Imagined Life
My father doesn’t say, “Don’t tell.” He doesn’t say much at all. The way to end the silence he gave me was to write this sentence: “I’ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I’m mistaken.”
Hopwood lecture
“Four Voyages,” by Andrea Barrett
Sometimes, not often, I’ve found the writing of a story or a novel to resemble Nansen’s smooth and well-planned voyage. Sometimes I know, roughly, where I’m going; sometimes I can also guess the routes by which I might reach that destination. Usually, though, my experience has more closely resembled that of the hapless souls aboard the Tegetthoff.
MQR 55:3 | Summer 2016
By MQR Staff
Susan Choi stirs the waters in the 2016 Hopwood Lecture, Pearl Abraham surprises with unexpected connections between political and private wrongdoing, Natalie Bakopoulos sorts through the tangled relationship at the heart of Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels.
Fiction from Mark Brazaitis, Cynthia Dockrell, Beth Kissileff, Barbara Krasner, Matthew Lansburgh, Monica McFawn, and Elizabeth Poliner.
Poetry from Natalia Romero (translated by Seth Michelson) and Felicia Zamora.
“Roads Taken (and Not),” by Susan Orlean
By Susan Orlean
The ultimate journey that any writer takes is an emotional one, and that is what informs the geographical and professional passages you undergo, the moral development you attempt, the intellectual maturity you reach for. Being a writer is exhilarating, demanding, fascinating; it is the most wonderful life, but it can be terribly lonely. In fact, I am still surprised each time by how singular and private the experience of writing is—how this big conversation the writer conducts, and this desire to gobble up the world comes down, finally, to a quiet moment alone.
MQR 54:3 | Summer 2015
By MQR Staff
Eavan Boland gives the Hopwood Lecture, Hasanthika Sirisena conflictedly tours the sites of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, Carolyne Wright introduces the work of Ruby Rahman, Sara J. Grossman contemplates ordinary bodies and Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser,” David Scobey talks about why we need the humanities.
Fiction from Paige Cooper, B.G. Firmani, James Morrison, Brenda Peynado, Sharon Pomerantz, and Karen Wunsch.
Poetry from Timothy Liu, Ruby Rahman (translated by Carolyne Wright with Syed Manzoorul Islam), Danez Smith, and Xiao Kaiyu (translated by Christopher Lupke).
