lizzie because we’re unsure the place we want to go to has Mac and Cheese; we go out without Lizzie so things can be more about me sometimes. It always feels kinda weird though.

We are not a group of three, we are a group of four.

Sometimes my parents talk about taking a break from Lizzie; these breaks involve her staying with my grandma in Rhode Island, or having respite for a few hours. And while she’s away and I am hanging out with my parents, sometimes I feel guilty, sometimes I feel weird, sometimes I miss her. No matter what I am feeling, I always notice her absence.

She has her highs and lows, like we all do, but above it all, we are a group of four.

Lizzie is not my sister, I am her sister. I don’t even know how to put into words how defined I am by having her in my life. I have a picture of me holding her the day she was born, and I’ve been holding her ever since.

I’d like to acknowledge Professor Kovaleski Burnes for hosting personal and productive discussions with the whole class. I’d also like to acknowledge Abbie Langmead and her extensive and extremely helpful peer review. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge Lizzie, who I find myself missing a little extra as I wrote this piece.

[stretchjournalemerson]

An open letter to the past four seasons

by Daniella Lopez White

Spring,

You were the harshest this year. When I first learned about you in school, the science textbooks said that you were everything new- new beginnings, new plants, new air, new skies. And in some way, that’s what it was. Everything shut down, everything closed, and a new way of living was in place. At first, I was angry at you. I locked myself up in my room and refused to see your skies if they weren’t the way I was used to; at the malls and the parks, hand in hand with the people I was connected to. But you brought torrential downpour and everything that I knew had gone down the drain.

It was a different way of beginning, but I began anyway. It was a new way of acknowledging the plants, but they were beautiful to take pictures of. The air was a completely different atmosphere, but it was clear in my lungs. And even though the skies were looked at alone, the sun was warm in a way I had never thought to notice before.

You may have been the harshest, but sometimes tough love is the only way to breakthrough. You took more than you gave, but perhaps I was in need of taking if I was to ever be ready to receive everything you gave in return. I have forgiven you, and I hope you have forgiven me, too.

Summer,

I was ready for you to come. Counting down the days, really. The hot, sticky nights were spent driving downhill and screaming songs from my childhood into your pink clouds. You allowed me to sweat out everything I had pent up inside, and I never wanted you to end. Your sands were soft and your waves were blue, and everything about you was perfect for me. My friends and I relished in your company, stealing your early morning hours for our tongues to talk away. Your air made me linger in the arms of my love, and beg my friends to stay for one more restless night. You hold the longest day of the year, yet, somehow, it always feels so short. There are days when I think of you, still. I sing the songs from the hills in my flat new city. Those songs are reserved for new people now, not the people that you gave me. I hope this is okay.

Autumn,

This was my first year truly experiencing you. I had never seen such vibrant colors. Similar to Spring, you took and took until there was nothing left to grab, but I willingly put my life’s belongings into your hands. I wonder why the scientists describe you in that way; as a season who destroys everything that we have spent the warm days building up. Instead of stealing, you gently picked up the things I was so hesitant to leave behind. I was skeptical about leaving the hot days to their own, but you turned out to be a chilly gust of beautiful things I had never expected. Your leaves were a mirror, and I stared at myself changing into someone new. Opportunities had never been so clear, and they were scattered along your streets, underneath my feet like a blanket to fall back on. I suppose they call you Fall for that very reason.

I hope you are not cautious about the way you are used as a platform to leave things behind for the people who walk through your days. You are bursting with memories that are polaroids on my new walls, and I am grateful for everything you painted over. You gave me a new canvas to create on.

Winter,

You are the cold that I can never get enough of. While my friends sit inside by the fire during your icy tantrums, I stand outside and watch my breath dance in your song. I was hesitant of your barren trees, but you can see the whole park through the windows when there aren’t any leaves. While it’s true that your snowy white grounds are blinding, they add a light to the darkness. I could never be mad at you, and I talk warmly about your harsh winds. You let people forget about me, and watch me fade into your blackest nights, but I have no problem sitting amongst the stars. It is nice to be able to exist in a place where the only thing that covers me is open air.

I’m sorry that I cried while you held me, broken about people who think Winter is for leaving. But I promise that I never left you. You remind me that even on the shortest of days, something new is around the corner. As the warmer winds creep in, I promise I will hold your hand with gratitude for all the things you taught me about myself, and I won’t forget the light that your moon has engraved on my heart.

P.S,

New seasons are approaching, and I will accept them with open arms as you have done for me.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Records on Living Room Walls: How a Man I've Never Met Defines Me

By Sophie Pargas

As my grandmother left her home of Cuba behind with only a porcelain doll and small duffel bag of clothes to remember it by, not much was promised. Behind her, she left her family, friends, school, home; everything she had ever known was traded for a plane ticket to a country filled with unfamiliarity. She did, however, have one thing which the Castro regime did not succeed in taking from her: her parents, sister, and brother. Together, they struggled to acclimate to a new country, language, and culture, all the while fighting to make sure their’s did not go forgotten. Though years passed and The United States began to feel like more and more of a home, the story of my great uncle’s coming out and getting diagnosed with HIV proved that hardships could be found even in “the land of the free and home of the brave.”

Growing up, I remember visiting my great grandmother’s house and admiring dozens of records and pictures on the walls, remnants of a man I would never get the chance to meet. It wasn’t until later that my grandmother found the strength to tell me his story, but once I knew it, I never seemed to miss the ways it defined my family and our belief system. My grandmother’s brother, Aristedes Jacobs, defied social norms of his time and traditions of his culture by coming out as gay during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. Though sexuality was a taboo subject which lived up to the notorious saying of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I often think of the courage it took Ari to face his traditional Cuban family knowing that their culture challenged them to reject his identity outright.

Heartbreakingly, Ari was a victim of his era and was diagnosed with HIV in his young adulthood. Soon enough, the disease stole away my grandmother's baby brother, leaving me to learn of his legacy through tear ridden stories and records on living room walls. Though his legacy is a heartache which is still felt by my grandparents, father, uncles, and aunts, I am certain that it has challenged the traditional Hispanic view of homosexuality and replaced it with a yearning for acceptance and empathy within my family.

Cuban refugees forced to flee in the wake of immense political unrest, my grandmother and her family struggled to create a life and a legacy for themselves in America whilst honoring the ones they left behind. To them, culture and pride were everything; if they did not uphold the values of their country, they would find the mark it left on them slowly fading into oblivion. One of these values, encapsulated by the spanish word “machismo”, created a deep rooted and traditional belief in toxic masculinity and homophobia which seeped its way into the inner workings of my family. The term created an idealized and often completely unattainable version of men as unemotional, dominant breadwinners who strived for nothing more than power and women. Machismo culture not only worsened pre existing gender norms, but it also perpetuated a culture of fear surrounding sexuality. Men like Ari who, by Cuban standards, did not live up to the machismo characteristics by practicing homosexuality were considered weak and inmasculine by nature. Forced to decide between their identities and ostracization by their communities and families, many men chose not to relinquish their pride and value by coming out and instead led lives dominated by fear and shame.

My great uncle, despite having come out to his two sisters and living his truth behind closed doors, was no exception to the exemplification of discomfort surrounding sexuality within his family. Even after the disease began to deteriorate his body and mind alike, Ari had yet to share his diagnosis or even come out to his parents, and these words were ones left unspoken. Though my great grandparents inevitably learned of his sexuality and the disease which stole his life away, the conversation was one they could never bring themselves to have; at the mercy of shame, fear, and tradition, Ari was forced to carry a piece of himself to the grave with him.

While his death undoubtedly left behind insurmountable regret, pain, and suffering, the stories I have heard growing up have been centered on his life, his legacy, and the lessons learned in his wake. Ari’s identity completely challenged his culture, and it forced my family to reassess and redefine the beliefs upon which we build our legacies. In addition to serving as a hammer with which to tear down narrow walls encompassing narrow viewpoints, his story is a motif for the beauty and possibility of growth. After his death, my great grandmother showed her acceptance in her own ways; she wore a red pin which symbolizes HIV awareness to his funeral and even requested to be buried at his side. Today, I am proud to say that my family is one who accepts all people for their differences, and they have raised me to do the same. Despite the fact that society and culture pressured them to ostracize him, my family evolved into one who was proud of his story, who speaks fondly of his legacy and passed it on to me so I had this opportunity to do the same.

At his core, Ari was a man who lived his life in pursuit of happiness, and being gay was only one small part of this. A music producer and promoter in the iconic disco era, he loved to create music and share it with those around him. One of my favorite stories is told by my grandfather, who recalls the time Ari casually invited YMCA’s Village People to enjoy dinner with his extremely conservative and unknowing Cuban family. The platinum records I used to admire on the walls of my great grandparents’ living room are pieces of history, symbols of a budding success which Ari was only beginning to acquire and an impact which would long outlive the numbered years he was given. Though the records have since been taken down and the house in which they hung has become someone else’s home, Ari’s legacy lives and breathes through not only my family, but through every person we love, every difference we accept, and every moment we cherish in his honor.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Pain Management

By Maura Grace Cowan

For decades, I have been told, Mema’s fingers smelled of nicotine, trailing the scent of a pack a day and a love that ate away at my grandfather until it swallowed him whole just five months after I was born. After that, an already vicious candy habit became a lifelong method of staying cigarette-free. She said that it kept her mouth busy and her head on straight.

We were alike in that way– her weakness was See’s Candies butterscotch lollipops, and I favored peppermints to focus. It was not uncommon, during the five years that she lived in our home, to find us next to each other in the living room, teeth clacking on our respective hard candies until I finished my work or she tired of the barrage of bad news.

Her other method of oral fixation was toothpicks, little orange slivers that she dropped as she hobbled from room to room. Truthfully, that was about all she left behind– plastic wrappers and wood chips, breadcrumbs that led me back through the years after she was gone.

I was home for Christmas during my freshman year of college when she passed, as suddenly as one can pass after almost a century of life. It was California dreary out, with a blank sky and a bad attitude. She was three thousand miles away by then, but the West Coast was mourning. That night, I popped a coffee-flavored See’s lollipop in my mouth. It was the last thing I would bite into for days.

My wisdom teeth were never wise enough to grow in the correct direction, and with my already small jaw, their removal was an inevitability. We had made the appointment the previous summer, hoping to control the problem before it started. The timing could not have been predicted. But I would have signed away a world of hurt down the line if I could have absolved myself of surgery on the morning after my grandmother’s death.

My orthodontist was a genial Scottish man in his fifties. I had met him just once before, for our consultation. He charmed me immediately by recognizing my name and its correct pronunciation– “Gaelic, o’course,” he had said cheerfully. Mema would have been smitten. She always loved accents– anything about people, really, cultures and language and history. She told me once that she had lived so many stories that she couldn’t help wanting to hear everyone else’s. This was what I was thinking about when he began to rattle off the medications he would prescribe me for the weeks after the operation.

“Oh, I don’t need the strong stuff,” I interjected. “I’ll be just fine with the Ibuprofen, I’ve got a lot of grit.”

He chuckled, handing me a stack of forms.

“I don’t doubt it, Maura. Let’s just see how you’re feeling afterwards, eh?”

I was the last of my friends from high school to get their wisdom teeth out. I had stayed the night with Amelia right after the surgery, brought ice cream for Tyler every day for a week. I knew that there would be no conversation or ‘seeing how I felt.’

I am not taking those pills.

I have never lived at extremes. Modesty and moderation were ingrained in me before I could pronounce either word, by my mother and Mema and their working-class sensibilities. And if nothing else, I have held myself to those principles. In high school, even on the rare occasions that I allowed myself to go out on weekends, it was a point of pride that I knew my limits. I was never the least sober in the room– often, I was the most by far. I never, ever, lost control.

The assistant was a young, lanky man– almost a boy, really, I noticed as he plunged the IV drip into my arm. I imagined babbling to him when I woke up, making a fool of myself, having to be carried out like I once carried my high school friend when she mixed Vicodin and vodka.

“Don’t give me too much,” I remember pleading. “Look at me. Promise me that I will walk out of here on my own.”

He must have listened, because when I came to, it was with a surprisingly clear head. At least, the part of my head that I could feel was clear. I spent the car ride home in silence, poking at the numbness, pushing down the tears that were welling up in my eyes.

Healing happened, slowly and awkwardly. A prescription of Hydrocodone sat on my dresser unopened; I refused everything but aspirin and a steady supply of vanilla pudding. Instead, I spent my days drifting between sleep and discomfort, but I suffered in silence. The whole house, after all, was suffering too.

Mema was not an affectionate woman– in the years that I knew her, she was not even particularly kind. She was stubborn and abrasive, with a Southern drawl turned scratchy with years of smoking and sighing and complaining.

She was also the strongest woman I have ever known.

After she quit smoking, she kept as far as possible from any sort of vices that would shorten her lifespan, replacing them instead with virtues… temperance, fortitude, and CNN. Even in her last years, when my parents begged her to have a glass of wine each night just to help her get to sleep, she refused. Her pain management was a strict combination of stubbornness and grit, and her health remained remarkable for her age.

But when you are close to one hundred years old, regardless of how healthy you are, on some level, every part of your body is begging you to just stop. To rest. Sometimes, it’s even in your own mind.

Once, I heard her ask my mother, “Why am I still here?”

“You know that we can’t get you back on a plane safely with all this oxygen, Mom.”

“No,” she sighed. “Why am I still here?”

But she accepted it. She held firm, and she stayed. Even when we ran out of money and resources and patience, when we had to fly her those three thousand miles to move back in with my auntie Beth, she stayed until she could not stay one second longer.

When I was seventeen, I once stood staring into her medicine cabinet on the precipice of explosion. I had my father’s gin and my mother’s anger in my stomach, and I knew what matches it would take to light that fuse. But I stayed, strong and composed, just as she did every day. I couldn’t do it for myself. So I did it for her.

I am not taking those pills.

I was, at the outset, correct about my ability to push through the discomfort. My constant fear of losing control had given me an acute awareness of how much I could handle, and I walked that line confidently. I did everything right, took the antibiotics and cleaned the surgical sites with a ritualistic reverence. All of my focus went towards the pain in my mouth. And the other pain, the ache that had settled into the bones of our house and deep into my chest, went untreated.

Until it couldn’t anymore.

I pushed myself too hard, I understand that now. I had convinced myself that I was out of the woods entirely, that I hadn’t felt any real soreness for days, that I was ready to shut the door behind a miserable week. That afternoon, I went hiking with my best friend, and we caught up over coffee and pre-Christmas peppermint bark. She tried to mention Mema, and I pointed out a hawk in the trees ahead.

By the evening, I was curled up in excruciating pain, convinced that the left side of my jaw was cracking and splintering as I laid with a bag of ice that did no real good. Taking Ibuprofen was like trying to stamp out a forest fire.

With gritted teeth and an apology, I cracked open the bottle of Hydrocodone.

