Fourth Genre

The Pursuit of Happiness

Wendy Willis — 2024-04-11

On Loving, Losing, and Mostly, “And-ing”

Vibha Akkaraju — 2024-04-11

In Lost & Found, Schulz meditates on the meaning of losing (your keys, your language, your mind) and on seeking and finding (answers, love, meaning in life). Both remind us that our worlds are large, mysterious and expansive. Schulz also hones in on what she misses most about her father – his inner light. Kalpana Mohan also ruminates on her own relationship with her beloved father in Daddykins, and along the way sheds her own inner light in the way she treats her world as expansive and inclusive. Both books beautifully illustrate that happy families can indeed be interesting and unique in their own ways.

Thinking Like an Essayist

Fourth Genre — 2024-04-11

Memory Cut

Erin E. Edwards — 2024-04-11

Still Life

Monica Judge — 2024-04-11

Sea of Troubles

Julie Marie Wade — 2024-04-11

Flattened

Toni Mirosevich — 2024-04-11

Comfortability

Lauren Henley — 2024-04-11

Salvation

Kristine S. Ervin — 2024-04-11

DESSERT

Jamie Cattanach — 2024-04-11

11 Stones and an Outlier

Julie Lunde — 2024-04-11

The Hanker Chiefs

ANDREW WESTOLL — 2024-04-11

Memory, Silverback, Woman

Jules Fitz Gerald — 2024-04-11

This is How You Protect Yourself From a Rapist

Elizabeth Koster — 2024-04-11

Strata

Kim Wyatt — 2024-04-11

Maundering Women

Maria Hummel — 2024-04-11

Sentinel

Mary Pan — 2024-04-11

Collected Pleasures of a Collector

Tim Bascom — 2024-04-11

Waterfall Children

Jennifer Sammons — 2024-04-11

A lyric essay examining the death of the author's mother through personal narrative, familial history, the history of CPR, and metaphor.

What Water Is

Lauren Watel — 2024-04-11

"What Water Is" recounts the author's fear of water, stemming from incidents in childhood, and explores her subsequent realization that she considers and water an enemy and treats swimming as a series of battles she always loses. The essay also describes her simultaneous fascination with the power of water, which becomes a lifelong obsession. When in middle age she decides to try yet again to conquer the water by learning how to swim more efficiently, it finally occurs to her that water was never the enemy and cannot be conquered. The enemy, in fact, was always herself, her own impulse to fight such an awesome, uncontrollable force, rather than to move with the water, to surrender to it.

Tick Season

Danielle Harms — 2024-04-11

Following the Ink

Joan Maeda Trygg — 2024-04-11

Divination

Faith Shearin — 2024-04-11

Behind the Fence

Sabine Casparie — 2024-04-11

This is an essay about visiting the 2018 Berthe Morisot exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art with my mother. Mt mother and I both realise that Berthe Morisot, although a celebrated Impressionist in her own time, was completely overlooked in the Western canon. I look back on my mother's life path and that of myself, and realise we were both held back in pursuing what we loved. But is it ever to late to change the past?

Those Who Came Before

Nafisa A. Iqbal — 2024-04-11