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STAFF Managing Editors Brunella Tipismana Ethan Kan Everett Yum Fatou M’Baye Owen Curtin Will Sussbauer Associate Editors Angel Hu Carter Flemming Chloe Budakian Claire Nam Keya Bajaj Lexi Eskovitz Miranda Wollen Moe Shimizu Oliver Giddings Sukriti Ojha Tara Singh Copy Editors Anna Papakirk Bella Washburn Cameron Jones Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch Sophie Garcia Terence Harris Layout Ashley Wang Malina Reber Megha Kumar Michelle Vong Neve O’Brien Illustration Anna Chamberlin Luke Louchheim Maria Andreu Bird Neve O’Brien Sophia Chmelar Sophie Yi Thisbe Wu Photography Addy Gorton

Dear reader, This April, the Yale Daily News Magazine considers how humans perceive, react to, heal from, and find remedies for public and personal crises. Arthur Delot-Vilain argues for a politicized response towards the environmental crisis in place of the normalized recourse to institutional change. Ashley Wang explores what — and to what extent — Yale and West Point students can learn on a ten-day, moderation-focused trip to Palestine and Israel. Sophie Lamb draws connections between three generations of New Haveners who have revitalized their neighborhoods in periods of urban decay. Addy Gorton interviews Erector Square artist JinSu, for whom pottery is a source of solace and spirituality in her battle with a rare disease. How do we envision a shared future despite the constant fracturing of our ideological and material worlds? How do we embrace change while also tending to memory? As we close our chapter as Editors-in-Chief of the Magazine, we offer you a collection of pieces that do more than reflect on these questions — they reach toward answers, however provisional, and affirm the quiet possibility of hope. Sincerely, Harper Love and Kinnia Cheuk Editors-in-Chief

CONTENTS COVER | Anna Chamberlin Cemetery of Forgotten Books #3: Amanda’s New Life COLUMN | Ingrid Rodriguez Vila

Dear Life, It’s Not Your Fault COLUMN | Megan Kernis

Digest: I Became a Recipe They Could Swallow COLUMN | Evan Sun

The Oil Spill and the American Imagination FEATURE | Arthur Delot-Vilain

The Salvaging of Wrecked Things FEATURE | Sophie Lamb

Bienvenue à La Petite Inde PROFILE | Aanika Eragam

Weavers of Art: The Quiet Brilliance of the Elm Shakespeare Company PROFILE | Carter Flemming

Seeing Through the Clay INTERVIEW | Addy Gorton

Fast and Getting Faster FICTION | Cal Barton

Slouching Towards Moderation FEATURE | Ashley Wang

Bliss FICTION | Will Sussbauer

Cemetery of Forgotten Books #3: Amanda’s New Life Ingrid Rodríguez Vila illustration by Thisbe Wu

Hi. My name is Amanda Smith and I live in seventh street, New Orleans. I love our small neighborhood and our un-noisy street. I am in sixth grade at the exclusive Jeffery Middle School. I have two older brothers called Arthur and Aaron. I am really wishing not to be the only girl. But one day, I overheard mom saying that she was having a baby! I was so happy until she said: “If we are having a baby, we will have to move.” Amanda’s New Life is a thin volume. It’s printed in a terrible swooshy, bubbly cursive and arranged in wobbly lines of fading charcoal. Each page is a different neon color. It is the handiwork of a nine-year-old with great literary ambitions and not enough homework. Allegedly a story about a girl adjusting to a new middle school, the booklet reads more like absurdist satire.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. And I’ve been haunted for nearly as long as I’ve been writing. This is only half my own fault—sometimes, long before it’s meant to see the light of day, a story concept will take on a life of its own that isn’t completely snuffed out by early interment. Borrowing a concept from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Shadow of the Wind,” “Cemetery of Forgotten Books” will chronicle my visits to the vast cemetery where I’ve abandoned half-finished stories since I was a child. By exhuming some of their corpses and giving them another chance to state their cases, I hope to exorcize some of the spirits that still haunt me. And, hopefully, I’ll learn something about myself, my stories, and the philosophies that have shaped my life in the process.

From its characters’ comically WASP names (Amanda Smith, Joy Parks, and Allison Quimby, just to name a few) to its total misrepresentation of very distinct settings (the story begins in a “New Orleans” indistinguishable from an idyllic New England suburb, and continues in a “Chicago” indistinguishable from this “New Orleans”), the pervading atmosphere is somewhat chaotic and decidedly nonspecific. Still, Amanda’s New Life is firmly rooted in what I can only describe as the American schoolgirl genre. In less than ten pages, Amanda Smith is faced with a slew of the genre’s greatest hits: the birth of a sibling, a big move, the first day of middle school, senselessly cruel bullying, food fights in the cafeteria, and cliques with ridiculous self-ascribed names.