That night was one of the worst of my life. I dreamed apocalyptic wastelands, bodies fetid and festering after the pestilence of the pandemic that had already defined that year. I saw my grandmother, sweating in and out of sleep– alive for a moment, but dying again and again. In the confusion and haze, for just a moment, I thought she might have been a god.

My fever dream ended as a weak winter sun began to stream through the window. I was drained, more exhausted than I had been the night before, but the ache had disappeared and my head was clear. I stripped the sheets and washed off the night, plugged in my headphones, hit shuffle perched on her old bare mattress.

And I was catching my breath/

Staring out an open window, catching my death/

And I couldn’t be sure/

I had a feeling so peculiar, that this pain would be for/

Evermore

I didn’t even notice I was crying until the drops hit my legs. I do not think I could have stopped myself if I tried. But I had run out of the desire to control.

Hey December, guess I’m feeling unmoored/

Can’t remember what I used to fight for

Everything, my grandmother and mother have insisted, exists in moderation. But what is moderation when we feel in extremes?

I rewind the tape, but all it does it pause/

On the very moment all was lost/

Sending signals to be double-crossed

We are made for vices, for cigarettes and coffee and chocolate cake. We are made to cling to any semblance of control, and then to watch again and again as it slips away, and then we are made to try again.

When the tears ran out and the last notes played, I pulled myself up and grabbed my keys. On my way out of the door, I caught a glimpse of something on the kitchen counter– a small glass bowl filled with See’s lollies. We had bought a box to send her for Christmas the day before she died.

This is what she left behind. Plastic wrappers, wood chips. A gap in the family and four gaps in my jaws. Ninety-nine years of stories and stubbornness and Southern sensibility. I carry the weight of her within me, her love and her loss. I manage our pain the way that she taught me, with control and composure. But I’m learning my own ways too.

And I couldn’t be sure/

I had a feeling so peculiar, this pain wouldn’t be for/

Evermore

My fist closed around a butterscotch.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Experience Examined In Between Lines of Poetry

By Jacqueline Thom

Experience is a difficult concept to bring to life on paper. It requires the act of being able to sit with oneself and consider all the elements that make an encounter so vivid that it stays in the mind, transforming an event into memory into experience, that which is so powerful, it alters how one feels, in the moment and afterwards. Bringing that emotion to life in an authentic way was important for Tarfia Faizullah in writing her poetry collection, Seam. She chose not to go the same route many of her contemporaries might follow — heavily researching an experience before attempting to conjure the mindset that can accurately replicate it; instead, she traveled to Bangladesh where she spoke with birangona, female survivors of the 1971 Liberation War, which saw many women and girls raped, tortured, and traumatized by the Pakistani Army that captured them. Faizullah adds a valuable addition to the New Historicism school with her attention to truth and validating the ordeals of women long shunned by their own communities, and changes how experience is renewed and reexamined on paper in her book.

Faizullah’s ties to her culture is evident in how devoted to its exploration she is in her work. As a Bangladeshi American, she is privy to two cultures, but strives to stay away from the western narrative, instead choosing to come to terms with the duality of being a person of color in America, and then just another Bangladeshi in her ancestral country. Her poem, Self-Portrait as Mango, angrily retorts to “How long have you been in our country?” with “Suck on a mango, bitch, that’s all you think I eat anyway…This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango / that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months / per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds.” (Faizullah 23). Faizullah ironically calls herself a mango and articulates that what is a simple object to one person holds generations of history for another. While the mango ripens, it is witness to war and violence, but still grows until the day it is properly eaten (sucked open with teeth), or analogously, truly appreciated for the history it holds. Self-Portrait as Mango represents Faizullah’s tone as a poet; she is confused at her status as an other in America, she is angry when her validity is questioned, and yet she is indignant with the knowledge that her heritage has a rich history that rises far above any of these challenges to her identity.

This style is evident in Faizullah’s notes to herself in Seam. While she takes on an appropriately modest tone when addressing the birangona and emulating them, there is still that reverence for a past yet undiscovered by her. Such is true of Interview with a Birangona as she takes time to self-reflect in third person on her findings of the women’s experiences: “You listen to the percussion / of monsoon season’s wet / wail, write in your notebook / bhalo-me, karap-me / chotto-sundori— / badgirl, goodgirl, littlebeauty—in Bangla / there are words / for every kind of woman / but a raped one” (29). Not only is Faizullah questioning her culture’s inability to accommodate raped women, but she does so in a melancholic rather than accusing tone. She asks readers to consider why there is no infrastructure in place to support the birangona, or at least educate the communities about the long-term damage sexual assault has on victims. Her thoughts are expanded further in other poems where Faizullah suddenly becomes mournful and almost separated from what she is talking about as she emulates the birangona’s distanced retellings of their own traumatized encounters in the camps they were brought to. She tells readers, “my body became an eddy, / a blackblue swirl. Don’t cry, he says. How when the time / came for his choosing, we all gave in for tea, a mango, / overripe. Another chance to hear the river’s gray lull.” (34) Faizullah becomes much more metaphorical and perhaps even more poetic when she takes on the birangona perspective, a way of speaking that is common for victims of trauma to distance themselves from what happened. In turn, Faizullah’s dialogue and that of the birangona is distinguished from the much harsher, violent language of the rapists. All this works to create an eerie conglomeration of memories retold into an experience that shocks readers into the women’s awful realities as slaves to a traumatic past and their scapegoated present. What is presented in Seam becomes another experience on its own, for readers who have not had to witness the same kind of violence that is described, for Faizullah, as the child of parents scarred by the liberation war, and for the women who had to put their trauma into words for us to understand even an inkling of what they felt. Seam then reconfigures how we think about the representation of experience for all involved in its depiction, for without the multiplicity of historical perspectives, and then Faizullah’s own influences as a person of color in two very distinct worlds that perceive her identity differently, we would not have the same ability to experience so deeply as we did with this book, where no aspect of the memories and thoughts we read about feels unexamined and unfelt.

The way in which Faizullah truthfully pursues the telling of experiences in her poetry is a valuable contribution to the New Historicism literary theory. She does not merely try to grasp on her own what it is like to be a birangona, but seeks inspiration from the very women who know what it is like. Writer Kristina Marie Darling of Tupelo Quarterly puts Faizullah’s writing as “tragedy turn[ed] to narrative and set[ting] other pains into motion, be it grief or a desire for some form of justice. Faizullah also documents the stories in compact ways, choosing the most potent images and details to render heartbreaking devastation, and then moves to a larger, almost prophetic, question that forces readers to confront the senselessness of such a death” (2015). In other words, Faizullah’s cultural connection to the events she speaks about, and her willingness to strengthen that connection, is what allows her to translate words said by women likely desensitized to their own trauma if only to be able to bear it, in a way that resonates with readers and forces them to consider the needless violence of the war. New Historicism itself is a cultural study that strives to reconnect a work with the time period it is produced in or influenced by. It is not just a matter of what happened, but a matter of interpretation of the historical events themselves. With this examination of historical literacy in mind, Faizullah casts a telling light on how exactly birangona have been treated since they survived the war. She laments on their being shunned by communities for their ‘dirtiness,’ despite the total lack of control these women had in their circumstances. She asks readers to consider the women’s self-inflicted guilt over the futility of their situation and the guilt added on by their families and neighbors, and how that increases birangonas’ trauma. There are words for every kind of woman but a raped one. By asking these questions, Faizullah attempts to further enhance the contextual analytical methods of New Historicism by juxtaposing the circumstantial with the emotional.

In showing readers the lack of respect for these survivors, Faizullah ultimately addresses how we need to interpret events — as experiences that affect our own and should be treated as such. Seam does not just ask what happened, but it confronts violent experiences with a forwardness that shocks readers into sympathizing with victims and considering what can be done to right the wrongs of history and prevent another mass traumatic event from occurring. We are stirred into thought and action by the poetry’s historic validity, and Faizullah’s own willingness to be meta. While traveling to Bangladesh to interview the birangona, she notes, “I take my place among / this damp, dark horde of men / and women who look like me— / because I look like them— / because I am ashamed / of their bodies that reek so unabashedly of body— / because I am / an American, a star / of the blood on the surface of muscle” (12). She is different, a misdiagnosed ‘other’ in America, but as soon as she is in her country of origin, Faizullah emphasizes feeling strangely more American than before despite mingling with those who look like her…startlingly too much like her. That familiarity and lack of it at the same time is another influence in the way she is able to convey her sincerity and truthfulness as a narrator for the birangona in her poems. There is an acknowledgement of disconnect, but a drive to bridge that gap by finding the truth buried underneath cultural stigma and old historicism’s failure to interpret experience according to person and place in time.

Through Seam, Tarfia Faizullah contributes an entirely new way of recording the human experience for those who witnessed it in the past and alternately those who learn about it in the future. What is produced is a vivid re-narration of experience that is able to explore both the feelings felt by those involved in such encounters, while also questioning the supposed objectivity of previous historical interpretation methods. Faizullah posits that it is impossible to approach history without a subjective lens, and we are all the better for it, for only then can we truly understand the emotions that drive human action. Faizullah takes New Historicism head on with Seam, and fearlessly confronts the context from which her subjects’ stories were violently created so that readers may understand how their own experiences are subconsciously affected by the past.

Works Cited

Darling, Kristina Marie. “Seam by Tarfia Faizullah.” Tupelo Quarterly, 2015, https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/seam-by-tarfia-faizullah/.

Edwards, Trista. Review of Seam, written by Tarfia Faizullah. American Literary Review. University of North Texas. 2014.

Faizullah, Tarfia. Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems. Graywolf Press, 2018.

Faizullah, Tarfia. Seam. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

“New Historicism, Cultural Studies (1980s-Present).” Purdue Online Writing Lab, Purdue University,

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/new_historicism_cultural_studies.html.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Caitlin McGill for her profound patience and support when I wrote this during a time of much personal unrest and dissatisfaction. I learned so much in the few short weeks we had together.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Kids With Guns

By Natalie Vasileff

I would like to dedicate this to those who have suffered and continue to suffer from gun violence in their towns and schools.

“Now they're turning us into monsters, Turning us into fire, Turning us into monsters, It's all desire, it's all desire, it's all desire.” - Kids With Guns by Gorillaz

Kids With Guns: The Gun Violence Epidemic in Northeastern Pennsylvania

Mrs. Davis was there when the kid in Wilkes-Barre got his arm shot off. She would have  to pull the two boys apart and wait until the police would come, because both of those boys would decide to bring guns to school that day and have a face-off in the front of the school. I saw the video of him laying there, and Mrs. Davis rushed over as her heels crackled on the concrete and she collapsed in front of the boy. It’s something I would never forget.

***

When you’d walk into a classroom at my old school, tattered desks that were usually covered in doodles would be flipped over on the floor, the whole room in the aftermath of chaos. Most of the lights were broken and the teacher would always be 15 minutes late as the smell of cigarettes would trail in afterwards. Learning in the classroom was usually self-taught, which deeply reflects on why I now understand why my classmates were unruly. What I used to think was normal for a public school I now know was an environment that was completely out of control where no learning was done. Public schools in Northeastern Pennsylvania were known, and still are known, for the incredible amounts of teenage pregnancies, kids being sent to Juvie, and for rates of awful mental health going off the charts. It would be strange to pass through the hallway and not see some sort of fist-fight and the school was suddenly turned into a fishbowl for me. I remember when Marcus punched this kid named Jamie so hard in the face that he was left unconscious in the hallway. No one showed up to help him until half the day was over. I remember when Jeremy raped one of the girls from the neighboring town and then killed her after when he suffocated her to death. All he got was Juvie. I remember when one of my teammates from soccer got pregnant, like most girls by that time would, only she quit the team and I never saw her at school ever again. Still, I knew there was one thing that stood out as a giant in that community and would continuously be a problem no matter how many of my classmates got into trouble: guns.

I don’t remember the day too well because it seemed like any other day. What I do remember is that I was sitting in Mr. Kelly’s eighth-grade math class. I sat to the side on the right, close to where the door was. I felt the day crawling by slowly until alarms started blaring over the speakers in the classroom. “Code Red, Code Red,” the announcement said over and over again, “There is a shooter in the building.” This was not the first time this happened, which was why I almost barely batted an eye. I was still nervous, but not panicked. We almost lazily crawled under our desks, either sure that it was a drill or that one of the seventh-grade boys was fooling around with a weapon again. It wasn’t until I heard shots being fired down the hallway where my classroom was. This was when the panic began. No one had ever actually fired their gun if they ever brought it to school - this was the first time. Crouching under my desk by the door, I ran to where Mr. Kelly was standing as he urged us to get behind him and crowd around his desk. I remember suddenly realizing that none of my friends were in this class with me and that my parents were at work. I had nobody to hold onto. Like everyone else near me, I began to frantically text my parents and my friends to let them know where I was in case anything happened. I was almost too shocked to cry and I didn’t think about how I might have died that day had the circumstances been different, but almost just as soon it had started, it was over.

He was a 13-year-old-boy whose name I didn’t even know until I heard it for the first time. He didn’t kill or hurt anyone, he just left some bullet holes in the wall of olive-green lockers. The gun was stashed in his locker and he had apparently kept it in his backpack. He pulled it out in the hallway, in the middle of the day when anyone could have seen it, only somehow, no one did. In his backpack, they also found two knives. When he was caught by his locker, he was suspended for a week. We saw him again at school in a few days.

***

When I think about it, the most disturbing part of the mess was that when the announcement first went off in the building, no one had a panicked reaction or was surprised in any capacity. This has happened so many times that it’s as if students walk into the building, expecting that this will happen and knowing that nothing much can be done about it. It was also no surprise when the boy only ended up being suspended for a few days instead of being completely expelled. I was angry. I knew others were too. However, this was an issue that was much bigger than all of us that we would never be able to truly solve, no matter how many times it could have happened.

Maddy wasn’t in the room that I was in when it happened, but she was still in the same hallway. Maddy Tratthen, who is one of my closest friends from Pennsylvania, graduated from Scranton Prep - a private school - after going to Mid Valley, where I was, for middle school. “I really thought I was going to die in that moment,” Maddy told me when I interviewed her. “Of course my parents pulled me out of Mid Valley. There’s never been this kind of problem at private schools here. At least not as much.”

It became normal for kids to bring guns to school - and it was too easy to do. The school had no metal detectors. We had a few cops, but they mainly stayed in the cafeteria to make sure no fights would break out during our lunch hour. The school seemed devoid of any common sense in order to keep its students safe and there was nothing to do about it. Bomb warnings were a regular thing to expect, maybe 6 or 7 reported over the speaker in class, and that would be in just one semester. Dogs would always be prowling around the hallways, sniffing to see what students might be hiding.

This was solely a Pennsylvania problem. Pennsylvania is a state with some of the most school shootings, along with California, South Carolina, and Texas. Citizens in Pennsylvania are permitted to open carry gun laws within the state. There have also been 42 school shootings in Pennsylvania in 2021 so far. This mix of facts has become a normalization of the issue. It has become too easy for younger students to simply reach for their parents’ guns wherever they would be hanging and then bring them to school anyways. They didn’t have to have any plans on harming anyone, but this act alone should have been enough. This alone should have become a red flag, and no one picked up on it.

