All posts by Suzanne Freeman

Into a Sliding World by Jane Bradley

Projector playing on wall of house
 

Before there were Google maps, cable travel channels and live streaming from every corner of the Internet, there were slides, those posh cousins of snapshots. The tiny film inside a cardboard frame only reveals itself through projection on a white screen in a dark room, lending a kind of drama and mystery to each shot. In my home, putting up the screen and watching a round of slides was an important occasion. So important that my parents invited friends over for cocktails before regaling them with a slide show of, say, Pompeii, or Rome. You … Continue reading Into a Sliding World by Jane Bradley

Granny by Sharon Harrigan


 

We had just learned how to answer the phone. We liked to grab it first, before it woke our parents. That made us feel like spies and more grown-up than five. We flitted from flimsy top and bottom bunk, almost as soundless as we were sleepless. We lit like two squirrels on a telephone wire, our blonde or auburn hair banded into bushy tails. Red-checked, flame-resistant nightgowns scratched our scabbed-up, tomboy legs. Who would call us so early, the sky still dark through yellowed curtains? We knew who. Both tottering on a single metal chair … Continue reading Granny by Sharon Harrigan

Catalogers of the Galaxy by M.X. Wang


 

Later, when asked to speak about what happened for the second time, Harlen recalled that it was in fact a single object, faint and blurry one second, close and vibrant the next. It hovered overhead: two blazing parallel rods, about a hundred feet across, connected by a transparent, egg-shaped disk that expanded and collapsed like an inflating and deflating balloon. There was a lot of pressure, as if giant hands were pushing down on his shoulders and scalp. “As soon as my knees gave, the pressure left and what I saw changed. I mean, I … Continue reading Catalogers of the Galaxy by M.X. Wang

Just Try It.


 

Don’t bother with a resolution for this New Year.   There’s abundant evidence that Resolution Road goes straight downhill sometime after January, littered with gym membership cards, strewn with diet cookbooks and half-finished knitting projects (not that I would know).  All those goals we fail to complete just end up making us feel worse than before. So, don’t set any goals.  Instead, why not let the start of a new year mean that you will try something new – just one new thing  that appeals to you– and see where it leads you? Dead end, whole … Continue reading Just Try It.

My Pilgrim Problem


 

In second grade, I was assigned the role of a Pilgrim woman in the Thanksgiving play.  I wore a dull, gray dress with an itchy, starched white collar and I had only two sentences to say: “Look, look, the Governor is coming.  He is such a fine man.”  Even as a seven-year-old I recognized that this was a smarmy speech and a bit part, but such was the lot of us Pilgrim women.  We all delivered our brief lines and then stood back, pretending to stir things while the Governor and Squanto got all the action.  … Continue reading My Pilgrim Problem

The Hairy Man by Laurie Billman

salmon
 

It was midnight of our last night in the cannery, and all twelve of us who had been assigned the fish house had been working since seven that morning. All day and into the light-filled night, we had been cleaning fat salmon as they slithered out of the tin chutes directly from the salmon boats. White fish bellies were burned on my lids when I closed my eyes, and my ears sang with an exhausted hum. When the warning bell rang, down slid silver salmon, spilling, wet and shiny, onto the long, wooden tables. We … Continue reading The Hairy Man by Laurie Billman

From Close to Couric: Some upcoming events


 

      October 16 marks the official publication day for Erika Raskin’s debut novel, Close. Published by Harvard Square Editions, Close details the moving, wryly funny and ultimately fateful actions of a single mother trying to cope with raising three daughters.  The book has already generated some glowing advance reviews on goodreads.com (“an incredible family dynamic and a plot twist that makes it impossible to put the book down…”) Raskin, who lives in Charlottesville, says she has been writing “off and on since elementary school.”   Her fiction has been published in a number of … Continue reading From Close to Couric: Some upcoming events

The Name Game by Jane Bradley


 

It wasn’t until a government agent called me that I realized I was somebody else. Not an impostor exactly, but something like that. Since birth, I had been Jane Coffin Bradley, a moniker I bore through jibes at my lugubrious middle name and easy jabs like Jane the Pain. If I parried with Jane the Brain, it fell flat, and living in Indiana, it was useless to claim kin with the historic Coffins of Nantucket. (Nantucket was more famous as the launch of a naughty schoolyard limerick.) Once, when I was seven or so, I … Continue reading The Name Game by Jane Bradley

Home Schooling by Sydney Blair

illuminated illustration
 

Del was in the kitchen, opening the bottle of wine his second wife Catherine had given him earlier in the day. The cork kept splitting, the sign of a true amateur, he thought, except that he was an amateur in few areas of his life these days, unless you counted the endless pursuit of happiness—or rather, the achievement of that happiness—as one such minefield. But perhaps this time happiness was just around the corner, in the literal and figurative form of Juliana. “What are you doing?” Juliana’s voice drifted in around the corner of the … Continue reading Home Schooling by Sydney Blair

The Pigeons and the President


 

It was just about a hundred years ago that Martha dropped dead. She was found on the floor of her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo and that was that – the end of the last known passenger pigeon on the planet. One lifeless bird signified the extinction of a species whose population once numbered in the billions, perhaps the most abundant bird in the world. They were large, grayish pigeons, not flashy, not exotic, yet in descriptions, something about them evoked the language of magic or mythology: the golden-green iridescence that lit up their plumage, … Continue reading The Pigeons and the President