Category: Issue 17

Just before I stopped acting, I was in a short film with Harold Perrineau, the actor who played Michael on Lost. I couldn’t sleep for days leading up to the shoot. I was sure he’d be able to smell the Lostie on me, that he’d notice my particular brand of “star-struck” had a more desperate […]

My relationship with my father ended when I was fourteen. He went to prison, and I finished ninth grade. I’ve spent many years searching for some version of my story, yet what seems a simple premise—“daughter carries on without father”—is not so simple to find in children’s literature. Unlike many children of incarcerated parents in […]

Hot girl summers give way to sick girl winters; COVID-19 is back in the news again. I open a long read about “succubus chic”, a beauty trend and twenty-first century twist on a nineteenth-century aesthetic. Tuberculosis was the disease of the 1800s, gifting the patient a thinned body, radiant skin, and a slow death lingering […]

I recently watched a video on the architecture of haunted houses in films and what makes them seem scary. Among the most common elements are: the Mansard roof, enclosed in its coffin-like pitch; the pointed, gothic-looking widow’s walk; and the forced, distorted scale of being placed upon a hill. Like most conventions, these elements have […]

In spring of 2019, I met a man on Tinder, which was somewhat surprising given that I’d been wondering whether to swear off men entirely in the wake of my first, revelatory relationship with a woman. Now, that man and I live in a 2-bedroom apartment. We have a reclining armchair and a Subaru, a […]

I have loved J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings series since I was ten and revisit it often. Each time I have reread the books, I have enjoyed them anew and been amazed at how different they seem with each reading. This is surely true of many great books, but with The […]