As a fourth grader, I was nothing if not well-read — in a certain sense of the word. Apart from books about fairies, snakes, and disaster survival, one of my favorite things to read were these American schoolgirl chapter books. I devoured Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones, Annie Barrows’s Ivy + Bean, Sara Pennypacker’s Clementine, and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona. With ears pricked and eyes open, I followed my spunky cartoons of friends from kindergarten up to the fourth grade. Planning, preparing for what I would inevitably face. But I might as well have been memorizing all the alien species listed in my comically large Star Wars Encyclopedia. Any prophecies the books contained would remain unfulfilled: for me, there would be no yellow school bus to ride, no first day of school

outfit to pick out, and no class turtle to feed. I attended a small elementary school run by an order of Spanish Catholic nuns. As is the norm in Puerto Rico, we had to wear uniforms. For girls, plaid blue jumpsuits over short-sleeved, white button-up shirts, both of which would become slick with sweat in the wet September heat. Given that the school did not have air conditioning, the only solution was to crank open a set of rusty Miami windows, which would inevitably invite a swarm of mosquitos in. There was a crucifix in every classroom. We were not allowed to say the word “Halloween” because of the holiday’s demonic implications, instead covertly probing each other for “H-Day” or “Pumpkin Day” costume ideas. I had been in class with roughly the same 26 kids since pre-pre-K. Among them, I was known to be extremely emotional, and it was difficult for me to make friends. A deep dissatisfaction characterized my elementary school years. I found my classes boring, my classmates mean, and San Juan’s horrible heat and car-centric architecture stifling. All the chapter books I read — which spanned a period from the 1950s to the early 2010s — swirled together into a timeless, placeless, suburban Americana. A magical land where a little girl could walk out of her house, stop across the street for her best friend, and go ice skating on some neighborhood lake frozen for the winter. It was as good as fantasy to me. As my teachers droned on, I escaped there, sometimes only in thought, other times on sheets of colored paper.

Though I had written short, oneoff stories and chapters before, Amanda’s New Life was my first attempt at a complete commercial novel. I had recently found the first installment of Nancy Krulik’s How I Survived Middle School series abandoned by my older cousins at my grandmother’s house. Amanda’s New Life owes a great debt to the vast, labyrinthine, halls crawling with larger-than-life teenaged enemies that was 11-year-old protagonist Jenny’s massive American middle school. Its scale and the absolute seriousness with which this absurd caricature of a middle school experience was narrated presented to me an iteration of the American fantasy that did not seem merely fun — it seemed thrilling. Amanda’s world—built by such an innocent, frivolous god — is even more arbitrary than Jenny’s. Her mother’s pregnancy, and seemingly nothing else, catalyzes a sudden move across the country. Her new school is foreign and its rules incomprehensible: Amanda is shocked to discover that, for example, she is now required to take gym class every day. The popular kids — named “The Fashions,” an obvious riff on “The Pops” from How I Survived Middle School — pick on her relentlessly from the moment she steps through the doors, drawing particular ammunition from the fact that she had a summer job at a hot dog stand back in “New Orleans.” This was not meant to be class commentary. I simply thought it was what American middle school was like. I was blissfully unaware of any nuance or semblance of cruelty in the world I attempted to trace from memory. It is as funny as it is terrifying to realize how malleable one’s mind is between the ages of six and eleven.

Perhaps that is why I now look back at my elementary school experience with particular fondness. Retrospect paints the tight concrete hallways of my youth in stunning colors, making my American fantasy appear dull by comparison. After all, none of my American schoolgirls ever had to doomsday prep whenever a tropical storm loomed across the Atlantic, nor were they threatened by frequent power outages or mosquito-carried tropical diseases. One time, my class was held past the 2:30 dismissal because someone had (allegedly) thrown a piece of chalk across the room and almost struck our teacher. We were brought out one-by-one into a little room in some obscure strategic order, where two nuns tried to wheedle confessions from our little grasps: “You are a very good student, Ingrid. We know that. Which is why we would not want you to get caught up in this.” I remember experiencing a dramatic religious arc, starting around age seven with a mission to become a saint whatever it took, which escalated to a vivid crisis of faith by the time I was eleven until I finally transferred to a lay school. I wonder what Amanda’s world would have looked like if I had followed the adage and “written what I knew.” If I had taken the care to notice them, I would have found fascinating psychological conflict and dynamic characters all around. But, as a snapshot of my nine-year-old psyche, the actual Amanda’s New Life is much more insightful — and entertaining.

Dear Life, It’s Not Your Fault “Dear Life” is an ode to the nuance of emotion surrounding death and an exploration of the life we can live when it’s near its end. As I navigate chronic illness and end-of-life care as an aspiring physician, I’ve found that the beauty in healthcare isn’t just saving lives but making life happen.

Megan Kernis illustration by Thisbe Wu

“Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant,” my mother announced to my grandparents. She was 17 years old, preparing to begin her senior year of high school, and completely unaware of the next 20 years ahead of her. My grandparents, though shocked, were ready to support her decision to raise her child. Soon after the initial shock, they came to find out that they would be supporting my mother with her children — twins to be exact. My brother and I made quite the entrance into this world. Two decades later, I am celebrating my 20th birthday. I have the fierce freedom and independence of a college student — far from my mother’s experience at twenty with twin toddlers. My place in this world was certain when two blue lines showed up on the at-home pregnancy test. My mother never questioned following through with her pregnancy, and she diligently prepared for her new life. But there is a 20% chance

in modern medicine that her pregnancy would have resulted in a miscarriage. Our family has been blessed with “perfect” pregnancies — no severe genetic abnormalities, no fertility challenges — but many women are not so fortunate. Miscarriages are treated as normal conditions, as if the mother had caught the flu or sprained her ankle, until she is affected by multiple, which may indicate a genetic abnormality. But minimizing the heartbreak of a miscarriage in medicine juxtaposes society’s accusations toward the mother. Instead of blaming statistical probability for a lost child, society demonizes the miscarriage, holding the mother responsible. The more attentive she is to her own health, the better her baby’s outcomes will be. In reality, miscarriages feel anything but normal. It shatters women. It causes guilt and grievance. It is not soon forgotten. My mother, though not initially expecting a pregnancy, would have been destroyed by such a case.