The problem with guns is that they stem from and to multiple other problems. The gritty and somber notes of Northeastern Pennsylvania are what have also created this part of the country into a shrine for firearms. This was particularly a problem in more rural areas of Pennsylvania. Confederate flags would swarm across backyards and almost at every other store that you passed by in your car, you’d be able to buy a gun there. Not owning a gun, in the opinion of those who live in the state, would be strange. “Why would you not want to protect your house from complete strangers?” Pennsylvanians would say. Of course, they didn’t mean it. This was a disguise for pretending to care about something, when really, it was just for the ability to show off their guns. The cultish behavior of being obsessed with guns has become such a niche, Pennsylvanian thing. Kids would be able to be excused from school because they had to go on a hunting trip or because they were going to a shooting range that day. The same day, my Instagram would be filled with my classmates holding up a dead deer, proudly showing off what used to be a living, breathing creature. It never once occurred to them that it could have been one of us. Everyone was blinded. It was the desire to even feel something that made them forget that they could hurt someone. They even forgot that they have been hurt themselves.

***

I did not realize how bad everything had gotten until I moved to Connecticut. This state was peaceful and green, overflowing with trimmed front yards and sailboats galore. This state was also very rich and privileged and still remained a mystery to me when nothing bad there ever happened. It was when I saw welcoming signs of acceptance instead of Confederate flags in yards. It was when I realized that you couldn’t go to the nearest Walmart and buy a gun like you could in Pennsylvania. It was when no one in school would open their lockers and stop everyone in the hallway just to show off a gun that was recently purchased. Still, I noticed that the same problems began to arise.

The shooting at Sandy Hook was not too far away, so the more I lived in Connecticut, the more I realized that not everything was perfect. Gun culture was practically eliminated, but new cultures instead began to arise. Now there were big mansions filled with parents that emotionally abandoned their children. Now there were rumors of more and more classmates being depressed because of not being good enough to get into Yale. Now there was gossip of a certain someone snorting cocaine off of the toilet seat in the girl’s bathroom. Now, there was a gathering in the quad to protest gun violence after we watched what happened at Parkland on the news.

We held hands together and saw our teachers crying and praying. The school band played at the top of the staircase in front of us all. “Enough is enough,” we chanted.

A single trumpet played somberly in the distance.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Te Amo Abuela

By Sebastian Germosen

Play Ball

It was the championship game. It was the 9th inning and we were losing by 2 runs. I was next up to hit and as I stood on the on-deck circle, the nerves crept in. The cheers of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs from the concession stand, and the torching sunlight that made me sweat so much. So much was going through my mind at that moment. I was practicing my swing and timing the pitcher, but I was so nervous. I was next up to bat and if I didn’t get a hit, my team would lose the championship. My teammate drew a walk, so now it was my time. My parents were standing right behind home plate. My mom cheered me on, screaming my name as loud as she could. My dad, the one whose dream was to play professional baseball, stared at me with such intensity that I could feel it as I walked up to the plate. He always did that.

There was someone missing from the crowd, but I couldn’t think about it at that moment. I stepped up to the plate and stared at the pitcher. I wanted to get in his head and I wanted to intimidate him. I was on a mission and no one would stop me. I wiped the dripping sweat from my eyes and forehead, rubbed my gloves together, and dug my feet in the dirt. The umpire signaled to the pitcher. He was ready and unfortunately for him, so was I. The cheering grew even louder and my teammates roared in the dugout. Everyone’s eyes were on me. “The best player on the team.” “The man to win us the championship.” As the pitcher began his windup, I took a deep breath and remembered that this was for her. For the person that wasn’t in the crowd that day. The ball was thrown, its spin telling me that it's a fastball. As I waited for it, the world turned silent. I only saw the ball and I heard nothing. Then the screaming and cheering happened. My teammates scored and we won the game. The coaches and team ran to me and huddled over me, celebrating. They dumped water on me and tried ripping my jersey off. I looked at my mom and dad, and they were crying. They were crying because they were so happy. They were proud. They were also crying because someone was missing. I looked up at the sky, made the sign of the cross, kissed my chain of the cross, and said, “That was for you. I love you abuela.”

Christmas Time Is Here

I was reading a book from one of my favorite novel series, Captain Underpants. It was a couple weeks before Christmas and I was so excited. I already sent my letter to Santa. I used blue construction paper and wrote it with a pencil. I always asked Santa to sign my letter after he finished reading it. A lot of gifts were under the tree and my mom was finishing up the rest of the decorations. My mom is one of those Dominican moms that completely transforms the house for an upcoming holiday. Dominican moms go crazy about decorations for holidays and they’d decorate a month ahead of time, depending on the holiday. She hung some lights on the windows, put the stockings up, and put little Santa plushies around the house. I was most excited about going to my abuela’s house for Christmas. The whole family was going. My mom’s side of the family is huge, so I didn’t know how everyone was going to fit in the house. I didn’t care, as long as I got to spend Christmas with my abuela and the family. I loved abuela’s house. As soon as you walked in, you’d smell the food she was cooking. That rice with habichuela and the scented candles she had all over the house. There was a portrait of Jesus on the living room wall and some other paintings. Sometimes, I’d look at the portrait and stare into Jesus’ eyes and move back and forth, because I always thought he was staring at me. I don’t think he was though. My favorite part of abuela’s house was this couch she had. It was leopard skinned and I always sat there. That was my spot and everyone in the family knew that.

Tears

I had reached the part of the book when Captain Underpants was battling the villain, Wedgie Woman, and I heard my mom’s phone ringing. It was her sister, so she picked it up. A minute into the conversation, my mom ran outside. I was scared because my mom had never done that before. I wondered if my aunt was okay. My mom came back to the house ten minutes later and was crying. My dad was on his way home from work, so there was nothing he could do at that moment. I had to put on my big boy pants and do something. I went over to my mom, hugged her, and asked what’s wrong. She looked at me and said, “Everything will be okay. Just go to your room and watch some TV.” So I went to my room and watched my favorite show, Power Rangers. It didn't feel right to just go and watch tv, but I was scared. The show reached the point where the rangers got their megazords to defeat the villain. A couple minutes later, I heard the door and it was my dad. I ran out the room and hugged my dad. When I looked at his face, I saw tears streaming down his cheeks. Why was I the only one that wasn’t crying?

Is The Price Right?

My parents had to work, so I had to go stay at abuela’s house. She lived in Brooklyn. Not a bad part of Brooklyn, but it wasn’t great either. My mom didn’t like Brooklyn that much; all the graffiti, crime, and stuff didn’t make her comfortable. It’s where my parents grew up. It’s where they met and it’s where the majority of my family was born and grew up. Brooklyn was home to everyone else, except for me.

My mom dropped me off, talked to abuela, and kissed me on the cheek goodbye. When she left, my grandmother told me the plan for the day. She spoke to me in English and Spanish, but mostly in Spanish, since her English wasn’t the best. I could already smell the food she was cooking. It smelled like eggs or something. I was amazed I could smell her cooking from upstairs, since the kitchen was downstairs. I guess the scent was very strong. I sat down on the leopard skinned couch and turned on the television. It was a really old-fashioned television. It had like a little antenna, and I would usually play around with it for fun. Every time I turned on the television, I looked for our favorite show. The Price is Right! We watched the show every time I was at abuela’s. I never knew why abuela loved watching the show. I still don’t know to this day. My parents say it’s because it helped her with her English. I try not to think or talk about the show anymore. When the episode finished, we went to go pick up my little cousin, Ryan, from daycare. It was a short walk from the house and abuela always said that walking is good exercise. On our way to the daycare, we saw a homeless man sitting on a bench. The man was short, with a scruffy beard and he was wearing glasses. I looked at the man and felt bad for him. “It’s awful that people live like that, abuela,” I said. “Yo sé,” abuela said. We walked up to the man and she handed him five dollars. He was shocked. He said thank you and God bless. We crossed the street and I asked abuela why she did that. “Dios dice que ayudemos a los necesitados,” she said. God says to always help those in need.

I Love my Dad and I Hate Asthma

I turned down the radio and opened the car window. It was sunny with that type of breeze that, when you take a deep breath, you feel relaxed. My dad was driving. It was only me and him in the car; my mom was in another car. My dad was wearing this nice suit and he got a haircut two days before. He wore some really nice glasses too. We were talking about baseball. That was probably the only thing that could distract us from what the day was about. My dad always talks about his love for baseball. His dream was to be a professional baseball player, but that dream wasn’t supported. He had the talent to play professionally, but he was forced to work at a young age at his dad’s restaurant. His dad wasn’t the best at caring for his kids and their dreams. As he drove, he was telling me that his dream of playing baseball in the MLB lives through me. “Your mom, abuela, and I sat down one day and discussed your future. I don’t want you to have a childhood like mine. Skipping school to work and not being able to do what I wanted to do sucked. I didn’t want you to play baseball because I feared that I would act like my father. Abuela looked me in the eyes and said that I am better than my father and you will make this family better no matter what you do. What you’ve accomplished at this point in your life is beyond what any of us could’ve dreamed of. I’m proud of you, your mom is proud of you, and so is abuela.” My dad parked the car. We did our special handshake and got out of the car. Everyone proceeded into the funeral home.

“Name him Sebastian. Sebastian is a name for a boy that will do great things. He will be someone special,” abuela said. I saw her in the casket and I couldn’t process what was happening. How did she die of an asthma attack if she didn’t have asthma? How would God let this happen to her? My dear abuela. She looked so peaceful in the casket. Her eyes were closed, her hands folded together holding a bible, and she was wearing like a dress or something. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Now she can make some rice with habichuela for God, the angels, and everyone else there. She can watch The Price is Right with all them too. That’ll be fun. She’ll be able to watch my games from heaven too. Watch me get the game-winning hit for the championship.

Author’s Note

I was hesitant to write this memoir. I’m not an “open person.” I don’t like to get personal or tell people about things like this. I pondered what I should write about for the longest. I’m writing this right now and I see a picture of me and my abuela on my desk. It’s a picture of her holding me. I’m wearing a cute, little outfit with a spongebob hat. Spongebob was my favorite when I was a baby. I think about her everyday. How different would life be if she were still alive? It’s a question I’ll never have the answer to.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and say thank you to the class for workshopping my memoir, and providing thoughts and opinions that helped me improve it. I would also like to acknowledge my abuela for being the superhero she was.

[stretchjournalemerson]

READING IS FUNdamentally Flawed: Questions on Children's Literature

By Abbie Langmead

READING IS FUNdamentally Flawed: Questions On Children’s Literature

The nine-year-old girl I babysat curled up with a book above her fourth grade reading level. I was ecstatic that she read as eagerly as I did, and imagined who she would become as a result. I was once a fifth grader reading Harry Potter in Justice shorts at my desk during silent reading time, a sixth grader with Rowling quotes on the walls of my English classroom, walking home listening to the musical adaptations of Matilda and Seussical.

In June, the girl I babysat began reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. By August, she’d just started Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She wore a tie-dye shirt and her pajama shorts even though it was 1PM. She sat at the granite island with a half-eaten Lean Cuisine on one side of her and the book on the other when she said “JK Rowling is such a good writer.”

Do I say something? I could’ve said the same thing to my mom or sister at her age. I didn’t want to ruin her reading experience, not when she has three books to go. I wanted to protect her from the realizations I had when I was older regarding Rowling’s flaws.

“But unfortunately, she’s a better writer than she is a person,” I replied.

“What do you mean?”

I know what I should’ve done. I should tell her the issues, and let her decide what to do with the information regarding Rowling. She’s a smart girl for nine, and she’s very capable of thinking for herself.

However she reads and reveres her authors similar to how I did. I saw that it led me down a lifelong love of literature, and didn’t want to extinguish that for her before it was fully developed.

I chose my words carefully: “There are a lot of times that JK Rowling has done things that hurt people. Some of that is in the books, but most of it is outside. She wrote some really good stories, but now she’s writing on Twitter and changing the story, and it’s hurt a lot of people who feel excluded.”

That wasn’t the greatest explanation, I know.

“But you still like Harry Potter,” the girl responded.

“I do.”

“How can you like Harry Potter and hate the person who made him?”

“I can do both,” I said, “I can critique JK Rowling for the things she’s done wrong while loving the world she created. When I think about that world, I think about the things that are good about it. The things that are bad, I ignore. Also, I don’t like Harry Potter. Hermione is better.”

She returned to the chapter, satisfied with my answer. I, however, was nowhere near satisfied. I know more authors' names than I do US Senators, despite considering myself very politically involved. I grew up writing fanfiction for my favorite stories, and still see slivers of inspirations in everything I write. Their influence hangs over me like a Pantheon of Gods.

While each author, their situation, and the circumstances regarding their educational merits vary, they’re being taught in the same educational system, to the same children, and by teachers who often don’t have the skills to break down bigotry in their classrooms (Adam 5). A decade after I left my elementary school behind and in the middle of a national reckoning regarding racial bias, children are still reading these stories and managing their harms once they reach adulthood. I’m left with empty hands wondering what we do with my childhood icons, and what damage these works have done to children through the decades.

Perspectives on Children’s Literature

At the core of education is a promise to provide children the skills that they need to succeed. While globally the methods vary, the genre of children’s literature is always a part of the conversation. Yet the genre has problems that appear in classroom environments. There are countless authors not discussed in this essay. My case studies have different biases, different circumstances around their work, and are taught at different ages. The problems I will describe are complicated issues with varied opinions, but these issues of racism, sexism, and bigotry aren't limited to the authors I describe.

Dr. Brynn F. Welch specializes in children’s literature while teaching philosophy at University of Alabama at Birmingham, and asks the same questions of damage and future action that I ask myself. Welch’s call in her paper “The Pervasive Whiteness of Children's Literature: Collective Harms and Consumer Obligations” is straightforward on the surface: do not contribute “to the pervasive whiteness of children’s literature” in any form (4). Welch attacks the genre for its white-centrism to this day. White children are more likely to see themselves represented in all forms of media, including in literature. While there are merits of exposing children to books, the dangers of a white literary canon causes harms: “A child's experience with literature is part of that child's moral development, serving to cultivate either compassion for others or racial biases and stereotypes; either can have lasting effects for both the child and those around the child” (Welch 8). Not only is the biased state of children’s literature harmful in the moment, they also affect the “moral development” of our children, and the generation as a whole. Welch argues that by participating in this white culture of children’s literature, we continue to perpetuate racial bias. When teachers use pervasively white texts, like the classics I will discuss, they perpetuate a white centric culture.

Welch doesn’t speak in hypothetical terms, these racial biases are already proven. Welch explains “Children as young as three or four demonstrate ‘the same level and type of bias’ that adults show. Young children are absorbing cultural messages that affirm white superiority. Children's literature has been—and remains—a vehicle for those messages” (11). To create anti-racist environments, it starts as small as the books we read. Welch argues that we need to avoid any children’s texts that “affirm white superiority” at all costs. While I harbor complicated feelings about bigoted authors, Welch’s proposal provides children with alternative positive examples rather than an adult reckoning.

