New England Review

Julia Cohen

All the Space in Between Is Water

Nonfiction from NER 41.1

I. APRIL FOOLS

Photo by Nick Fewings on UnsplashHistory begins with someone else’s memory of you. It begins with accepting that memory as your own. I want to remember the sensation of curling into my grandfather’s woolly armpit as he reads to me months before he died. A stack of books in bed with us. But all I can remember is climbing up the furry stairs on all fours and looking over the top step into his bedroom to see if he’s awake. To see if he can read to me. What I remember is the anticipation of warmth, of the perfect fit between my two-year-old body and my grandfather’s armpit. My sensations end with carpet and hope. The only lie I repeatedly tell is when I claim my mother’s memory of these reading sessions as my own, a history in tenderness.

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Robert Lopez

Coming from Nowhere

Cover art of NER 41.1, spring 2020. Bright-colored cover art of a hand-drawn apartment building front, with faces of people, pets, and more, all going about their business.

Nonfiction from NER 41.1 (2020)
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The first time someone called me a spic was during recess or after school in the playground or in the park across the street from my house. I was in shirtsleeves and it was hot or I had on a heavy winter coat with a ski hat and gloves and boots because it had snowed overnight and we could see our breath in the frigid winter cold.

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Sean Hill

For Which It Stands

Nonfiction from NER 40.4 (2019)

https://homeofheroes.com/flag-of-freedom/the-pledge-of-allegiance/

When folks say the war was about states’ rights, that was the right—the right to hold people as property . . . That is the history that [the Confederate] flag commemorates. 

I was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, and going to school in the 1980s I said the Pledge of Allegiance along with my classmates, facing the American flag with our hands over our hearts, at the start of each day. I liked the rhythm of the words in my mouth in the cadence we were taught—the syntactical pauses inevitably ran “for which it stands” together to almost become one word. It and those other morsels—“and to the Republic,” “indivisible,” “with liberty / and justice for all”—pleased my tongue and my ear, though first-grade me surely didn’t have enough context to understand to what I was making my pledge. 

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Nathaniel G. Nesmith

A Love Song for the Theater: An Interview with John Guare

Nonfiction from NER 40.4

JOHN GUARE’s career as a playwright has made him a dominant figure in theater for over six decades. Born in New York City in 1938, he has received Tony, Obie, and Olivier awards, among many other distinctions. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and nominated for an Oscar. Guare, who earned an MFA from Yale University, began his career in the theater during the 1960s at the legendary Caffé Cino. His most recent play, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, opened at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in March 2019, directed by Jerry Zaks. . . .

I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Mr. Guare at his apartment in New York City in September 2018, covering everything from his early days as a child dramatist to his upcoming opening at Lincoln Center.

NGN: You’ve said that you’ve loved to go to the theater since you were seven, and you knew that writing plays would be your way of working there. Why theater and not another artistic field?

JOHN GUARE: I had two great uncles who toured in vaudeville from 1880 to 1917 and I had their handwritten sides—actors’ sides with the cue lines. Their plays were terrible melodrama—Pawn Ticket 210, The Old Toll House—but I was absolutely fascinated by the past, about traveling around America. And then when I was a kid, I went to see Annie Get Your Gun and it was overwhelming. The immediacy of the theater, and that it was so formal: You had to go at a certain time. You had to sit in a certain seat. It began, it ended. I loved being part of the audience. It was amazing how something up on stage could make a thousand people laugh or gasp at the same moment. Growing up in New York City, I would go and see a show at least once a year, always on my birthday. Going to the theater always meant something special, you got dressed up for it back then. I loved that—that world seemed to me to have an excitement and exhilaration. . . .

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