Phoebe Stone

In My Cradling Arms

September 27, 2018

Nonfiction from NER 39.3

How easily I can remember that small parlor with the tiny coal fireplace in England. That room, that house, seems to come in clearer and stronger every year that I grow older. The tall upright piano took up much of the room, that piano where I tried, when I was ten, to play the “Coventry Christmas Carol.” It was bitterly cold in that row house in Cambridge, England. There was no central heat in those days, and in the bedroom we had to stand in front of an electric heater to change into our pajamas.

My father was on sabbatical for the year and we had taken the enormous Queen Elizabeth ocean liner across the Atlantic in warm, easy weather. Under bright sea skies and sun, we had played shuffleboard on deck. Tea and cakes were delivered to us by a steward in a white uniform, while we lay under wool blankets on deck chairs. My father kept saying how charming and fun it was. The wind blew through his jacket sleeves, as if to lift him away. While my mother was afraid the boat would sink. For the whole trip her hands clutched the railings. Her eyes never lightened.

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Phoebe Stone is a painter, poet, and author of seven novels for young adults published by Arthur A. Levine Books at Scholastic and three picture books published by Little, Brown and Co. Phoebe grew up in a family of poets and novelists and has spent most of her life painting and writing. She is presently working on a series of memoir/short stories for a book. This piece is the first from that series to appear in publication.

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François Scarborough Clemmons

From the Beginning

June 25, 2018

New nonfiction from NER 39.2

“Man Making Music in the Forest” by Rebecca Pyle

When I was born, the Sanders-Scarborough clan had lived for several generations in the sprawling, blanched little town of Blackwater, Mississippi, just north of Meridian in the backwater region near the Okatibbee Reservoir and the Alabama border. If you weren’t a cotton farmer or sharecropper, or a smithy who worked for white folks, there wasn’t much else to do there. Some folks got along raising chickens and guinea fowl, some did light farming but could not prosper. Each year they fell further in debt to the landowner, Ol’ Man Sanders.

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François Scarborough Clemmons is a singer, actor, and writer who had a long career as an opera singer, performing with the New York City Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and more. He created and played the role of Officer Clemmons on the children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and founded and directed the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble. He was Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence at Middlebury College from 1997 to 2013, where he directed the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir. He is currently working on a series of children’s books and a memoir, DivaMan: My Life in Song.

Jay Parini

A Beer with Borges

March 20, 2018

New nonfiction from NER 39.1

I can smell Borges in my dreams, and I dream about him often. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I suspect he didn’t.

"View of the Riviera" by Chuka Susan Chesney, courtesy of the Aarnun Gallery. — “View of the Riviera” by Chuka Susan Chesney, courtesy of the Aarnun Gallery.

A writer of poems and brief, enigmatic stories, and provocative essays that were also stories, Borges moved easily between fact and fiction, and his wild inventions became truths. It was all fiction for him, as in the title of his most celebrated volume, Ficciones, first published in the early forties. Fiction means, in its Latin root-word, “shaping.” And Borges was always shaping realities, even making them.

I called him Mr. Borges the first time we met, and he corrected me. “Just Borges, please.”

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Joseph Pearson

This Is Also Tangier

March 14, 2018

“in your arms, in your arms” by John Gregory Brown

You come from the other side?” a young man later asks me, in the bar in Tangier.

♦

On the flight from Lisbon to Morocco, I try to see where Europe ends and Africa begins. The coast must be somewhere below me, but it’s lost in the diffusion of clouds. I stare at the cabin wall opposite, where strange shapes, long trapezoids, morph; they’re projected from the late sun blazing to the south. I want to say “African sun,” but that rings false, like something said in the nineteenth century.

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Joseph Pearson is a writer and historian based in Berlin, and author of Berlin, his portrait of the German capital (Reaktion Press, 2018). Pearson is the essayist of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin, and also writes for the BBC and Newsweek.

New England Review