In a study that involved book audits in Australian classrooms, Professor Helen Adam finds this same white centrality and harm that Welch discusses. First, Adam discusses how books are beneficial to children: from spoken and written proficiencies to the “moral development” that Welch describes. However, like Welch, Adam argues that these merits are limited in a “monocultural” setting (4) to the students of the dominant culture. Similarly to Welch, Adam argues that diverse texts aid children of color to see themselves represented and educates white children on tolerance.

Adam argues that the entire educational system needs to become more diverse, rather than to disengage. She explains how “early childhood settings are not neutral spaces, but places where children learn how diversity is constructed and valued” (Adam 4). Educators must teach about power in their communities, yet educators are often not taking on this responsibility:

Educators are often reluctant to discuss issues about equality, power, attitudes and values because of their unfamiliarity with the knowledge base, a lack of confidence and availability of resources (Boutte et al. 2011) as well as the mistaken belief that one book about a group can adequately portray that group’s experiences (Mendoza and Reese 2001). (5)

As mentioned with Welch, this issue of what we do with one book or one author isn’t the entire issue. The educational system fails to combat the biases created in classrooms, as is the genre of children’s literature. Adam offers to diversify the books that students read. While Welch places pressure upon the consumer, Adam pressures the educators to “discuss issues about equity” with their young students instead.

When speaking of specific authors as I will in this essay, there’s an additional question of how an author’s life convenes with their work. While my school experience integrated the author’s life into the texts we read, philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes offered a solution known as “The Death Of The Author.” Barthes defines the way that I studied literature as flawed and ancient, as “Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature” (8). He then offers an alternative that highlights reader interpretation. He argues “It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality [...] to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'” (Barthes 3). To Barthes, the author may as well not exist. Their works do not belong to them, rather they belong to each reader. The “pervasive whiteness” that Welch discusses, nor the call for diversity that Adam depicts, affect an individual text and if it should be read. The authors I discuss in this essay display bigotry outside of the texts read in schools. For Barthes, this sort of problematic author would be irrelevant. Yet if those same biases appear implicitly within the text, they would then cause harm that would affect their young readers.

These researchers promote different values and ideas, yet unanimously push against the way children’s literature appears in schools. In my schooling, the author was dominant. This contrasts Barthes’ philosophy on analysis, where the author’s influence isn’t as important as the text. For Welch and Adam, the monotony in popular children’s literature becomes problematic. Throughout a student's experience, they are being exposed to texts by problematic people. The impact on both white children and children of color is visible. The following authors appeared as part of my schooling curriculum, and still appear in classrooms. I intend to implement the ideas of Adam, Barthes, and Welch in determining what harm these authors do and what should be done about them in the future.

Dr. Seuss: First Reads, Core Problems

Dr. Seuss is a staple in children’s literature, and a juggernaut in American media as a whole. He’s one of the first books that children are introduced to when they’re learning how to read, and one of the first authors I remember idolizing.

The National Education Association reaffirmed Seuss’ iconic position in 1998, by creating “Read Across America” week to promote literacy in classrooms (National Education Association), and placing it on Seuss’ birthday. The first year I ever participated in Read Across America week, my kindergarten class made Green Eggs and Ham with Cool-Whip and green skittles. In the years following we went to see Seussical, watched the movie rendition of The Cat In The Hat, made the Cat’s Hat out of a strip of paper and a cut out drawing, and paraded around the hallways holding his books.

Some progress has been made; March 2021’s Read Across America theme was “Cultivate Compassion”, and all the books promoted on the Read Across America website promote a wide variety of cultures. Dr. Seuss is relegated to one “Frequently Asked Question”, where the National Educational Association confirms that it no longer partners with Seuss’s brand in order to “provide both windows and mirrors” for children to “feel included and recognized, and who understand that the world is far richer than just their experiences alone” (National Educational Association).

So how did Seuss fall from grace? While the question is just coming to the forefront of national consciousness due to Fox News’ outrage, Seuss’ racism has caused Read Across America and teachers across the country to pull Seuss’ books from the classroom curriculum.

Many of his lesser known books like If I Ran The Zoo, Scrambled Egg Super, and And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street were pulled from publishing by Seuss’ family in March 2021 due to racial stereotypes. Simultaneously, Read Across America promoted books with POC protagonists overcoming hardship and bigotry. His political cartoons, the start of Seuss’s career, often contained similar racist portrayals (especially anti-Japanese sentiments). Going even further back, he wrote and starred in a minstrel show during his high school years (Jenkins), displaying his anti-black sentiments long before it appeared in his work. As a children’s author, Seuss often depicted other races in similarly cartoonish proportions, his African characters are barefooted and wearing grass skirts and his Asian characters wore cone-shaped hats and ate rice on their walk (Pratt). Only his white characters were able to participate in the wild adventures that ensue, oftentimes with some invented creature with a wacky name to teach them a moral.

Seuss was particularly interesting to me, because unlike the other authors I wish to discuss, his books have already left school curriculums. As Read Across America now focuses on undoing the damages that Adam and Welch describe, Seuss’ legacy hangs on a mostly political balance. Seuss’ books ask the same questions that concern me most in classrooms: “That tension between Seuss and Seuss-free classrooms is emblematic of a bigger debate playing out across the country — should we continue to teach classic books that may be problematic, or eschew them in favor of works that more positively represent people of color” (Jenkins). While conservative figures may argue about Seuss and encourage their followers to purchase his books, Seuss’ legacy is now about questions of harm and managing it. Seuss is an opportunity to look at what we’re currently teaching our children, and to change it. Do we want this overt racist to remain an icon in children’s literature, and in American Culture as a whole?

So What Do We Do With Dr. Seuss?

What do we do with the beloved icon? Seuss’ history and work promote the “pervasive whiteness” of children’s literature (Welch 4) that has plagued the industry for decades. Both Read Across America and Welch agree to disengage. Both promote books with positive representations of POC to provide representation for those children, where Seuss fails to depict children of color (often depicting strange creatures more than he even depicts people) (Jenkins). While some ideas that Seuss writes about are strong, and the methods he writes in makes reading exciting and accessible to new readers, he isn’t the only person who has ever done it. There are a plethora of authors who write for the same early reader demographic, and many are pushing to give these authors new opportunities to enter the classroom. Based on Adam’s analysis, a dismantling of Seuss’ legacy would be a prime opportunity to introduce a more diverse catalog for young readers, and even bring up ideas of power and equity at an early age.

This idea of teaching children about equity issues isn’t partisan either, even if Seuss’ legacy has become one. During an episode of Fox News’ Media Buzz, commentator Jessica Tarlov argues that educators shouldn’t shy away from“showing people racist depictions and telling them that this is racist” (Kurtz). Philadelphia high school English teacher argues a similar idea: “I believe there is a way to look at material that is stereotypical [and] racist and identify it for what it is, and then hopefully, in doing so, neutralize its effect.” (Jenkins). Both sides argue that something has to change in the way that authors like Seuss are taught, however the distinction between the two begin to show a larger divide. Just “telling” students about racial bias doesn’t “neutralize its effect” in the classroom. Neutralization goes beyond just words, and creates action. Teachers need to have the power to talk about these issues of racial bias with their students, and discuss how that affects the work, and how we as a society can change for a more equitable future. Unfortunately, Helen Adam mentions that these skills don’t often appear in the early educational environment where students learn about Seuss. While some may say disengaging entirely from a problematic author like Seuss is extreme, teaching about equity within educational spaces is a necessity. Whether teaching about equity justifies Seuss’ actions, from a period with different societal scrutiny than the current day, or whether his books should be removed from school curriculums as a whole over the author’s actions, is still up for debate.

A reading considering a “Dead Author” as Barthes encourages may give Seuss a pass. After all, the overtly racist portrayals were removed from print, and Seuss’ political cartoons or racist past doesn’t affect The Lorax’s call for environmental care or Horton’s insistence that “a person’s a person no matter how small” (Seuss). However, reverence of Seuss, as taught in my classrooms, go against Barthes’ philosophy on literature. If teachers can separate the Green Eggs and Ham feasts and parades from the morals of the texts as they appear, then perhaps there is still merit to the non-racially charged texts alongside a more diverse children’s literature canon. Yet if classrooms continue teaching Seuss as an icon, then it can become much harder to argue whether his works should still appear in classrooms across the country.

Roald Dahl: Classically Problematic

Of all the authors I discuss in the essay, this one hurts the most. I read everything that even referenced his work, including Roald Dahl’s Completely Revolting Cookbook. My favorite text of all time was Matilda, and stayed that way until around seventh grade. The story talked about a bookish and misunderstood girl who was constantly smarter than people gave her credit for. When I was dealing with teachers who complained to my mother about how fast I went through their books, I felt the same. I also saw a girl willing to fight for what she believes in, something that I wanted to be and would eventually work to become. Matilda also had superpowers, and although I never earned those Dahl empowered me by showing this smart girl facing evil grown ups.

I loved Roald Dahl. Unfortunately, Dahl would’ve hated me.

Dahl was an overt antisemite, announcing in an interview the year of his death “I have become anti-semitic” (Roos). That statement wasn’t even the most damaging thing he’d said about Jews, such as when he promoted one of the most common conspiracy theories regarding Jews: “There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do” (Roos). Worst of all, despite fighting in World War II against the Nazis, he justified the Holocaust: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” (Roos). His family has acknowledged these statements. although it’s debatable whether this was to save themselves from the same fate as Seuss’ legacy or a genuine need to apologize. Either way the damage was already done, and it goes far beyond his interviews.

My second favorite Dahl book was The Witches, and even thinking about that makes me horrified. We read it as a class in second grade, a year after I was teased mercilessly for not “eating a ham and cheese sandwich like the rest of the kids” during Passover, where I couldn’t have bread, let alone pork or cheese with it. While Seuss’ more commonly read books don’t depict his bigotry, The Witches portrays almost every negative Jewish stereotype, less than 40 years after the Holocaust. Despite my mother teaching at a synagogue and being raised primarily through my Jewish faith, I didn’t even notice.

Children’s Librarian Chelsey Roos writes about each of these stereotypes in her blog post “The Witches, Roald Dahl, and a Renewed Legacy of Harm”, along with how they appear in adaptations of The Witches (most recently in 2020). Dahl’s books portray its antagonistic witches as birdlike, with large noses, bald heads that they cover with wigs, and hideous for being so (Roos). Wigs are a common part of Orthodox culture, and large noses are a stereotype often used to depict Jews (such as in Hitler’s Germany, when “Jewish” looking features were instantly suspicious). The terrifying Quentin Blake images that kept me engaged were caricatures of my mother, my friends, and worst of all, myself.

If images weren’t enough, then the actions and position of the witches would further showcase the antisemitism instilled into their character. They “are described as powerful, extremely wealthy, and lurking in society, secretly passing as ‘normal’ women” (Roos), once again perpetuating the harmful stereotype that Jews control the media, banks, and world. Their end goal, eradicating children, also stems from the ancient and dangerous stereotype regarding Jews killing children known as ‘blood libel’. Of all the big Jewish stereotypes, Dahl hits each and every one in The Witches, perpetuating these ideas to all of his young readers.

So What Do We Do With Roald Dahl?

Roos asks the exact same question at the end of her essay, and cannot provide an answer due to her experiences. Children read Dahl, and so Roos’ library will continue to keep up with the demand because libraries are considered “neutral” space. However, there is also the issue that Adam presents in her research that “early childhood settings are not neutral spaces, but places where children learn how diversity is constructed and valued” (Adam 4). While Welch describes the general harms of “pervasive whiteness”, The Witches expresses outright bigotry and is still beloved, referenced, and taught in schools. This isn’t like Seuss’ history, this is the text. This text is harmful to children, both Jewish children and those who have no exposure to Jewish customs. While people are continuing to read this book, along with Dahl’s other works, they perpetuate this harm to the next generation.

This text portrays overt harms that our society still grapples with today. QAnon’s platform combines blood libel with the secret global control conspiracy theories, blended just as dangerously as Dahl depicts in The Witches. Barthes’ reader-interpretation focus can allow some Dr. Seuss books to evade critique, however The Witches portrays an explicit harm regardless of whether the author is ignored and revered. While witchcraft is a fantasy construct, the harms of a book like The Witches is directly in the text, and very real for the children that read it.

Can we teach this away? Can we identify these problematic tropes for our children and tell them how it’s wrong? If we remain “reluctant to discuss issues about equality, power, attitudes and values” in our classrooms (Adam 5), then Dahl’s work is an overt harm to children everywhere.

JK Rowling: Living Icon Falling into Infamy

Rowling is larger than life. She shrouded herself in mystery, hiding behind a Billion-Dollar magical world (Fischer). In my childhood readings, I clung to a word where anything was possible and the heroes won through the power of love. Most children read it the same way I did, as “A 2014 study by Italian psychologists suggested that reading Harry Potter ‘improves attitudes toward stigmatized groups,’ and young fans seemed to bear this out” (Fischer). This is a rationale on why schools teach Harry Potter in the first place-- it presents metaphors about tolerance that keep conversations about inequality outside the classroom, but still teach the values of acceptance and love.

However, once the metaphorical curtain was pulled back on Rowling’s beliefs, many former readers found new faults in the once beloved work. While Rowling expresses her support of the Jewish community on Twitter, she also wrote a story where large-nosed subhuman creatures run the banks (Burack). While she has a large and diverse cast of characters, many fall flat or turn to stereotypes of their identities: such as the studious and mild mannered Cho Chang or the gossipy pack of teenage girls led by Lavender Brown.

In attempts to correct these errors, Rowling has continually revised her already completed universe to be more inclusive. After completing the Harry Potter series, Rowling revealed that the iconic Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore was gay (Coggan). In the following years, Rowling pointed out one (and only one) Jewish student at Hogwarts (Rowling 2014), compared lycanthropy to AIDs (Pan), and created Wizarding Schools outside of Europe (Pottermore). For fans, these retconned responses were laughable; there was little to no evidence that supported many of these claims and were often surface level inclusions that didn’t change much. The Wizarding World is still incredibly white, heteronormative, and ladened with stereotypes and gender roles.

Compounded by the distinction between Witches and Wizards in her world, the separate living quarters for male and female students, and even the “mannish” hands of antagonistic journalist Rita Skeeter (Fischer), we fans should have seen Rowling’s transphobia ahead of time. Yet our love for these fantastic stories left us blinded until Rowling was explicitly offensive through her Twitter page. For the thousands of trans people and allies globally who resonated with Rowling’s story of inclusion in her own activism, this was a low blow. In journalist Molly Fischer’s article “Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?”, Rowling’s statement of support for the Anti-Transgender Rights movement validates anti-trans fans while blatantly harming others. The shapeshifting character Tonks became a fan-favorite for the trans and nonbinary community, such as nonbinary ex-fan Flourish Klink. Yet some re-reading highlighted how Rowling’s text highlighted her transphobic beliefs: “‘Tonks was a big deal,’ [Klink] told me. But ‘when you look back on Tonks, Tonks never changes into a guy. Tonks never changes into anything but different kinds of girl” (Fischer). Biological sex has always been a part of the Harry Potter universe, as Rowling explains “From the word go, it was a boy” (Fischer). While Rowling supporter Chris Elston reveres Rowling as “ a genius among geniuses” (Fischer) due to their mutual transphobia, many like Klink (who chose their first name based on a shop Rowling mentions in the series) try to detach themselves from the work that brought them into a love of literature. Like what I explained to the girl I babysat, adults who read Rowling as children and fell in love with that world now have to choose what good to accept from it, and what bad to ignore. All the while, these books are still being sold, still being read in schools across the world, and still enticing children into the world of literature.