I often see these cases as a clinical records assistant at the Kliman Lab. Our lab helps diagnose genetic abnormalities resulting in pregnancy losses. Hundreds of women seek out the lab’s clinical diagnostics for answers, frequently relieved to receive confirmation that it’s not their fault. Most of the time, it’s not. One particular woman, desperate for answers, brought her placenta home after delivering her pregnancy loss. She quickly emailed our lab, looking for direction. We advised her to store it properly and bring it to our lab for analysis. That afternoon, I donned my lab coat, oversized goggles, and latex gloves to dissect the thick, muscular tissue of her placenta. As I sliced open the tissue, I looked for the characteristic “feathery” texture of endometrial tissue that we use to observe biomarkers of genetic abnormalities under a microscope. Taking thin slices of the tissue, held between two pieces of glass on a slide, we stained the tissue with pink and purple

dyes that clung to certain parts of the tissue. In this way, we can identify deep purple rings that represent “trophoblast inclusions,” biomarkers of genetic abnormality. The bright shades that colored my childhood bedroom now seemed to symbolize the loss of another child’s opportunity. I was relieved to see only faint pink and lavender hues on this patient’s slide rather than the vibrance of a biomarker. It meant the loss was not from her intrinsic genetic code but a chance occurrence. Though my mom chose to carry out her pregnancy with my brother and me, it was nothing short of a miracle that no other uncontrollable factors took this choice away from her. To her, a positive pregnancy test meant a 100% chance of having a child. But that chance is closer to 80%, and it might only continue lowering as we design tests that detect pregnancy earlier and earlier. Nearly one in four pregnancies, clinically confirmed or not, end in miscarriage.

dicting a baby’s outcomes than their clinical history. One miscarriage doesn’t define a woman. My mother has always been grateful for my brother and me, and likewise I will be grateful for my children. But gratitude must be accompanied by understanding. To appreciate life is not to have blind faith, but to have an understanding of all the odds we work against. Loss is one of the greatest pains we can experience, but it is also natural. It is an opportunity to hold on tight to the life we do get.

When I first joined my lab, my research mentor trained me to navigate our digital database. Without the background knowledge, many of the terms and dialogue boxes were coded jargon to me. She began by inputting a new patient into the database; this includes the patient’s name, basic medical history, and pregnancy complications. This patient had multiple unsuccessful pregnancies, and I immediately felt sympathetic that she may never have children, but to my surprise, my mentor reassured me that many women like her are able to have successful pregnancies in the future; genetic probability played a larger role in pre-

Digest: I Became a Recipe They Could Swallow Evan Sun

illustration by Thisbe Wu I bake when I have no responsibilities. Nothing tethers me to the act of whisking meringue or piping icing other than love for baking itself. This love is mineralized in succulent memories of butter-perfumed kitchens and floured marble counters. It demands a will for perfection, an eye for sugar-laced aesthetics. One of my favorite baking projects are my annual holiday cookie boxes, an assortment of intricately decorated holiday cookies. They’ve grown with me throughout my high school, and now college, career. They’re a festively sweet meter for how much I’ve changed as a person. I’ve been gifting these annual holiday cookie boxes to my extended family for the past few years, in which I’ve been building up my culinary skill and repertoire. With the madeleines and macarons I now know how to make, I’ve come a long way from those first cookie boxes, crafted with the most uninspired sugar cookie recipes with sickeningly sweet royal icing. I’m determined to bake better cookies every year.

Digest is where I braid consumption with memory, stirring love and longing into every dish. Here I’ll serve my delicious escapades — my interactions with food, people, and places. What I’ve tasted, remembered, and still crave. I know that this pressure is self-induced, but I can’t help myself. Pleasing my family has been a far-away pipe dream — a castle in the sky. Since I was little, my queerness has set me apart from my aunts and uncles. They saw the dolls I used to play with as signs of a soft incompetency. And now, if I delivered lackluster cookies after years of consecutive improvement, I’d probably prove them right again. I would be an abnormality who couldn’t live up to some rigid expectation and bake up a pristine cookie box. Needless to say, for the 2024 holiday cookie box, I went all out. I started strategizing the cookies a good two weeks before I even touched a whisk. When I was supposed to be studying for my ECON 121 final or writing my PLSC 114 final essay, I was scouring Bon Appetit for the perfectly tangy lemon poppyseed madeleine recipe. On Christmas Day, I started to assemble the cookie boxes. The work itself was simple, but its pace was

relentless. And yet, there was something almost hypnotic about the hours spent in the kitchen, the steady movements of hands shaping dough, pressing filling, and coaxing heat from the oven. I sandwiched cranberry jam between matcha shortbread. I rolled caramel ginger molasses dough in sugar, watching it form into tight spirals, each one glistening as it turned golden. I assembled the macarons — pistachio, raspberry — assembled with a precision that bordered on reverence, rows of their shells lingering like unspoken promises. I worked non-stop for four days. The result was a kitchen counter covered with pistachio macarons, raspberry macarons, matcha-raspberry linzer cookies, caramel ginger molasses cookies, double-chocolate peppermint bark cookies, gingerbread, lemonpoppy seed madeleines, and cream puffs — two hundred in all. I packed them carefully into white boxes, each sealed with a simple ribbon, and sent them off.

