Fourth Genre

The Pursuit of Happiness

Wendy Willis — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

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

Vibha Akkaraju — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

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 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Memory Cut

Erin E. Edwards — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Still Life

Monica Judge — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Sea of Troubles

Julie Marie Wade, Brenda Miller — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Flattened

Toni Mirosevich — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Comfortability

Lauren Henley — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Salvation

Kristine S. Ervin — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

DESSERT

Jamie Cattanach — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

11 Stones and an Outlier

Julie Lunde — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The Hanker Chiefs

ANDREW WESTOLL — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Memory, Silverback, Woman

Jules Fitz Gerald — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This is How You Protect Yourself From a Rapist

Elizabeth Koster — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Strata

Kim Wyatt — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Maundering Women

Maria Hummel — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Sentinel

Mary Pan — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Collected Pleasures of a Collector

Tim Bascom — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Waterfall Children

Jen — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

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 K. Watel — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

"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 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Following the Ink

Joan Maeda Trygg — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Divination

Faith Shearin — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Behind the Fence

Sabine Casparie — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

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 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400