So What Do We Do With JK Rowling?

There are reasons to teach Rowling’s works in school, and there are methods to teach her work without teaching about the author’s rags-to-riches past. Harry Potter shaped a generation, and that impact on children’s literature has merits. Yet deciding what to do with Rowling asks both the questions I asked before. Like Seuss, can educators and students dismantle the idea of the icon and read the work as is? Like Dahl, does the work display any of the author’s implicit or explicit biases?

While for the previous authors I was able to say “yes” to both questions, I can only say “kind of” at best to either in regards to Rowling.

While Barthes’ philosophies of ignoring the author may alleviate some of the pressures of Rowling retroactive additions, Rowling actively fights against that interpretation. When asked if the Wizarding World is now “owned by the fan base”, Rowling evokes the classical criticism where the author is all-powerful: “Seventeen years, that world was mine. And for seven of those years, it was entirely mine; not a living soul knew anything about it” (Fischer). Rowling claims ownership and dominance over The Wizarding World, even as she moves past the initial series to sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. While Barthes would want an author to distance themselves from their work, the social media age provides any author who wants to speak on their works an open platform to do so. Rowling seizes that opportunity often, which makes it much more challenging to consider her a “dead” author. Rowling is physically alive, and makes the choice to be present in all aspects of her work. If an educator actively chooses to go against Rowling’s wishes, then many of the controversies that appear in the text could be avoided. However, the living author refuses to die in relation to her text, which allows the separation between Icon and Text to be more complicated than it is with Seuss.

Additionally, what’s left directly in the text is implicitly harmful. Not only are there the same harmful stereotypes about Jews that made The Witches so problematic, but there are also stereotypes regarding race and gender that separate the white protagonist from any direct diversity in the Wizarding World. The depictions of Rita Skeeter as both masculine and villainous are an explicit harm against trans women. Cho Chang’s name alone is an explicit harm against Asian people. The only people safe from Voldemort are the predominantly white “pure-blood” families, causing harm to characters of color. Welch addresses how this harm doesn’t justify merits: “Works like the Harry Potter series can help avoid the cultivation of racial biases and stereotypes, [yet] the pervasive whiteness of children's literature also deprives children of color of many of the valuable goods that literature provides white children” (9). Harry Potter is one of few texts Welch mentions specifically in her paper, showing both the power in its work and how problematic the work is. She encourages people to not engage with pervasively white texts: do not read them, do not purchase them, and do not promote them. While that may appear harsh, especially to a former fan like myself, classrooms should hold themselves to a high enough standard to give all children “the valuable goods that literature provide”, not just the white ones.

There are children’s texts that highlight the same core issues of acceptance and tolerance without a problematic author and a white-washed setting. There is an opportunity to swap out Harry Potter for one of these other texts, to the benefit of the children in the classroom as adults, “Such an approach assists educators to meet the challenge of preparing children to live in a society that is rapidly changing and where issues such as race, ethnicity, gender, ability and social background impact the benefits enjoyed by different groups” (Adam 2). While Harry Potter may address the privileges “enjoyed by different groups” in metaphorical senses, school systems need to consider alternatives, preferable alternatives that make these issues real.

So What Do We Do With Our Classrooms?

Dr. Eve L. Ewing describes how children internalize literature while speaking about writing her own experiences writing for children: “I believe that children form literary canons. I believe most of us are at our most active as readers when we are children, and that the way we see, you know the way I see the world and who I am as a writer is formed by Goosebumps and Nancy Drew”. For her, the work of creating a canon with positive depictions of children of color is necessary work, shaping the readers for their entire lives. Therefore, schools should acknowledge that role and use it to reorganize power. It would be extreme to ban any of these authors from the market. However, schools can make the conscious effort to leave these problematic authors in the dust for new or underrepresented voices to enter the conversation. Instead of using The Cat In The Hat to teach rhyming, there are opportunities to include lessons on acceptance such as Mira’s Curly Hair by Rebeca Luciani, Not All Princesses Dress In Pink by Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple, or All Are Welcome by Suzanne Kaufman (Willoughby). In fantasy worlds where anything is possible, limiting our children to read about white-washed worlds created by transphobes and antisemites has become unnecessary. We can do better.

We need to distance ourselves from the classic books of our youth and expand the canon for the next generation. There are so many things to read, and as time progresses there will only be more. Educators, schools, and parents need to combat systemic bigotry in any way possible, and that includes the books we read.

Although my pantheon of authors consists of faulty gods, and although I resisted leaning into my discomfort when someone I care about read these same books, that doesn’t need to be an eternal struggle. We can look at every stage of student life and analyze the effects and harms of what we read. We can put our most cherished authors on trial, and sometimes decide that they should rest. We can fill those voids with underrepresented voices to let all students see themselves in their stories. Most importantly, we can have these conversations about how bigotry starts young and small, and take responsibility for preventing it in any shape it takes. It’s time we take a look at what we’re teaching, and let a new age of inclusive children’s literature begin.

Works Cited:

Adam, Helen, et al., editors. “’Portray Cultures Other than Ours’ : How Children’s Literature Is Being Used to Support the Diversity Goals of the Australian Early Years Learning Framework.” Australian Educational Researcher, vol. 46, no. 3, 2019. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsaed&AN=rmitplus223553&site=eds-live.

Burack, Emily. “Are the Goblins in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Anti-Semitic?” Alma, 19 Dec. 2019, www.heyalma.com/are-the-goblins-in-j-k-rowlings-harry-potter-anti-semitic/.

Burack, Emily. “J.K. Rowling Is Surprisingly Good at Calling Out Anti-Semitism.” Alma, 17 Sept. 2018, www.heyalma.com/j-k-rowling-surprisingly-good-calling-anti-semitism/.

Barthes, Roland. “Death Of The Author.” Image-Music-Text, 1968, pp. 142–147., sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf.

Coggan, Devan. “J.K. Rowling's Long History of Discussing - but Not Depicting - Dumbledore's Sexuality.” EW.com, Entertainment Weekly, 19 Mar. 2019, ew.com/movies/2019/03/19/harry-potter-fantastic-beasts-jk-rowling-dumbledore-sexuality/.

Ewing, Eve L. Keynote Address: “1919 And Beyond”. Emerson College Teach-In on Race, 19 Mar. 2021, Boston, Massachusetts.

Fischer, Molly. “Who Did J.K. Rowling Become? Deciphering the Most Beloved, Most Reviled Children’s-Book Author in History.” The Cut, 22 Dec. 2020, www.thecut.com/article/who-did-j-k-rowling-become.html.

Jenkins, Tiara, and Jessica Yarmosky. “Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students Keep Reading Them.” Code Switch: NPR, 26 Feb. 2019, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/26/695966537/classic-books-are-full-of-problems-why-cant-we-put-them-down.

Pan, Alexander. “Never Forget When JK Rowling Likened Being A Werewolf To Having AIDS.” GOAT, 16 Nov. 2019, goat.com.au/books/never-forget-when-jk-rowling-likened-being-a-werewolf-to-having-aids/

Pottermore. “How to Pick the Perfect Wizard School for You.” Wizarding World, Wizarding World Digital, 16 Oct. 2017, www.wizardingworld.com/features/how-to-pick-the-perfect-wizard-school-for-you.

Pratt, Mark. “6 Dr. Seuss Books Won't Be Published for Racist Images.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 2 Mar. 2021, apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed18335c03319d72f443594c174513.

Seuss, Dr. Horton Hears a Who! Random House, 1954.

National Education Association. “Read Across America: Frequently Asked Questions.” Read Across America, National Education Association, 28 Jan. 2021, www.nea.org/resource-library/read-across-america-frequently-asked-questions.

Roos, Chelsey. “The Witches, Roald Dahl, and a Renewed Legacy of Harm.” ALSC Blog, The Association for Library Service to Children, 24 Nov. 2020, www.alsc.ala.org/blog/2020/11/the-witches-roald-dahl-and-a-renewed-legacy-of-harm/.

Rowling, JK. “.@benjaminroffman Anthony Goldstein, Ravenclaw, Jewish wizard.” Twitter, 16 Dec. 2014, https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/544946669448867841?lang=en

Welch, Brynn F. “The Pervasive Whiteness of Children’s Literature: Collective Harms and Consumer Obligations.” Social Theory & Practice, vol. 42, no. 2, Apr. 2016, pp. 367–388. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5840/soctheorpract201642220.

Willoughby, Katherine. “20 Fresh Rhyming Picture Books for the Seussed Out Reader.” BOOK RIOT, Riot New Media Group, 23 June 2019, bookriot.com/rhyming-picture-books/.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Girlhood: The Forgotten Céline Sciamma Film We All Should Have Seen

By Ivy Miller

It is not a hot take to question the usefulness of queer films that seem to insist on being white, old and reminiscent of each other. In fact, when Potrait of a Lady on Fire came out, and I told my gay friends about it, they practically rolled their eyes. Many of my friends who happen to be young, queer, and women of color, were understandably not going to scramble to applaud another white woman for making another film about white women—even if these ones were in love.

What may have surprised my friends however, as it certainly surprised me, was to learn that the director behind Potrait of a Lady on Fire had made very different films prior to her lesbian period piece. In fact, Céline Sciamma made three coming of age queer films all before Potrait of a Lady on Fire, and the last one in particular stands far apart; Sciamma’s Girlhood is everything that Potrait of a Lady on Fire could never be. Girlhood (2014) is about a young black adult named Marieme growing up in the suburbs of France. We follow Marieme as she confronts issues with race, gender, poverty and sexuality alike, all while finding joyous moments with her friends that strike just as genuine a chord.

Girlhood starts with a montage of people playing American football who we can’t tell are girls until they victoriously take off their helmets in a group huddle, and we see their proud wide grins as they shout to each other. While some of the girls are revealed to be wearing eyeshadow and lipstick, and sporting long hair under their helmets, others are shown to wear black streaks as their only make up and display nearly shaved heads. This small detail becomes increasingly relevant throughout the film; it's as if the masculine football armor—with room for a plethora of identities underneath it—foreshadows the fact that our lead Mariame will continuously change her clothes and hair as she tries to discover where both her power and comfort lies. At one point Mariame exactly mirrors the friend group she makes, and wears a stolen tight dress and shimmery makeup after all the girls have dressed up altogether in a modest hotel room. This scene is arguably the most fun we see Mariame and her friends have on screen—which is only fair considering Sciamma makes the conscious choice to cut the playful montage to the entirety of Rihanna’s “Shine Bright Like a Diamond.” At the start of the song the girls have gotten to know each other a bit, but by the end of the song we are convinced of the magic of a girls night in to cement a group of girls together as true friends.

Mariame makes friends and she makes mistakes. For instance, it is hard not to wince when we hear Mariame’s younger sister accuse Mariame of becoming just like their older, and abusive, brother. Furthermore, when Mariame seems to be leaving one dangerous situation only to “escape” to another, we root for her friends when they try to attempt to forbid her from doing so. However, only moments after the harsh exchange takes place, Mariame says simply to her friends: “make me laugh.” In response, her friend Adiotuo looks briefly right into the camera —and thus intimately into our eyes—right before she tells us and Mariame that the charismatic leader of the group, Lady, is actually named Sophie. This exchange is exemplary of what Girlhood does so well: it lets its characters be vulnerable, and even miserable, but it is never too long before they are funny, caring and defiant once again.

Before allowing Adiotou to say her “real” name, Lady says a very important line: “my name’s Lady, it’ll be on my grave.” In this sense Lady will not be defined by her birth given name, instead the only name that matters is the one she chooses to die with. As the captive audience, we know Lady’s real name is Lady because we have watched her friends and her world use that name, just as we will stand with and recognize Mariame when she starts to look a bit different. Towards the end of the film, we see Mariame wearing a binder and with very short hair. It is unclear if this outfit is for her physical protection against the seemingly violent men she works with, or is reflective of what Mariame feels her true form may be. When we then watch Mariame slow dance with a girl we are reminded of the deep loyalty and fondness that she once had for her old friend Lady, and we wonder if the friendship we had witnessed earlier carried a different kind of love than just platonic.

These are questions that Girlhood doesn’t answer. Admittedly, this can be frustrating, as sometimes as a witness to Mariame’s life we want her to answer our questions. Especially by the end of the film one may find themselves expecting Mariame to define herself to us—and more importantly to those around her. As I watched Girlhood, I waited for a dramatic monologue: a moment in the film devoted to Mariame telling her world who she is and who she isn’t. It is not a spoiler to say that this moment does not come. Mariame does not tell us—or her friends, or the men she works with, or her first boyfriend, or her family— who she is, but perhaps this is simply because Mariame does not know yet. Meaning, Girlhood’s nuance in its exploration of gender and sexuality seems to lend to a larger truth. The truth being that Mariame is still growing up, she’s still finding out who she is, and the film won’t announce or clarify an answer that Mariame hasn’t discovered for herself.

There is beauty in this nuance, and for many queer individuals alike, there is also a universal truth in addition to Mariame’s personal one. Just as Mariame does not have the words, or space, to verbalize her being yet, many queer youth may take comfort in watching Mariame and knowing they are not alone in not being able to define themselves. I watched Girlhood on a couch next to my dad and his girlfriend, both of whom know I am a lesbian. What they may not know however, is that sometimes this label feels inadequate in explaining how I feel about my sexuality and particularly how I relate to my gender. What a personal relief it was then, to watch a film called Girlhood that had no interest in prescribing to a definition or experience of womanhood that I—and so many others—have become increasingly severed from.

However, Girlhood tells the intricate story of a Mariame, a black woman, growing up in a community that is deeply affected by the product of France’s racism. Mariame and her friends all live in public housing and, through the lens of the film, it appears as though there are no white people who live in these apartment buildings. Furthermore, Mariame, although certainly not defined by her world’s limitations, undoubtedly has to deal with the intersection of racism and sexism throughout her daily life. In this crucial way most of Mariame’s experience of “girlhood” is nothing like mine— but that shouldn’t make this film any less meaningful to me. Often I hear people like me who are white and queer equate how much they like a film to how much they relate to it; but how can we push for diversity and at the same time only desire to watch films that tell the stories of people who look like us. Of course there were still moments and scenes in Girlhood where I “saw myself” in the characters, but I ask again: why is seeing yourself in a film more meaningful than being able to see someone else?