I received rave reviews. When I handed over a box of cookies to my aunt, she gushed over the presentation — how the lined paper perfectly complemented the colors of the macarons — and how she loved ginger molasses cookies. Not so coincidentally, she immediately switched the subject to ask me how I liked Yale so far. I answered in a typical avoidant nephew fashion — giving her enough to chew on but not enough for her to pry. She then asked me to weigh in on the San Francisco private school hierarchy for my cousin applying to high schools, because now my opinion matters. My aunt’s interest in my cookies, my life, my opinions seemed to coalesce into this confusingly rehearsed dance. She compliments my cookies, but she also compliments me. I’m her Yale nephew who made these cookies. The nephew who did well in school, understands the college admissions process, and knows about baking. I became the missing ingredient, the one who could enrich the family’s name. For the first time, I felt like something carefully folded into their lives — essential, even cherished, like dough rising in the quiet heat of belonging. This high did not last. Over the days following Christmas, splitting headaches left me bedridden and aches stung my skin. My limbs were weak

and I couldn’t get out of bed. Four days of no sleep, no sustenance, and running around the kitchen nonstop had clearly drained my body. The human body doesn’t become bionic for holiday cookie boxes. Baking literally induced me into a fever. My once untainted leisure now felt like work. There was no monetary benefit for my holiday cookie boxes, but I was still shackled to my own expectations.

I wish I could say that perfectionism was the culprit, but I’m self-aware enough to recognize that I’m not really a perfectionist. I don’t GCal my life, and I don’t do all my readings. If anything, I’m imperfect. And yet, there it is. Butter, sugar, and flour unearth some strain of perfectionism that I never knew existed, demanding precision, the right balance of ingredients, the delicate crisp that

somehow feels like a reflection of the self I’m still trying to become — for my family and for myself. It’s the desire to be the son and the nephew who is revered, golden, the one everyone seeks out. I had been unsure about my place in my family for so long, yearning to finally be taken seriously. For years, I felt unmoored within my family, my position never fully solidified. There was a raw, insidious insecurity about where I stood, who I was in the eyes of those who mattered most. Yet, with each batch of cookies I bake, there is a fleeting sense that I can finally be seen in the way I’ve always wished to be. To me, raspberry macarons and lemon poppy seed madeleines are more than just French pastries; they are objects of defiance against the doubts that have long lingered about my character. Cookies, along with my Yale degree and my ambition, have the punch to unangle an uncontrolled illusion about myself. I redefine this fatal illusion with a positive one, where my queerness and my feelings of inadequacy no longer define me. Now, the the care I bake into each cookie does. They hold the promise of erasing years of judgment, symbols of exactly who I always hoped to be.

the oil spill and the american imagination by arthur delot-vilain art by sophia chmelar January 1969, Santa Barbara, California: an offshore drilling rig operated by Union Oil blows. The intense upward pressure of surging natural gas explodes the soft ocean floor around the rig and thick oil oozes to the surface, coating everything it meets. Like much of Southern California, Santa Barbara is an old Spanish mission town that was rebuilt in the Spanish Colonial and Mission revival styles in the 1920s. Its main adjective is beauty: beautiful people; beautiful beaches; beautiful sunshine. Seals, sea lions, cormorants, and pelicans patrol the bluest water. An oil spill can have disastrous material consequences for workers, habitats, and wildlife, but the true initial strength of the spill is visual. You couldn’t have built a better theatre for a spill than Santa Barbara in 1969.

tection Act) in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972. And following 1989’s Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, Congress quickly passed the Oil Pollution Act (OPA), which set out guidelines for future oil spill preparedness and established a clear liability policy. This is an essay that thinks about how environmental crises and activism exist in the American imagThat 1969 oil spill in Santa inary, and how this imagBarbara did leave a scar on the ination has guided “mainAmerican environmentalist’s stream” activism. psyche. It would be incomplete to attribute the eruption Wisconsin Senator Gaylord of landmark environmental Nelson, who is often credited legislation to the Santa Bar- with founding Earth Day as bara oil spill, but the event a series of Environmental did push along the organiz- Teach-ins in the aftermath ing that led to the establish- of the Santa Barbara oil spill, ment of Earth Day in 1970. had his finger on this pulse. In quick succession, President Consider his address to an Richard Nixon signed NEPA audience in Denver on the (National Environmental Pro- first Earth Day. He argues All of a sudden, that sparkling California water is a vast black sludge, striking the shore and leaving oil stains behind when it recedes. The pelicans dive into the water. If they come up, beak full of oil, it will be difficult for them to fly again. There’s a Homeric quality to the disaster: the vastness of the ocean seemingly transfigured into a new substance.

that so-called environmental Zero Population Growth problems are broader than (ZPG) is a curious relic of issues of pollution: “Environ- this era of environmenment is all of America and tal organizing. The group, its problems. It is rats in the which argued for widespread ghetto. It is a hungry child access to family planning, in a land of affluence. It is birth control, and abortion housing that is not worthy of in addition to general enthe name; neighborhoods not vironmental advocacy, was fit to inhabit.” Environmental founded in 1968 by Richard health, from the start, implies Bowers, a lawyer from Old a broader question than the Mystic, Charles Remington, tyranny of the oil spill – even an entomology professor at then, Nelson pushed for a ho- Yale, and Stanford biologist listic conception of what the Paul Ehrlich, whose book environment might mean. The Population Bomb emphaAnd even so, his movement, sized the potential prolems of his holiday, are still narratoverpopulation. ed today in the shadow of a Yale’s chapter was catastrophic oil spill. one of the first, and it seems Yale, like other schools, also to have had a post-Santa Barbara immediately taken Earth Day teach-in. Senator on a prominent role Ted Kennedy delivered a in campus speech at the Yale Political Union. In fact, Yale’s Earth Day buzz went beyond that over other schools, as the Yale environmental Daily News coverage from organizing. In fact, 1970 points out: “While for such a niche organization, ZPG as a whole most of the nation will be was stunningly popular – by observing a solitary ‘Earth 1971, there were 26,000 Day’ April 22, New Haven members nationwide. environmental groups have planned a full ‘Earth Week’ That aside, something was of activities.” A number of groups, including the “Spring meaningfully different about Yale’s 1970 Earth Day celeEnvironmental Offensive,” bration – and not merely the the “Environmental Action “full ‘Earth Week’ of activiGroup,” and, most crucially, ties.” Rather, Ted Kennedy’s “Zero Population Growth,” visit was interrupted and organized most of the week.

