Subscribe to HFR today and get a paper airplane with handwritten work from Geffrey Davis, or buy a two-year subscription for all our contributor paper airplanes. For more from Davis, check out his contributor spotlight from last month.
Tomorrow our contributor airplane offer will be Staci R. Schoenfeld.
Read MoreStarting tomorrow, subscriptions (or resubscriptions) to Hayden’s Ferry Review will come with a paper airplane featuring handwritten work by a contributor in our Departure issue. Each day will feature a different writer. What’s that? You say you want to collect them all? Well, if you buy a two-year subscription, you’ll get six paper airplanes, one from each contributor. There are limited amounts, so once they’re gone, they’re gone. We’ll post each day to remind you whose work you’ll receive.
We hope you’ll enjoy these carefully crafted artifacts and celebrate another year of HFR with us!
Read MoreI have never been to Auschwitz, or any concentration camp for that matter. Neither do I have family members who are Holocaust survivors. And yet, the Holocaust is all over the manuscript. I begin to reconcile this by considering the nature of American Jews from my generation and also the enigma of poetics. As for the former, I am absolutely an inheritor of Jewish anxiety from my grandparents and parents, which was also manifest in my Hebrew school experiences as a child. For the past two summers, I’ve gone with my mentor, Carolyn Forché, to Thessaloniki and the island, Thassos, in Greece. My mother’s family is Sephardic, and though her family’s diaspora spreads through many countries, the Greco-Turkish region around Thessaloniki is a significant one—I am named for my mother’s father, who I never met, and his father came from this place.
Read MoreGrade school, junior high, and high school were all difficult for me. It always felt like I didn’t know quite how to act like other kids—though I had friends, I often felt apart from them. In the second grade, my teacher sent home the following note with my grades: “She’s a loner who gets along well with the other children.”
Once, I spent an entire afternoon on my stomach in my front yard, searching every clover for the four-leafs. The neighborhood kids had been teasing me and I hadn’t even noticed. I was too excited about all the luck I was amassing.
Read MoreA few thoughts on “Verisimilitude”:
If I could make short films using my mind, I would.
And if we all had USB ports in our temples and could share those images, strung together by white cords, like two kids sharing earbuds on the bus, what then?
Would those images be a semblance of our desires? How terrifying or transcendent might that be? How tender or tyrannical?
Would our primary goal as creators and composers become receiving a knowing glance?
Applause seems an odd response to art. It stirs the air, then same old silence. Yet I love it when people clap at the movies, which can’t hear.
Read More“Mellow Drama” began with the epigraph – a pronouncement I overheard a woman gleefully declare one late afternoon as I was walking along the Jersey Shore. The beach was already clearing out for the day, only a few people around. The sun was slowly sliding toward the horizon – that seam between sky and sea I’d had my eye on, hoping to spot some dolphins in the distance, as one occasionally does that time of day.
Read MoreIn times of distress, I open up The Mine, a folder on my hard drive where I store my early writings, things I produced before I turned twenty. It’s an embarrassing folder in many ways, full of pastiche and self-indulgence and three or four ridiculous, unambitious novels I started writing, but thankfully never finished. But every time I dig in, I manage to find something worthwhile. In the case of my HFR piece, “The Ithaca Moment,” that “something” was a rough draft of a story I had written about Cornell.
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