After I watched Girlhood I called my friends and told them they had to watch it. I did not promise them that they would love it, but I was able to promise them that it wasn’t another film about white gay women for white gay women. I was also able to promise them that the film wasn’t a period piece. I told them what I will, in a sense, tell you: while Girlhood and its beautifully portrayed Mariame may have not made it to the big screens in 2014 like its younger and estranged sister, Portrait of a Lady on Fire did in 2020, the film and Mariame deserve a place on your screen at home and, if given, they will likely find a place to stay in your mind long after.

Where to Watch: Hulu (with premium subscription), Amazon Prime ($2.99 to Rent), Youtube ($2.99 to Rent), Itunes ($4.99 to Rent), Apple TV ($4.99 to Rent).

Acknowledgements

Before writing this piece I had never written a film review. Of course I had watched films, analyzed films, texted my friends and family to demand they watch a film, but writing a review is a different story. To write a review of a film is in a sense to quantify its value, and to be honest I never felt I was worthy of doing this. Who was I, as a nineteen year old, to think my opinions on a film should matter to anyone? However, as we entered the “Literary Review” Unit of Research Writing I realized that this would be my opportunity to write a review for a film that I felt had been looked over by mainstream audiences and critics alike. I may not have felt worthy of writing a review of Girlhood, but I knew the film was worthy of a better review than I had been able to find scouring on the internet. I would like to thank my professor Livia Meneghin for encouraging me each step of the way, and for helping me to create a review that I think reflects the beauty and importance of Girlhood.

[stretchjournalemerson]

One Bible Quote Pocket Knife Away From An Existential Crisis

By Jenna Reilly

For four years, from ages eight to twelve, I played in a bowling league two towns from mine at Patchogue Bowling Alley each Wednesday night from four o’clock to five thirty. The bowling alley was running down with half-seventies, half-nineties era technology and upholstery that smelt of pretzels and old carpet. But I enjoyed myself every time I went because I found that I really liked to bowl. The satisfaction of the pins crashing down from the force of the ball or the calculations needed for the perfect aim to knock down the last few pins, etc., I found much joy in the sport. I played with the same two to three boys, some varying as the years went on. Though I never got too close with them, an imaginary rivalry sprung in my head. I thought I kept it secret, but I definitely made gloating faces when I won or acted like nothing was wrong when I had lost without realizing it.

At one point, I wanted to win so bad that I began to pray to God to get strikes or win games. Not to say I didn’t work on my technique and actual skill in the game, but I used to literally pray to win when that didn’t seem to work. Thinking back, I don’t know why I thought that it would. I must have thought God worked in ways that he really didn’t, because when I didn’t win, and I found that my praying for bowling was useless, instead of questioning whether praying for sports was reasonable, I questioned why God wasn’t helping. I do not know if it was reason or lack thereof as a child, but I began to question what everyone was telling me about God. When I was twelve, I had to quit the league because Confirmation classes started for my church which were on Wednesday nights.

In my Confirmation classes, in a room filled with children’s toys within the part of the church that doubled as a preschool, we learned of men hearing signs from God, Noah’s ark filled with two of every animal in the world, and more. Our Pastor would give us sodas and snacks as he told us lessons and words from the Bible and how they could relate to our lives. Though we never discussed hot button issues like LGBTQ+ and God’s view of them or abstinence which I thought we would, that was probably for the best considering my soon-to-be-discovered sexuality.

These classes originally started two years before we were supposed to be Confirmed. Three months before our holy day, our Pastor said we would be going to classes for half a year more instead. With no explanation or reason given to us, we were all pretty confused and aggravated, but still went on.

One other requirement along with Confirmation classes was that we had to attend pretty much every Sunday mass in our little, old white church. We all did, except for my friend Ben who barely went to class nor church for the last year and a half of our Confirmation studies. This bothered my other friends and I who spent literally countless hours in that church or its classrooms. Surely what is right and fair will prevail, I thought, this is God we’re talking about, right?

Well there I was on Confirmation day with Ben and the rest of us, getting Confirmed for God. Remembering the endless hours of masses and events we all had to go through together, they all seemed rather pointless then with Ben standing there as well in the parish hall on a brisk Sunday morning in fall. I was wearing a lace-lined white dress with my black slip-on concert shoes, which hurt very badly due to my pre-existing blisters from the required Confirmation hike we went on two weeks prior. I was at the peak of the awkward stages of puberty at fourteen years old with my braces and straightened, yet still frizzy, blonde hair.

The whole congregation of my fellow church members came today with some added extended family members of the confirmands, as my pastor called us. We sat in the nicer portable fabric-covered chairs awaiting the ceremony. I was nervous that I would trip and fall or recite something incorrectly, I did not want to mess up the day we had waited so long for. But the service started and after thirty minutes and some godly songs we were called up with our immediate families.

We all stood on the sandy, gym-like wooden floor in front of the white and brown altar and five-foot cross hanging above it. Our families stood behind us, my proud Mom behind me, tearing up, and my Dad, also proud but a little less passionately, at her side. While my Mom is semi-religious, my Dad claims that the church will cave in if he steps foot inside. My Dad’s mom was very active in my church, many of the older members would speak of her and my Dad’s family very fondly to me. I did not know much of her devotion to God, though years after her death, some of her hand-made holiday decorations were still on display during my time at the church. My Dad said he had to go to mass each Sunday growing up, though he did not care much for it. And usually following in his Father’s footsteps, he has told me that my Grandpa coined the statement about the church collapsing with his presence.

As my pastor spoke, I kept feeling for an extra holy presence, which I didn’t quite find but also did not really expect. He’s always here regardless, I thought to myself. Well, maybe.

We each swore our oaths and we were suddenly Confirmed. All of that and it was over, great, I optimistically thought.

We finished up the ceremony and started to head out after our celebratory breakfast luncheon when my pastor gave us each a bag of gifts. One of them being a cross and another being a pocket knife with a bible quote. I loved the pocket knife but that seemed kind of weird to me - get Confirmed - receive a pocket knife. I guess I should have expected the unexpected when it came to this entire experience.

When I was home that night in my room, next to me a wooden cross with a brass Jesus hung on the wall by my Mom, I contemplated the day and everything that led up to it. I had to sit through two and a half years of Confirmation classes and Sunday services and then go on a required hiking retreat in the upstate mountains of New York, all while Ben missed out on most all of it, to gain an already pre-existing misunderstood concept of prayer and God and a pocket knife after some ritual of Confirmed faith? Something wasn’t adding up in my brain. This did not seem like what I thought religion was.

Back then, I would have never considered that God was not real, especially on my Confirmation day, but I did not see many logical reasons behind why my life was going how it was meanwhile God was supposed to take care of me. Now I knew things could have been much worse and I knew I was very lucky to have the life I did, but things have not always been sunshine and flowers for me. So I questioned, why would God make it that way? I wasn’t a bad kid . . . right?

I was taught to ask God for forgiveness for wrongdoing to prevent bad things from happening, so I asked and prayed. He was always supposed to forgive us, so why were things still going the way they were? Why did two of my grandparents get taken from me when I was a child? What did I do wrong back then? Why do people get to cheat their way out of things and still get the prize at the end like Ben? Why was my hard work and effort in attending two years of church and class rewarded with another half a year at the last minute? Why did I have to go hiking and get blisters on my feet to get confirmed and be accepted by God? Everything might be even more simpler than we all think it is, but if that is the case, then what is the purpose of it all if it’s not for God?

My religious journey was nothing I took too seriously for too long. Only for a few years in childhood was I devout, but I never thought much of it as it faded away, only remembering that I did not have the best experience getting Confirmed. I had many childish reasonings and ramblings that led to my questioning of faith. But sitting here now, open to any interpretation of life (personally favoring the one that we all just simply exist within scientific fact), I wonder how “wrong” I was at such a young age to question.

I grew up and at the age of fifteen I realized I was bisexual. It took a lot to overcome the internalized homophobia within myself to realize who I was. But once I did, I started to gain confidence within my sexuality and myself that I never had before. I am glad my church did not take a stance on it during my time there because it may have made my acceptance even harder, though I assumed most religions were against it. Realizing my sexuality solidified my questioning nature of God and (mainly) the major organized religions such as Christianity or the Protestant branches which I grew up under.

New questions began to unravel my ideas of God and such religions. If God loves all His creations, then why are people like me considered sinners to the church? Why was I born like this and then destined for a horrible life of discrimination and oppression? Why did I have to hate myself for fifteen years before somehow learning to like what God apparently hates of me?

Without my questioning of faith, I might still hate myself for who I naturally am. I didn’t know who I was then, but I’m grateful now that I questioned it all at such a young age to follow the path that I personally needed to. Maybe everything went wrong for the right reasons in the end.

Naturally, this all led to the loss of God as my answer to everything. Why we suffer, die, love, endure, exist, etc. So within that came a desire to have a reason for it all, which is a natural human reaction to life, and that is why so many people turn to religion. It is much simpler to live your life for God than to find a reason yourself, it seems.

Relying on God is a valuable tool when it comes to the hard things in life. That’s why it has been so popular for thousands of years: because life is not the kindest! Think about all of the people who worked their whole lives for minimum reward except the love and grace of God for their devotion and (hopefully) a one way ticket to heaven. Now, take away God and heaven from that equation, if that is all they focused on, what else did they have to live for?

If I did not have God to live for, then I needed another reason. Once I stopped relying on Him to guide me to my purpose and meaning, I felt lost in it all when things got difficult. But over time and through my experiences, I learned my own lessons of what life can provide and what I could try to make out of it. I saw love for my friends and family, passion for my interests and hobbies, confidence in who I was, the beauty of the world around me, and so much more. The hard parts of life became a little bit more blissful when I saw the brighter side of what I could make of my existence.

So when I began to question: why is this happening to me, to all of us? What is the purpose of my life? I realized that I am not completely sure, nobody truly knows. But over time, I discovered that maybe my life could be whatever I wanted to make of it.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for what Professor Armour has taught me about memoirs. I had not written many memoirs before Research Writing, I was more of a fan of realistic fiction and I was used to that form of storytelling. But after reading examples and studying what distinguishes a memoir from other pieces of writing, I discovered the impact they could have. This piece specifically allowed me to process many feelings from my experiences with the church and beyond. I never truly analyzed my experiences and their effects on me until I spewed it all out on a page and wrote my memoir. Professor Armour allowed me to discover a new form of analysis within my own life through writing, and I am very grateful for it.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Great Lawn Separated

By Samson Malmoi

On the great lawn separated

by zigs of pavement

zagging eyes

see the beautiful people-

I am reading

America’s favorite

heretic!

Then I feel so deeply

connected to the ground

and the nails in my shoe

bleeding into my foot

will not bother me at all

maybe because

I am reading

“Four Changes”

or the cool

wind after winter.

Acknowledgements

This poem wants you to take a walk. Feel the environment, and think environmentally. It wants you to look up “Four Changes” and Gary Snyder, but know that anything would do the trick because your enjoyment of the earth is solely based on the environment around you. I would like to thank Professor Shippy and the rest of my poetry class for giving feedback on this poem, and Gabe Cohen, for being important, as always.

[stretchjournalemerson]

When Moments Turn to Memories

By Maddie Browning

art by Molly Mitchell

“You will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” - Dr. Seuss

This seemingly simple quote sat on a bulletin board outside of my high school theatre classroom for months. I would pass it quickly, glance over at it, and go about my day, not thinking about how horribly true it was. I knew things ended, but I didn’t understand that people did too.

I struggle with beginnings because I can only ever think of their eventual end, when everything I love about them will soon be a distant memory. When I was 12, my parents took my brother and I to Hawaii. It was absolutely breathtaking. We saw volcanoes and luscious greenery and crystal clear waters. We ziplined in an area where Jurassic Park was filmed and saw spinner dolphins leap into the air off the side of our boat when we went on a snorkeling trip. And as wonderful as it was, I couldn’t stop thinking about the time when I would eventually have to leave, when I would get one final glance at the glimmering waves, and then take off on a plane back to Colorado. It was like I needed the time to prepare myself for when the dreamy vacation life would be over before it had even begun. But I thought that maybe if I was prepared, leaving wouldn’t hurt as much. Maybe that was true. I still don’t know.

I never dealt with the death of a loved one until a little over a year ago. Before that, I had lost my great grandparents, but at the time, I was too young to comprehend the finality and pain of death. I thought that maybe, like my vacation thought process, if I had enough time to prepare for someone’s eventual death, I would be more okay. I’d be ready. But that was complete bullshit, and I didn’t get any time to prepare anyway.

I hear "Rainbow" by Kacey Musgraves, and suddenly I'm back in the car with my two best friends. We're dressed in all black. It's the middle of the afternoon, but it's as if the sky has been drained of all of its color. I’m sitting in the passenger seat, and I see life passing by in slow motion as I glance out at the gloomy clouds hovering above us. I’ve never seen a darker day. It is almost as if the world knows that something horrible happened and is in mourning with us. We drive in complete silence except for the soft playing of the song. I can feel the downbeat of the piano chords like they’re playing on my heart, pushing out all of the deep emotions I didn’t know I could feel. We make it to the church just as Kacey sings, “Everything will be alright now,” even though it couldn’t be farther from the truth. This used to be the place where we would all gather for choir concerts and sing and laugh. Now, it’s the place where we will witness the funeral of our 17 year old friend.

The first time that I met Parker was in my Theatre I class in high school. He stood apart from everyone else—wearing an orange puffer jacket, cargo shorts, and flip flops no matter the weather. His brown hair swept lightly across his forehead and his deep brown eyes held darker secrets than any of us could have ever known. He was kind and talkative and loved, but stood in the corner of the room as if he didn’t quite feel like he belonged. He was the kind of person who you wanted, needed to get to know, but you didn’t know how. My clearest memory from that class is watching a scene that he wrote and performed where a talking goat head was controlling his mind and driving him to insanity. He was strange, but in the best way.

I remember walking into the church and feeling numb. I saw people I knew everywhere, but everything felt wrong, and I couldn't even make it past the front door without crying. I couldn't understand how this was really happening. Directly inside, there were photo displays of Parker from when he was a baby until now and items he treasured like his infamous Scooby Doo shirt. I felt nauseous and almost as if I was floating outside of my own body. And as I floated above it all, I saw static. People were moving around in all different directions, and all I could see was a deep black aura emitting from the crowd. There was a sense of emptiness and darkness. Everyone blended together in a large mass of pain and suffering, a gathering of people who loved each other, sharing in immense grief. I didn’t know how to handle it all. I was shaking uncontrollably as I moved toward my seat in the chapel.

One of my favorite memories of Parker was during Beauty and the Beast, our last musical before COVID shut down in-person schooling. I played Mrs. Potts, but could not do a British accent to save my life. Parker had a knack for accents, so he told me he would help me in whatever way I needed. He tried coaxing me to say different phrases and mimic his intonation and went on rants in character about his life as the person he had created with specific accents. There was one day that I had an especially horrible British accent, and I was feeling really defeated. I told him it was almost more fake Australian than British to which he said, “That’s ok. Australians are just British people but on fire.” He made me laugh and smile when I felt awful about myself. I’ll never forget that moment.