overshadowed by the real crisis of the day: The Black Panther trial. April 22, the day of Kennedy’s speech, was also the first day of a student strike in support of the New Haven Nine, a suite of Black Panther Party-affiliated defendants indicted in the murder of Alex Rackley. The trial, especially the broad indictment (only two were accused of the murder itself ) was viewed as a tactic of state repression. Classes were suspended for the week leading up to May Day

1970, when the Panthers held a rally in New Haven. That the Panthers upstaged Earth Week in 1970 is a lesson in politicization. Yes, the struggle for racial justice in the United States was older than the environmental movement, but the BPP was founded in 1966, only two years before ZPG. But Earth

Week was easy to support, and already institutionalized to a degree. Sitting Senator Ted Kennedy spoke, and the events scheduled consisted mostly of “multi-media presentations” and panel discussions about the threat of overpopulation, a panel discussion on abortion, and another panel discussion on pollution. Though these topics were “political,” at least insofar as they operated in the realm of policy solutions and were framed by the American political system (see, again, Senator Kennedy), Earth Week was not politicized. By contrast, the Black Panther trial was politicized – thous ands of people gathered in Ingalls Rink for speeches, high school students rallied at the courthouse, Yale students agreed to strike from classes and support incoming protestors. It was politicized, in short, because state action met organized resistance. One way to think of politicization in this sense is as the preparedness of people to act beyond their everyday routine in support of a political cause. The Earth Week activities, and ZPG’s goals in general, reflect a certain managerial tendency in American environmental activism. By this I mean a tendency to think of environmental problems as ones that are

best solved by bureaucratic implementation of policy proposals. Think of the operative metaphors in (roughly) contemporary climate discourse: we need to keep warming below 1.5ºC; the Green New Deal; carbon tax. And it makes sense: the organizing that arose in response to Santa Barbara and Exxon Valdez was immediately taken up by elected officials like Kennedy and Nelson. Policy for prevention and containment makes sense in the context of something like an oil spill or even the ozone hole. These are discrete disasters that can be circumscribed and managed: and two of the biggest spills in American history immediately soaked into the public consciousness and were followed by clear legislative victories. It is just that these fights are not similar in degree or in kind to the present climate crisis. Where the spill is an isolated event, the crisis is systemic, permeating every sphere of life in ways that traditional bureaucratic and technocratic approaches are unprepared to handle. ZPG’s solution to resource depletion, in line with this managerial mindset, is the government ensuring access to abortion and birth control (admirable goals, both in pre-

(admirable goals, both in preRoe 1970, and post-Dobbs 2025). Even today, it seems that climate activism remains political without being politicized. The solutions for excessive carbon emissions are pitched as cap and trade, tax incentives for renewable energy.

After the collapse of the Paris accords and the current administration’s deregulation, there has been an affective turn in climate discourse, especially on the right, from Trump’s “drill baby drill,” to Elon Musk’s fear-mongering about declining birth rates. Both of these, interestingly enough, seem to be direct responses to the oil-and-population-focused 70s-era environmental activism we have been discussing. In fact, the right writ large

has proven to be quite politicized in the United States. The January 6th Capitol attacks are proof: nowhere is the left as prepared to respond as Trump’s right was then. Even the wave of organizing that arose with the popularity of Greta Thunberg never succeeded in preparing people to be politicized against oil extraction. It targeted itself at governments, asking for legislative change – because that is where we’ve learned that climate action is taken. It is almost a truism by now that the Black Panthers were “not just violent,” they took care of their communities with healthcare and free food programs. But this is politicization: preparing the networks that can then take action when pressed. If one takes the ultimate goal of politicization to be legislative change, it is easy to say that the Panthers failed: they did not build a broad-spectrum consensus and enact policy changes. But the value of successful politicization is that it moves the horizon of action beyond the state by allowing people to not be passive in the face of state apathy or hostility.

flashy but more successful initiatives, like the ones pushed by high schoolers who sued Montana for violating their right to a clean environment, are bubbling under the surface. Indigenous landback activism, which also looks to secure food sovereignty, is increasingly prominent, and is rapidly becoming a crucial approach to environmental activism. In 2020, the Supreme Court handed down a victory for indigenous landback activists when it decided to enforce an 1866 treaty in McGirt v. Oklahoma, effectively returning millions of acres in east Oklahoma to the Creek Nation.

This is what Nelson was gesturing at in 1970 when he spoke of the hungry child in a land of affluence. To think of the hungry child as a dimension of the climate crisis might be unintuitive, but it may be necessary for a proper conception of the crisis. Nelson, for all his senatorial clout, pointed beyond the immediate visual spectacle and toward politicization. What remains is for us to teach each other ways to survive and feed ourselves and stop oil extraction without recourse to bureaucratic chanAll of this is not to say that nels – i.e., to build networks there is no place for trying to that can make demands of the bend the state apparatus into state without being reliant on a tool for climate action. Less- it for solutions.

