When we were sailing I felt borne up by wings capable of taking me much farther than I’d ever thought possible, to places where I could watch the storm petrels glide before the rising and falling walls of waves. Where a calm night’s watch was spent watching the swirling bioluminescence in our wake while trying to think of the ways and whys I could and should steer my professional life away from the noise and…
My great-grandparents once had a homestead near Burns, in the shadow of an extinct volcano named Glass Butte for the obsidian flows on its slopes. The land is part of a ranch now and there’s nothing there anymore, if there ever was much of anything. But I wanted to see that scrap of nothing which is, when it comes down to it, one of the reasons I exist.
Don’t expect the conversation with your friend to extinguish your anxiety; your anxiety won’t go that easy. It’s braided and baked into you, part of your dough. She won’t have any magic words to change that. Honesty doesn’t trump anxiety. What it does often do is reduce it down to proper proportions, make it a more manageable size.
You listen to the quiet hum of your best friends’ breathing, the ocean baptizing the shore again and again. This moment is the closest thing to home you’ve felt in a long time.
Previously by Teri Vlassopoulos: Odds and Omens: Superstition and IVF
After my daughter was born, I thought about getting her astrological chart done. It would be fun for her to have the information when she was older, if only to roll her eyes at her mother. I realized, though, that maybe it wasn’t really a present for her.
You can't go in there! Why, no one enters the Forbidden Zone and returns to tell the tale!
You can't go in there! Why, no one goes past the Silent Sentinels without express permission from the Guardian Herself!
You can't go in there! Why, such a thing has not been done by someone of ungentle blood in seventeen generations, since before the Moon was veiled!
The Toast's literary pilgrimages archive can be found here. When you live across the ocean from where your favourite stories are set, Europe can seem nearly as imaginary as Middle Earth. London and Paris are real, but in my mind they exist as an amalgam of stories. Pure text doesn’t provide the sensory cues of visual media, so it demands that readers participate in creating the world of the story. It’s an intimate act of collaboration, a…
I’ve spent a lot of the last year driving back and forth across and up and down the United States in that awkward quarter-life crisis period toeing the, uh, thin line between “work” and “pleasure” in a precarious economy. You’d think that by the time I moved from rural California to Iowa by myself (with my bike strapped to the top of my car, in the span of three days), I would have figured out…
There’s a cool Portuguese expression called saudade that doesn’t have a direct translation into English. From what I understand it describes a feeling of longing for someone you miss, although it can also express nostalgia for an experience you’ve never actually had. Maybe saudade is what I’ve felt about the backpacking trip across Europe that I didn’t get around to taking after college, first because I didn’t have enough money, then because I didn’t have…
Previously by Evan Fleischer: This Is and Isn't About the DC Punk Archive “Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream,” Hugh MacDiarmid’s eponymous poem states (MacDiarmid himself described by Burns Singer as having hair that “curled up … like the grey-brown smoke of a volcano”), a poem amongst many carved into the gray granite of Scotland's parliament, the entrance to the building that has as its…
We live in the future, so I’m on a bus in Los Angeles and log onto Twitter to write a note to the author of a book I’m reading: “Loving yr novel. Managing to focus on its pages during a manic bus ride to Venice Beach, during which a drunk guy fell on me” “Thank you so much,” writes the author, Rabih Alamaddine. “Haven't had a drunk guy fall on me in ages!” This is…
After college, my friends and I might as well have crawled into a cannon that shot us out at varied trajectories and scattered us across the country from Minnesota all the way to east Michigan. Admittedly, many of us didn’t make it out of the Midwest, but it isn’t called flyover country for nothing – the Midwest is a formidable stretch of countryside to traverse, especially if you don’t have a reliable car. Like many…
Susan Harlan's previous work for The Toast can be found here. When I was in Paris recently, I wondered what would happen if I just never went home. Most people wonder this in Paris. It is not novel. When I graduated from college, I was all set to move there and start an internship at The International Herald Tribune. I can’t remember how I managed to get this internship. It seems that it should…
Attaining a lifelong dream — who doesn’t want to? — can prove difficult when your efforts are taken hostage by nature’s whims. I know this from personal experience. After two well-planned trips to take in the magical glow of the aurora borealis, I still rely on photos and YouTube videos, representations that only tease. My quest began in earnest when an email from Astronomy magazine offered a tour to Iceland, a trip designed for aurora viewing.