When the funeral started, they played a slideshow of Parker from when he was a baby until his senior photos. It was the first time I had ever seen this adorable little boy. His family enjoyed going on tropical vacations together yearly and compiled photos of him from each one. He seemed to be holding exotic animals in almost every photo. There were different types of lizards and birds and monkeys perched on his shoulder. I remember just how captivating his smile was. At that moment I couldn’t think of any smiles in the world that shone brighter than his. He looked up at the camera like he was the luckiest boy in the world to be where he was. He was so playful and happy, but now he was gone.

Parker was really, really funny. He used to post daily snapchat stories about the most random things. My best friend, Kalyssa, and I looked forward to watching them everyday and laughing while he discussed the concept of frogs and how airplanes are just flying metal dildos. “Bro what even the fuck are airplanes?” was our favorite quote. None of what he said made sense, but without us even realizing, it was one of the best parts of our day.

Parker’s family wrote moving speeches that they delivered throughout the funeral, but his dad’s speech still haunts me today. He said that whenever they went on vacation, Parker was always captivated by the waves. He would go down to the edge of the sand and play in the water as the tide moved in and out. He couldn’t swim, ironically enough, but he still loved being right at the edge of the water. His dad said that he would watch Parker play for hours, content with seeing him so happy. He said that those same waves that his son used to play in now washed over him with grief and pain. The thing that his son loved most in this world, now tore him apart. I think about that a lot, and I wish that I could have known that little boy, so enthralled by the crashing of the ocean's waves.

During the first semester of our senior year, Kalyssa and I choreographed and starred in the musical, Heathers, with our theatre production ensemble class. We only had about two and a half weeks to pull the show together, so Kalyssa and I had to divide and conquer between learning our own parts and teaching choreography. I worked with Parker on the song, “Dead Gay Son,” and he was a comically awful dancer. He performed every step that I taught him, no matter how many times I demonstrated it, almost like a suburban dad trying to embarrass his kids. My favorite part of rehearsal was watching him dance. He tried so hard to get all of the steps, and I loved seeing him working so passionately. He never gave up and always had a smile on his face. I would give anything just to see him dance one more time.

My high school actually held an in-person graduation in a huge field more than six feet apart in July. They had a chair set out for Parker with balloons tied to it, and when they called his name, they released them into the air. I remember shedding a tear as I looked around at all of his friends that shared in my grief, but it was like a small part of our pain flew into the air with those balloons. It was a beautiful moment knowing that he would never be forgotten as long as we were still here to remember him.

It’s been a little over a year since he died. It still feels weird, like a part of me is missing. I still have bad days where I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning and random triggers that send me into a dark void once again. But yesterday something happened that gave me a little bit of peace and hope. My roommate, Molly, is very spiritual. She does tarot card readings and lights candles for her deities, and however unbelievable as it sounds, she sees ghosts. I didn’t believe it myself at first, but after all of the weird encounters in our room, I know she’s not just seeing things. She can’t always see the full features of any ghosts, but she can feel their energies and when certain ghosts are connected to the people they stand next to. Yesterday, she told me that she had been noticing an energy that never left my side since last semester. Even when we left our room and traveled out into the city, it was always there. She sensed that this energy was a young male presence, who had some deeper connection to me. She is sure it’s him. It’s Parker. I know it sounds crazy and impossible, but I believe her. In all of my grief, I didn’t realize that he never truly left. And even though I can’t see him, I now know that he has and always will be with me.

Acknowledgements

This memoir was inspired by my friend, Parker Priesser. He was such a kind and beautiful person who made my days brighter and never failed to make me laugh. He was funny and smart and good at accents and had so much potential to do great things. His death caused me great pain and sorrow, and this memoir was one of my outlets of expressing that. It gave me a way to feel him again without spiraling back into a pit of grief. He was truly the most genuine person I have ever met.

I miss you, Parker, and I will always love you.

[stretchjournalemerson]

We Are, We Aren't

By Connor Gibson

02:51 PM

Dirty piles of slush litter the ground of the Public Garden. The ice on the pond is melting in the sun. Kids scoop up the last traces of snow, melted and hardened and melted into chunks of ice, to throw at each other. The Garden is full of people, tourists and natives alike taking advantage of the 42-degree weather— which, for a Boston February, is “warm”. I’m bundled in my wool coat and hat; others’ Patriots tees show under unzipped hoodies. The blindingly white neck of my Tatte shirt peeks out above my scarf. As always, I’m running early, but I speed-walk anyway.

Google tells me that Back Bay, the neighborhood home to the Tatte where I work, is one of the wealthiest places in the Boston area. It tells me that the bay on which the neighborhood sits was drained in the 1800s, uncovering foul-smelling fens and swamps. Developers poured cement on top of it and chopped it up into rectangles. There’s something there, some cute metaphor comparing designer stores atop a concrete-covered swamp to glossing over the issue of gentrification in favor of a new Sweetgreen.

I’ll write about that later, I think. I exit the Garden at Newbury and Arlington and cross the street. A high-cheekboned model, face blown up to the size of my entire body, peers down at me from the Burberry store window. Her eyelashes are lowered seductively under her huge sunglasses. Excuse me, I hear in my head. A posh British accent. Excuse me, why are you looking at me? I look away.

Letters barrage me as I turn onto Boylston. MK MK MK MK on clutches and purses. Chanel on a storefront. HOMELESS VETERAN PLEASE HELP GOD BLESS, scrawled on torn cardboard with a marker.

I walk into Tatte and take off my coat. VIBE CHECKER blares at me from the temperature gun, neon pink Sharpie on white.

Sarah, the mid manager, points the VIBE CHECKER at my forehead.

How’s my vibe? I ask.

She chuckles. Fine. Symptoms?

All of ‘em, at once.

Go grab an apron and we can talk about the new dinner menu. Her sweatshirt says BREAKFAST SANDWICH. I know that our BREAKFAST SANDWICH sweatshirts retail for $35. I wonder which Michael Kors clutch goes best with a BREAKFAST SANDWICH sweatshirt.

I step into Tatte Connor with his pristine white shirt and bandana and sickly sweet voice— a voice both Connor and not Connor, a voice that is mine and isn’t. Tatte Connor doesn’t create witty metaphors about systemic problems, he fires off meaningless platitudes: I like your outfit, cold out there, isn’t it? I know, I don’t know how I don’t eat them all. He grabs an apron, clocks in, and listens intently as Sarah explains chraimeh sauce.

03:14 PM

I’m at the register today, standing in one place for over five hours. It means hi, welcome in! to everyone who enters. It means my voice will stay in its customer service pitch for long after I leave, and when I walk around a person at Target while picking up yogurt that night, I will automatically announce BEHIND! and scare the shit out of them.

A woman walks in, several shopping bags swinging from her arms. Hi, welcome in! She nods acknowledgement. She wants a medium latte, almond milk and vanilla. We only have a small and a large. She asks to see the large. She’s fine with a large.

I take her phone number. All right! Will that be all for you? And would you like to leave a tip today?

She would not. She announces this so happily that I’m forced to match her tone. All right! I hope it sounds authentic. She takes her card.

I do NOT need a receipt, she proclaims, and walks out the door, bags bumping against the doorframe. The bags are massive, stiff, and glossy. They look expensive, down to the heavy serif font. My stained apron feels incredibly out of place. I wonder if it would be stupid to go get a new apron.

Caleb, the barista, waves his hand. He’s made my drink— it’s on the bar. I nod and ring up three more people before I get enough of a break to go grab it. He’s written my name on the cup and drawn little hearts for the O’s. My heart swells. I take half a sip, and then someone else walks in the door. Hi, welcome in!

03:32 PM

It’s a full-on late-lunch rush. The morning shift has just left, and the crowd hits us in the middle of a change. I’ve been moved off register and over to expo, where I’m doing three people’s jobs at once. Picking up? Todd? Would you mind waiting outside for a few minutes? Hi, Doordash? Do you need a menu? Take care! Thank you so much. Hi, welcome in!

A couple enters. They wear matching black puffy jackets with faux fur hoods and matching black sunglasses, similar in size and shape to the glasses on the Burberry model. They don’t remove their hoods or their sunglasses when they step inside. Picking up? Favio? I hand them their drinks. They are not happy.

You should be more thoughtful of your customers, I am told. It’s cold outside, and you shouldn’t keep people waiting. You need to be thinking about that.

I’m so sorry, sir.

I am reprimanded.

You need to move faster,

I’m sorry, sir. We’re doing our best.

I am told that maybe, that is not good enough, eh? And Favio and his girlfriend leave.

Have a good one! Take care! I imagine labels on their backs, as bold and shiny as the ones on their jackets and sunglasses: ASSHOLES.

03:42 PM

I am back on the register. The late-lunch rush has died down. In eighteen minutes, dinner will open up, and we’ll get slammed again— but for now I get to rest. I stack pistachio croissants in a delicate, buttery pyramid, coating my gloves with green dust and oil. Once I’m pretty sure they won’t fall, I head back to the register to count my tips.

Most people tip, but off-handedly, trying not to sound eager or generous. Sure, throw a dollar on there— “there” being a $12 sandwich. I wonder what kind of life they lead where dollars are something they throw. I notice that those thrown dollars never fall into the HOMELESS VETERAN’s plastic cup.

05:08 PM

An older woman enters and beelines for the Grab-and-Go case. She wears a brightly patterned scarf over her hair and carries an enormous H&M bag, full to bursting. She swings the bag onto one shoulder and holds up a small container of chicken salad. How much is it?, she asks. Maybe six or seven dollars, I reply.

She is surprised that I don’t know the exact price. She asks, don’t you work here? She asks, again, how much it is.

Give me one minute to check. It is seven dollars.

She complains that nobody here ever knows anything. She explains to me that it’s just one item, and you should know how much it costs. She tells me, I asked a girl a similar question, just the other day, and she didn’t know either.

I’m sorry about that. Will that be all?

She doesn’t want anything else, and pays with cash. She counts what I give back to her. She drops the chicken salad in her H&M bag, and then she leaves.

Have a great day! In my mind, I replace the H&M on her bag with BOOMER.

I remind myself that I am not an idiot, and that I deal with a lot, all day, and that I am good at my job. I remind myself that I am a human who makes mistakes. I remind myself to smile.

Another woman walks into the store. Hi, welcome in!

06:26 PM

I’m back from break, during which I inhaled a breakfast sandwich and submitted two

discussion posts on my phone. Apparently we have only made $96 so far from the dinner menu. The store is dark. Half of the patio is empty, and the people walking by, bundled up in winter coats, lean against the wind.

I’m sent over to the pass to bag food while my coworker Ayad takes his break. The dinner items come with a side salad and a little bag of pistachio cranberry cookies. Between orders, I stuff napkins into sandwich bags and draw hearts with a Sharpie on the cookie bags. I think of the people receiving them, in brownstones around Boston, living alone, living with girlfriends, living with husbands, living with tiny yappy dogs.

A woman comes in. I walk over to the register. Her hair is dark, curly, and pulled back in a tight ponytail. She carries a WHOLE FOODS canvas bag. She reminds me of my mother. She’s been thinking about getting a challah all day, but now she’s not so sure about the challah versus the pain de mie, and do I have a suggestion for her?

I bake challah at home, I say, but our challah is delicious.

She asks excitedly what recipe I use— I use Smitten Kitchen’s fig and sea salt challah, without the figs. I can’t find another good recipe for just one challah. She uses the New York Times recipe, makes two and freezes one. Smart, I say.

She decides on the pain de mie. She asks how long I’ve been making challah.

When I was at home, I made it every Friday since the start of the pandemic. I wanted to do that here, but I live alone and I can’t eat that much bread.

She’s sure my friends would be glad to eat it, and I agree. I ring up the pain de mie and an orange juice, and she tucks them into her WHOLE FOODS bag. Happy baking, she tells me, and leaves, pulling her hood up to block the wind.

08:32 PM

The close went quickly. Caleb, Ayad, and I walk out the door. Our manager stays behind, counting money, shutting everything down for the night. Lights flick off one by one. The wind bites my skin and whips my hair off my forehead. I button up my coat. Caleb and Ayad walk down the steps of the Arlington stop, waving goodbye, and I start the cold walk home.

Google tells me that the drought of the summer of 2016 brought many Back Bay buildings dangerously close to rotting and crumbling. Their foundations sit on man-made land, supported by wooden pilings. The drought brought the water table close to the pilings, putting them at risk for decay.

There’s something there, something about how the tiniest bit of stress can expose the problems lurking below a neighborhood so put-together and pristine on the surface. I’ll write about that later, I think.

It’s hard to put how I feel right now into words. I feel homesick. I feel happy. I feel tired. I want to collapse onto my sofa and pass out. I want to eat way too much cheesecake. I want to feel, just for a few minutes, like the people I welcome into Tatte.

I want to roll out dough on the dining room table, showing my mother how much it’s risen when she walks through the door with a WHOLE FOODS canvas bag full of groceries. I want to keep talking about bread. I want to work at a job where everyone who comes in asks me about recipes; where nobody plops their Chanel bags on the counter, knocking dinner menus left and right while digging in their MK MK MK clutch for their platinum VISA; where Favio and his girlfriend realize that the people bringing them their soy macchiatos are people; where older women understand that I have to remember three thousand things a day and sometimes none of those things are the price of chicken salad. I want to thank the New York Times Challah Lady for making my day a little less shit and reminding me why I even.

I could work at Starbucks, or Caffe Nero, or JAHO Coffee Roaster & Wine Bar. Sometimes, when people take their masks off inside to snap pictures of them biting into donuts for their Instagrams, I think about working at Target.

Then I bring home a whole cake, or I get handed a free iced latte with my name written on the top and little hearts drawn around it, or I talk about Boston winters with a customer excited to learn I’ve also moved from the Bay Area. I strike up a conversation with a man waiting for the restroom— he wants to know about the history of Tatte in Boston, and I tell him what I can.

I pet a very small dog. I hand the last almond croissant to a woman who tells me she is overjoyed that we have one left. She tells me that she stops by after work every day to try and buy an almond croissant. More often than not, we’re sold out.

I’m happy I could get you one today, I say, and I mean it.

I want to think that Back Bay is this woman— Almond Croissant Woman— or the New York Times Challah Lady. At times I think Back Bay is Favio and his girlfriend, MK MK MK clutches, $7 chicken salads, the Burberry model’s poster-sized glare. I want to think these things, but I know that Back Bay is none of them.

I know that Tatte Back Bay is just a coffee shop. I want to call it a microcosm of humanity, a shiny white petri dish for me to peer into. I want to claim that I know these people, that Favio and his girlfriend are selfish assholes, that the boomer really does value chicken salad over basic kindness and gratitude. I want to slap labels on them, thick-serif RICH KID, glossy embossed DADDY’S MONEY, CHALLAH LADY (GOOD PERSON?) in cursive scrawl. The truth is that I don’t know them, and I will never know them. Maybe Favio and his girlfriend were fighting that day. Maybe the boomer’s husband had just died. Maybe Challah Lady ran over a cat with her Subaru on the way home. Maybe maybe maybe.