Andreas Malm provocatively suggests something similar in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, presenting a case for climate sabotage (i.e. targeting infrastructure like logging machinery or pipelines that bring fuel to airports). But organized industrial sabotage is only one branch of what could be a widespread leftwing movement prepared to respond to climate destruction and to the hostility of the federal government to environmental issues. Such a movement might mean communities (blocks, neighborhoods, cities) forming closer ties by addressing those hungry children with the resources of many families instead of just one. One might imagine such community organizations becoming sites where people discuss their problems, educate each other, plant trees for each other, pool resources together to secure food and water and land, and establish cooling centers. Constant commitment to such community organizations might be able to politicize enough people to make demands on the state, or it might be able to organize sabotage in the face of a hostile government.

Importantly, all these possibilities grow out of the ability to feed the hungry child. Certainly, geographies of segregation and state repression stand in the way. But in many ways, the crisis of climate doomerism is a failure to escape the mode of thinking handed down from mainstream environmental activism, a mode of thinking that believes the only actor is the government. This failure is a failure of the imagination.

by Sophie Lamb

Here’s a memory — It’s late summer on Upper State Street in New Haven, 1978. Rents have plummeted, buildings sell for a dollar, residents call the neighborhood “a real battlezone” in local newspapers. The sidewalks are empty — save for dozens of antique shops dispensing all evidence of a once-booming neighborhood onto the street. Dozens of chairs spill across the sidewalk, collecting the sun on their wooden backs. No two look alike: there are desk chairs, lounging chairs, child chairs, adult chairs, sleeping chairs, and eating chairs. Four men sort through the mess. It is a hot day: the colors blend. A city dispenses and digests itself.

The 70s were the “wasteland years” of Upper State Street. In the 50s, a six-lane elevated freeway was built a few steps off the street’s east end, cutting it off from residential Fair Haven and the gentle banks of the Mill River. In the 60s, the neighborhood’s large Marlinworks firearms factory closed, moved north, and brought much of the neighborhood with it. Much of what made State Street was lost in those decades — but some have stayed, in the brick and the concrete, in the things left behind. I met Klugman in Spruce Coffee, on 952 State Street, on a

chilly spring morning in 2025. Back in the 70s, she was a graduate student living in Goatville, a neighborhood of State Street. More than forty years later, she still remembers Spruce Coffee as Satan’s Parlor — a pool parlor that she was “almost afraid” to come to most days. As the community dwindled on State Street and former residents vacated their businesses and homes, antique shops started booming in the area, selling bits and bobs of the neighborhood’s past. To Klugman, these antique shops — and the people who manned them — felt like home. “People would inhabit their shops like they were homes. So you’d go in and there’d be a couple of guys sitting on chairs and they’d have a hot plate,” she said. “Sometimes they would put their chairs outside, and people would come and just sit, and it didn’t matter that they weren’t buying anything.” She liked the challenge of photographing people who were just “doing their thing” — but over time, she became close with the antique shop owners. They were people of character, of stature, she said, people who stayed when the rest of the community fled. There was Penny, of her husband’s Anthony’s Antiques (“it’s funny ‘cause she always seemed like the dominant one,” laughed Klugman). Then there was Charles and John of Charles’ and John’s, whom she’s stayed

in contact with most. “They trusted me, you know. There was no barrier, and that’s part of the culture of the street.” In 2020, she self-published photographs of the stores in a Shutterfly book titled Upper State Street, New Haven 1978: At the Height of Its Decline. The book is split down the middle — on one side are black and white photographs of a stilled city, of people enveloped by trashed memories and old dolls and broken chairs and news clippings — and on the other side are snippets of notes that Klugman scribbled down 47 years ago. In one of the photos, Rhea, of Rhea’s Antiques, sits in the dark back office of her State Street store. She’s older, 70 maybe, clutching a curly-haired dog in a bow tie. The stuff on her desk threatens to eat her. She gazes at the camera with her chin lifted. She’s looking up, beyond the place. The note reads: I ask about the yellowed news clippings that cover the wall behind her desk. “Lots of famous people grew up in this area. I know because I’ve been here for sixty years. I was born in the house that is now in the back of this shop… There was a head of the FBI, a Supreme Court Justice, and a Mayor. These clippings tell a whole story. When she was a graduate student, Klugman furnished her cramped apartment with the things she found in these stores. Then she finished school, bought a house

up in Guilford, and did the same. She still lives alongside those memories she kept — including an eight-foot-long wooden butcher block and three stained glass windows pulled from the wreckage of a funeral home. “Back then, large, amazing things would be salvaged from wrecked places and given away,” she said. “I look through them and feel some connection to all the emotions, about God and sadness, and human feelings that went around them.” These days, she gets the same feeling from the bricks on the buildings of Upper State Street. “It all looks the same. I can tell what antique stores were where by the pattern of the bricks, or by the structure of the doorway. It’s, of course, completely different now.” Klugman didn’t know it then, but her memories, photographs, notes, butcher board, and stained-glass windows would become proof of a lost time on Upper State Street. And proof, too, of a rare success story in neighborhood redevelopment — one that would, 47 years later, give itself back over to a sidewalk democracy of salvaged things. In the 1960s, Mayor Richard

But here, for now, is another memory — It’s late summer on State Street, 1993. Steam rises from the pavement; the air is thick with the sound of insects. Trees color the scene green. Out, down the center of the street, dozens of tents flutter; from their shade spills out piles and piles of produce, carrots, radishes, fresh cheese, and bread. People move slowly, muffled by the heat. There’s laughter, there’s chalk, there are kids soaked by the succulence of the day. A city renews.

