helplessness…
As Bill Patrick writes, in his autobiographical essay, “Accident,” “It’s easy to forget that anything could happen, until something does.” Every day people slip and fall, veer off the road, find themselves unaccountably sick, experience betrayal; the world shifts on its wobbling axis for someone every moment. Every moment in our lives is make or break, every moment has the potential to become our before and after moment.
In his essay “Moon Valley,” Don Lago examines the various ways people choose to make meaning of the interplay of chaos and stability evinced by a solar eclipse, which people experience as chaos but which is actually evidence of order. “No es fácil,” Lea Aschkenas writes of the situation in Cuba, its economy reeling from the U.S. embargo, a phrase — it is not easy — which sadly applies to friendships between Cubans and Americans caught between imperial and revolutionary politics. “Livestream,” Michelle Fitzgerald’s cri de couer gives voice to the horror we all feel witnessing genocide in our time, in real time, on our phones and computer screens. I don’t think I have ever read a more down-to-earth, honest, complex account of relinquishing resentments and finding reconciliation than Beth Richards’ “Reckoning.” And Marc Levy’s “The Road to Northampton” powerfully reminds us that war is never over for those who survive. It is always something more than memory in the conventional sense, a presence, a need for peace and stability that issues as art, and as brilliant writing as it does in Levy’s essay, and in the writers he quotes in it.
This issue also includes a special section containing tributes to poet, essayist, novelist, memoirist, teacher, and Solstice contributor Baron Wormser. Baron died on October 7th at his home in Vermont, after a short and unexpected illness.
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the story collection Interference and other stories; the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and other essays; and five books of poems: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, which won the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry; and People Once Real.