Google tells me that Back Bay has a population of 16,427. The median age of those people is 35.3 years. Over nine thousand of them are white-collar workers. Their average household income is over $127k. Most of them are women. Most of them walk to work.

Google doesn’t tell me what challah recipe they use. It doesn’t tell me whether they feed the cookies that come with their cod in chraimeh sauce to their small, yappy dogs. It doesn’t tell me whether they notice the hearts I drew on their bags, or whether they smile before throwing those bags away.

We are what we say to customer service workers, and we aren’t. We are our jobs, our genders, our hobbies, our incomes, and we aren’t. We are the hi, welcome in and the thanks, take care and all the other facades we present to people, and we aren’t.

I walk up the steps of my apartment building, unlock and open the door, then close it behind me. Tatte Connor— the Connor I am and am not— stays out in the cold, perched on a wooden patio chair, shivering in his perfectly white work shirt: ready for me to step into him tomorrow.

Acknowledgements:

My inspiration for this essay came from working at Tatte and getting to know, through the lens of customer service, the people of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. As anybody who has ever worked in customer service will know, working with people is the best and worst part of the job. I’ve had some truly frustrating interactions, and I’ve also met some people that brightened up the rest of my day. When I’ve been on my feet for five hours, maintaining a customer service persona, and dealing with everything else that customer service entails, it’s easy to assign labels to people and make snap judgements about them based on a one-minute interaction.

My goal for this essay was to go deeper than that. The assignment that prompted this essay was to compose a profile, creating— in the words of my WR 121 E47 professor Stephen Shane— a “dominant impression that captures the complexity of your subject”. While I wanted to profile the people of Back Bay, I’m aware that I will never be able to understand their complexity through these tiny snapshots, and I tried to convey that struggle in this essay. I’d like to thank Prof. Shane for assigning this essay, and I’d like to thank the customers of Tatte Back Bay for their inspiration.

[stretchjournalemerson]

The Words She Knows, The Tune She Hums

By Julia Slaughter

I know no one in the world who loves Elton John more than my mother. Born in the year of JFK’s inauguration and the Freedom Riders, she went to high school with feathered bangs and bell bottom jeans, collecting the Rocketman’s records and merchandise everywhere she went. One time I was helping her clean out her closet and we found pages and pages of yellowed notebook paper with her favorite lyrics and songs from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album in her curly teenaged handwriting, the pages saturated with forty-year-old highlighter ink and eraser streaks from her annotations.

My godmother, her childhood best friend and next-door-neighbor, Sandy, was her partner in Elton fever, and she often tells me of the time when he came to TD Garden in Boston in September of 1973 and the two twelve-year-olds could not get tickets in time: so the night of the concert, Sandy came over and they listened to her Goodbye Yellow Brick Road LP and cried on the hot pink shag carpet of my mother’s bedroom all night long.

Fortunately, this tragic night was later redeemed by the fact that Mom and Sandy ended up seeing Elton in concert together something like fifteen times after that over the years. I think about this story a lot, though, because it resonates with me to my core. My best friend Miguel and I had tickets to see Harry Styles at TD Garden - the very same stadium Mom and Sandy wanted to see Elton John at all those years ago - on Halloween of 2020, but the concert was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In true fan fashion, Miguel and I FaceTimed all night long on Halloween, both laying on our bedroom floors listening to Harry’s Fine Line album and crying for what could have been.

I love my favorite artists - musical, visual, or otherwise - with every fiber of my being, and I believe wholeheartedly that this trait has to have been from the influence of my mom, who owns every single deluxe version of Elton’s discography on vinyl (which is something like thirty studio albums) and has a T-shirt from every concert she’s ever been to. I look around my bedroom at the stack of every deluxe version of Taylor Swift’s albums in CD, at the pictures of her that I’ve cut from magazines and plastered all over my walls, at the playlists upon playlists of her songs for every conceivable situation or mood, at the lyrics of hers I’ve printed out and annotated myself, the ticket stubs from past concerts pinned to my bulletin board. This obsession is a manifestation of the emotional connection my mother and I both have to music and the artists that make it, and the unashamed expression of being a fan of something.

But my experience in this expression is often met with judgement with that unmistakable, underlying current of misogyny. Why is it when I say Taylor Swift is my favorite artist, I am met with eye rolls? Or when I say that One Direction contributed as much, if not more, to the music industry than The Beatles (maybe this is a bit of an overstatement, but a hilarious one that I

believe wholeheartedly), I am met with the rage of a thousand suns from men? Do they not remember the time before The Beatles became music for pretentious white guys, and were a British boy band with a largely female audience, just like One Direction?

Truth be told, I used to hate my mom’s music. I used to whine and whine when she put her CDs into the stereo, arguing that my friends’ parents let them listen to Lady Gaga and Ke$ha in the car. She would roll her eyes and turn the volume up just to tease me - this was her music and no one, not even her five year old daughter, could convince her to change it, unless I could come up with a better alternative (it wasn’t too hard - she vibed with Hannah Montana a lot more than a grown adult probably should have). She taught me to be proud of the things I love, because despite growing up in a time when gender roles were even stricter than they are now, she never let anyone, especially any man, give her a hard time for crying tears of joy when she got tickets to see Sonny and Cher at TD Garden in 1971.

It was - and always has been - young women like my mother and myself who have shaped and influenced the music industry, and I firmly believe that this passion and emotional connection to things is passed down from mother to daughter, from sister to sister, from friend to friend. It was certainly passed down when my mom took me to see Taylor Swift at Gillette Stadium twice, once when I was thirteen, and the other when I was sixteen. She watched Miguel and I scream and sing and dance in our nosebleed seats at the top of the stadium, and laughed, posting even more photos and videos than I did because I knew she would have killed to have videos of her and Sandy at their favorite artists’ shows when they were our age. She danced along in that unabashedly awkward way that all moms do, the way that normally would have embarrassed me into the next century, however this was no normal night: the crowd was roaring, the music was blaring, and my favorite singer in the entire world was right in front of me.

Now when we go for car rides, my mom always hands me the aux cord, and in this transfer of power, I feel like the student surpassing the master. She drove me to every single college tour I went on the summer before my senior year - which was something like ten different colleges across New England, ironically not a single one of them being the school I ended up attending - and I would scour my playlists to queue up songs I thought she would like for the two hour car rides. We would chat about whatever was on our minds, or nothing at all. Sometimes I’d fall asleep in the passenger seat, other times I’d go on and on about whatever show I was watching at the time, or drama with boys and friends, all with my favorite songs as the soundtrack. We’d laugh about getting horribly lost, or stop for fast food, or just sit quietly and zone out.

“I like this one,” she’d say every so often. Or I’d later hear her humming one of my songs to herself. These moments feel like the world’s greatest honor coming from someone who helped make the music industry what it is today. Singing along to “Tiny Dancer” one moment and “Love Story” the next, we create a space that is beautifully simple, lighthearted, and joyful, a space where our voices, however off-key they may be at times, are heard.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Professor Mary Kovaleski Byrnes for introducing the concept of memoir to our class, and for her helpful feedback on the first draft of this piece. Many thanks to Sarah Sweeney for her fascinating insight on memoir writing, and to Jasmine Suk for peer reviewing this piece. I’d also like to thank my roommate Megan for enduring my writer’s block and for bouncing ideas around with me. Finally, I’d obviously like to thank Mrs. Carol Slaughter, my mom, for inspiring this memoir, and also for everything else.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Give Him Space

By Fiona Murphy

My dad stands across from us. We are waiting for him to speak. It’s hard to say how long we have been waiting, how many seconds slip past—his hands splayed out on the edges of the counter like a martyr on a cross.

He hasn’t lived in this house, the Big House as he calls it, for six years and his presence is always slightly off. Years from now, I will remember him here with sunglasses on his head, to-go cup of coffee in hand, ready to leave as soon as he enters—as I will see him so many times after this.

I am the only one of my siblings who went to school today. I sat in my second grade classroom and raised my hand for morning prayer.

“I wanna pray for someone in my family who died.” I said, beaming with pride. Having someone to pray for was like a gold badge of honor.

“I heard about that,” My snippy teacher who seems to hate me for being too loud and having bad handwriting said. “Your uncle, right?”

The memory now sits heavy in my stomach, an inexplicable kernel of shame. I watch my brother’s polar bear patterned pajama clad leg kick the counter in front of him over and over, creating a steady beat.

Yesterday, in the Party City parking lot, my mom got a call and paced circles around the car for half an hour. My sister, the oldest, was pulled aside in the balloon aisle, hearing what my brother and I are waiting to hear now.

My dad’s hand scrubs down his face every few minutes punctuated with a heavy sigh. His eyes are bloodshot red. When he does begin to speak, he doesn't stop for a long while. He talks about Jack and what happened and what he did and something about the funeral and how it is our choice if we want to go. All of this will be lost to me eventually. Only the sentence, “I just want you kids to know I would never do anything like this to you” will stick.

I don't go to the funeral. I guess it’s a choice I made, but I wish someone else had chosen for me. And chosen differently.

*

I am fifteen in my freshly painted bedroom. The walls are dark purple, masking the light blue my brother painted it before me. I thought it would be cozy but now it makes me feel as though the room is quickly shrinking. It is spring.

“Dad wants you to call him!” I yell to my mom. We are at the Big House. My sister and my brother have ended up living with my dad in his gray one-story across town.

“What?” She asks, appearing in the doorway.

I don’t bother to pause the episode of Gossip Girl I am watching. Blair is running to meet Chuck at the top of the Empire State building.

“Dad wants you to call him,” I repeat.

She groans, reluctant like a teenager, and dials him. She rolls her eyes at me as she listens to the dial tone.

“Hello?” She answers in her phone voice, always louder and cheerier than necessary. Her face falls and she turns away from me. I pause and both Blair and I are suspended in time, her with a discarded bouquet of pink peonies in hand.

I catch snippets of the conversation. The muffled sound of my dad’s voice on the other end punctuated by my mom’s sympathetic “Okay”s and worried eyes.

“It’s Daniel.” She says when she hangs up.

My dad doesn't make a speech this time. Or if he does, it’s at his gray house and I’m not invited.

My mom doesn't say how uncle Daniel died, and I will never know.

Daniel was the youngest, like me, but he never seemed it since Conor, my dad’s other brother––died at only nineteen. He was frozen in time in my mind, though I’d never met him, an eternal teenager. I hadn’t seen Daniel in years, and to me he was frozen, too. Late twenties, always smiling, soft-spoken compared to Jack and my dad.

My mom goes to the funeral without me though again, I can’t recall deciding. I wish someone had put me in the car, someone had put their foot down. I spend the weekend alone in the Big House which seems to be getting bigger. My purple bedroom threatens to swallow me whole.

My dad was the oldest of six: two girls, four boys. By the time he is fifty, he is the oldest of three and has no brothers. My siblings and I make three to begin with. What are our odds of lasting? I wonder. Will we make it to fifty?

*

It is Mother’s day and I am seventeen. We are in a park downtown sitting on a bench in a meadow of purple flowers. The park is huge, spanning hundreds of acres. It’s scattered with grass fields, walking trails, and large yellow abandoned houses. It feels entirely removed from the city as if we could disappear into it.

We watch dots of people wander around the beach and the lighthouse below us. The Puget Sound extends for miles past my eyeline. My mom says something offhandedly, a casual mention, that this is where my uncle Jack died. She says it and only I hear it.

I knew he died in a park. My mom said it once when I was a kid. I think I overheard it though I can’t imagine who she was telling. The news said he didn't look like himself. She said. People thought he was a homeless man. He looked crazy.

At the time, I pictured Jack with a full beard, tattered clothes, and a crazy look in his eye. In my mind, park meant playground and he sat on a bench in front of one. Townspeople running from him, shielding their children, in disgust.

That image transforms from cartoonish to vivid.

It was spring and the park was probably filled with people. I wonder how many people heard the sound. I wonder how long the ambulance took to back down the curving dirt road. I wonder, regrettably, how he was found.

He didn't even look like himself. That stuck with me. I examined my father all through high school. When I saw him for hours at a time, weeks apart. I would inspect his face for a change, as if he would wake up one day unrecognizable and I would know and I could somehow fix it. I was trying to lessen the fear I felt, that it would happen suddenly. That the funeral would come and go too quickly to stop it.

“I think there’s a bench somewhere in the park, dedicated to him,” my mom says. I keep my eyes on the distant dots of people, they walk along the edge of the water. Close but not touching. Somewhere here there is a memorial in the form of a park bench. Some sign of remembering. But with its endless horizon and acres of dry grass, how could we find it? There’s no one to ask––no one I could build up the courage to call.

*

I am eighteen and I am in my father’s Denali. It’s filled with discarded paperwork and crumpled notes on yellow legal pads. It perpetually smells of cigar smoke now, the habit he picked up last year to quit drinking. It makes my stomach turn.

Somehow, it is brought up that it is the anniversary of Daniel’s death. The call in my purple bedroom was three years ago now, though it feels much longer. I don't know if he brings it up or I bring it up. I fear it’s a very me thing to do. It’s the anniversary of the death of your brother, I’d say. Suddenly unable to follow up on what I started I’d go quiet. He’d be forced to reply once the silence grew too suffocating, sticking to the seats and muffling the radio. Yes, yes it is.

Once it’s brought up, it sits in the air for a moment too long.

I remember last year when his parents came to stay at my dad’s house. I went over for dinner and after they left, he told me as he walked them to their car, his father told him he was glad he quit drinking. We were always worried about that, my grandpa had said.

When my dad told me this he smiled but scoffed. “Why would you wait until I quit to say something? Why wouldn’t they tell me they were worried?”

We are at the stop sign a block from the Big House.

“Are you okay?” I say finally, not looking at him.

“Oh,” he says wryly. “I’m okay.”

We pass the stop sign. Sunglasses on his head, coffee cup in the center console. He looks like himself. I’m always worried about you, I think but don’t say.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay.”

It’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to talking about it. Any of it.

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge my uncles who were filled with love. This memoir is meant to be about my experience of their deaths, but I want to acknowledge the beauty and joy they brought to me, my family, and everyone who knew them during their lives. I also want to acknowledge my dad, my aunts and my grandparents––who have felt and mourned their loss in ways I will never understand.

​

[stretchjournalemerson]

facing tremont and park

By Abbie Langmead

there's a moment at sunset

when the sun hits a window

three blocks away that reflects

directly into my bedroom,

covering everything in red

honey,

and i remember that there are

pretty things

that i forgot, saving space for

ugly things

that i remember.

a white and walnut beebox

i never decorated, except

with the lists of work

i should do.

i should do a lot of things.

i don’t need a reminder

that there’s work to be done.

yet i so often sit

mesmerized, a room soaked in

sunlight.