Lee dreamt up a new New Haven; one he called a “Model City,” free of “urban slums.” To clear the foundation for this city, 5,000 homes were destroyed across Wooster Square, The Hill, and Dixwell, displacing 8,000 people, and bankrupting 2,200 businesses. Streets once clustered with families, markets, and parks were ground to dust. The wasted years of Upper State Street were in part an outcome of Lee’s Model City; the highway that ran above the street was built to deepen access between the suburbs and commercial city center. By the 1980s, governmental,

top-down renewal in New Haven meant a neighborhood death sentence. In the dim light of J.D. Dewell & Co Antiques on Upper State Street, dozens of other antique shop owners met and formed the Upper State Street Association. In February of 1983, they met with the city’s Mayor, Frank Loguwhich, to conceive of the Neighborhood Commercial Revitalization Program. This program prioritized a more bottom-up, rather than top-down renewal future for the city; less large-scale demolition, more salvaging of wrecked things. The first target of this plan was Upper State Street.

“Puleo built combination seating-planter boxes, which the group placed at bus stops, and he installed bulletin boards at a few locations, including Lulu’s, to let people know what was going on in the neighborhood,” Langdon wrote. “Upper Orange Street Neighbors had a vision: creating inviting gathering places on the then-drab expanses of asphalt or concrete in front of several stores.”

“It’s up to developers to take the risk and invest in rebuilding communities piece by piece, neighborhood by neighborhood,” Zane Yost, a Yale School of Architecture graduate, told a New Haven Register reporter at the 1983 meeting regarding the city’s vision of Neighborhood Commercial Revitalization. This reborn model of renewal spread across the Goatville neighborhood. One street over, another organization formed, the Upper Orange Street Neighborhood Association, led by landlord Joseph Puleo, Wardman Kathleen Wimer, and Architect Melanie Taylor, on whose porch they met. As written in Philip Langdon’s 2017 book, Within Walking Distance, the association began with the space between buildings — with the street, its shade, its corners.

True to the men on the chairs in the street, renewal by the people of Goatville was concentrated largely on the street; the city pledged to install new brick sidewalks, curbs, trees, and street lighting — and provide a $10,000 grant to business owners hoping to improve their stores. The Upper State and Upper Orange Street neighborhood associations also received a $25,000 grant from the city for “community development.” New cafes and restaurants burst from old brick facades, set out chairs and flower boxes, and welcomed in the street. The whole effort cost the city just over one million dollars. And so, in the sweet years of the 1990s, Goatville was reborn. In the summers, Sundays filled the sidewalks with music, food, and dance, and beckoned passers-by into the newly glistening storefronts. Posters hung from lampposts and telephone-wire poles reading:

UPPER STATE STREET SUNDAYS March 18th 1 - 4 pm Demonstration: Folk Toys and Talk-A-Radio Championship, Folk Art Shop, 948 State Street 2 pm Inside Tours: Recently Renovated Buildings, Upper State Street Association, 926 State Street “There are people who live here who could live anywhere they want to, but they choose to live here. There’s a comfortable confidence they have in themselves,” resident Bill Donohue told the New York Times in a 1993 article. “Here, you are not beholden or obligated to an automobile, or to a social set. Here, you don’t have to go out and make that support system — it’s already here.”

A week after meeting Klugman, I return to Goatville. It’s cold, gray, and 7 a.m. Brandon Doyle, dressed in Carhartts and a bright green URI beanie, bends down and brushes the top of a twig-looking plant poking out from the snow. “This is an Oak tree, can’t you tell?” he says. “Look at that little bud.” His black lab, Dolly, pants and sniffs at the little tree. It grows from a bright green planter box, next to an old abandoned construction site. Last fall, Doyle left his relationship, his house in Hamden, and his career, and came to Goatville, unsure and empty-handed. “I don’t like to call it a crisis — it

building, we stop and look at a squat little Norway spruce. This is where Edward’s Lunch used to be — an antique shop owned by Edward, and photographed by Klugman in 1978. In her photograph, the sidewalk outside was filled with shoes.

was more like a midlife pivot,” he said. That’s when he found the two-by-sixes. “Someone had renovated their deck and left 26 of these green two-by-sixes neatly stacked on the corner of Nash and Edwards,” Doyle said. “So I took them. That was sort of the origin of Goatville Salvage.” Since his arrival, Doyle has inherited the spirit of the neighborhood. So much so, he’s continuing the legacy of the antique shop owners and the city planners who came before him. From the two-by-sixes, he made six planters, and a bench or two, all of which he scattered throughout the neighborhood in

places he felt needed them. We walk from this first planter to another, just off Upper State. From this one grows a little pea plant, its winter-browned stems supported by a rusted metal lattice he also found on the sidewalk. It’s encircled by a few stone benches, a walkway, and a leaning cedar tree; in the cold, silent, snow-filled morning, it feels like the center point of a sanctuary. “This corner didn’t feel particularly inviting. This street was a little neglected, ” Doyle said, sweeping his hand down State. “I wanted to make it into someplace to sit that is sunny and safe and tended to.” When he placed this planter last summer, he left out a Sharpie for residents to write the names of their dogs as they walked by. The green box is covered with haphazardly scrawled names: Mok + Remmy + Minnow and Moxie and <3 CHRIS <3. “I wanted it to be playful, to engage people in having some sense of ownership.” We keep walking, this time up Upper State Street. These days, every block is full of restaurants, markets, and shops. On the side of a three-story brick

