Launched This Week: December 5th-9th

Hello, friends. We kicked off the week with this gorgeous gut-punch of a comic, “When We Were Whole,” by the inimitable Liana Finck.

“This is the unspoken sentiment: We welcome people who are like us, people who adopt our values, people who shed their beliefs like a snake sheds skin, leaving behind their homeland customs as they grow into their new identity.”

How to Write a Screenplay in a Café

Cody Delistraty on tennis, social striving, and grieving his mother: “. . . it felt like my ascent matched my mother’s descent. As I was trying to run away from Spokane, getting respectable internships, and making interesting friends, she was trying to stay alive just one more day.”

Tracy O'Neill’s new Body Language column—on her brother's craniofacial disorder, her Trump-supporting adoptive relatives, and the things that hold a family together and tear it apart—absolutely destroyed me this morning; you should read it.

From the Ecotone archives, a beautiful essay by Belle Boggs about teaching, infertility, and how childlessness is portrayed in literature.

Meet Luna, our Literary Pet of the Month.

Soraya Membreno on her Commencement weekend and “the American ideal of upward mobility” from her perspective as a first-generation college student: “. . . that weekend made clear the very thing I had been denying for the past four years: I was being subsumed by something else, going to a place where my family could not follow.”

Timothy Laurence reflects on his own history as a school bully in “New Kids”:

And so I try to forget: the bullying and debasements, the ruthless acts of my innocent years. I leave them buried in the riverbed, obscured by the silt and muck, and go along with my life with the notion that I am a decent human being, or at least as decent as anyone else I know.

“Recently, lightness, softness, indeterminacy, blur, unlocatability, and in-betweenness have become dangerous practices. Where is your passport and what does it say? Who would dare show a soft bit of skin, an intimate curve, in this cold, and getting colder, season? Who would venture out without a firm sense of allegiance to this tribe or that one? Who would risk getting caught in between?”

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