“This Christmas I met the owner of this building — back in the 70s, she and her husband bought it for a dollar,” Doyle said, pulling at one of the tree’s branches. “She wanted a living tree out in front, so we planted it after Christmas.” Doyle and the owner plan to turn the space around the building into a minipark of sorts, filled with native plants, picnic tables, and trees. We cross State Street to Lawrence Street Plaza, a triangle-shaped dog park splitting State from the down-ramp of US-5. There’s another green planter here, and a great big yellow one. “This park has seen a lot of different owners and uses over the years. It’s a veteran memorial. It’s the women’s park. It’s a dog park. It’s a street plaza,” Doyle said, setting his foot up on the yellow planter. Doyle has brought the plaza into a new era; he, with the help of friends, cleaned the area of invasive plants, polished the veteran memorial, and planted dozens and dozens of daffodils. They found an old fence and a rusted wheelbarrow to put up at the entrance. In September of 2024, they closed the street from traffic and brought a street fair to the plaza — kids drew chalk along sidewalks, live music played, and

community members mingled in the sweet evening air. He’s an artist in rewilding. “There’s a culture of people leaving useful things on the sidewalk here,” Doyle said. “I salvage them and give them a new life.” He made Goatville Salvage his full-time career, building benches and planters from scrap for businesses and people all around New Haven. The sound of the highway thrums above us; as we stand, cars blazing up, slowing just as they hit the side of the park. This is the highway that once ruined Upper State Street. Concrete columns arch around us like great Oaks; the steaming Mill River runs below, illuminated by weak light falling from gaps between

the two highway ramps. Invasive knotweed tangles and tumbles over the river’s banks. The asphalt clangs. Here, there are all sorts of wasted things; below the graying February snow lay piles of clothes, wind chimes, pieces of chairs, and cushions. It’s reminiscent of Klugman’s photographs, all spilled out and piled up in the present day. The space below this highway is Doyle’s next project; he dreams of integrating it into the street and the park, clearing it of trash and invasives, and running paths along it to complete what must be the final manifestation of the 1980s renewal projects in Goatville. “When we moved into our apartment off State it was really fall-

ing apart, you know,” Klugman tells me. “The rugs were all urine smelling. But we honored the fact it was a beautiful place. We went down into the street, got to know our neighbors, bought furniture from them, sat out on our porch.” The neighborhood has changed in half a century since she left it; the antique shops have disappeared, and the once-bare streets are now shaded with trees. But something in its soil, in its air, in its people, has remained unchanged — enough to push Doyle to participate in the same renewal that first arrived at State Street. It will continue long after Doyle’s oaks have grown.

art by Sophie Yi photos by Addy Gorton 20

Bienvenue à La Petite Inde the Hindu Hostel on a Catholic Pilgrimage

by Aanika Eragam photos by Annaelise Kennedy art by Neve O’Brien

Auvillar is a town of 926 people. The population swells in May, at the peak of the pilgrimage through the Santiago-de-Compostela. When I find myself here in July, I do not expect to meet anyone who looks like me. This is the countryside of France, a waystation for Catholic pilgrims, a town that past students have cautioned me against for its racial homogeneity. After four years sans d’américains due to the pandemic, I am not surprised by the town’s curiosity.

I press my face to the glass. Clay idols of Ganesha, a long table, a poster of the Tamil alphabet hanging off a fridge. I want to rage at the Frenchman cooking Indian food in this village where I am a rarity, this white guy who thinks he knows me. But when I finally work up the nerve to knock a week later, it is not a white man that greets me: it is Lakshmi.

When he first ventured to India, Ivan had been a chef on the transatlantic cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II. For three nights, the ship dotted across the nation’s ports. “When I walked on the streets in Mumbai and Chennai,” Ivan tells me, putting dough through a press for tonight’s pilgrim dinner, “something strange happened. India is India. You cannot stay insensible. I said, I’ve got to come back to this place. That’s what I did, a few years later.”

The bar owner affectionately known as Lol for his infectious laughter, the opera singer’s wife who lets us tour their home, the Bulgarian boys who scroll through TikTok by the town outlook — all have greeted me with one resounding question: “You Indian?” I am in Auvillar this summer for a writing course about place. We’ve discussed the pitfalls of exoticism, the many shades of New York, the utility of the sense of smell. We’ve read James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village.” I look at my surroundings — the cobblestoned streets, the stately crosses scattered between picnic benches, the clay gnomes with their gruff beards guarding every rooftop — and I cannot shake the notion that I am a splotch on a postcard. This is what we discussed — breaks in the story, interruptions to flow, the moments that take you out of place. But there, tucked into an archway of sanded beige concrete, right next to Vival, the corner store we’ve been frequenting for crates of eggs and gallons of rosé, a window with letters swirled in green and orange: La Petite Inde. The Little India.

a point of pride for her husband and teacher, Ivan. “It is hard,” he says, “For the Indian people. To speak without an accent.” Lakshmi laughs, recounting how when she first came to France, she ordered a bowl of spaghetti at a restaurant and began eating with her hands. Ivan taught her how to use a fork and knife. “Everything I am,” she tells me “is because of him.”

When she reaches out her hand to greet me, five bangles jingle on her wrist. She dons a kurta and a golden stud on her nose. Even my mother in suburban Georgia has assimilated to Western attire — jeans and blouses. But here Lakshmi is, in a town where her clothing marks her so starkly as different. And yet she doesn’t flinch. She’s lived in France for twenty years now, but she is still an Indian citizen. “I have the chance to get French citizenship, but I didn’t. It has to come from here,” she says, placing her hand over her heart, “not just on the paper.” Lakshmi was twenty when she got married, only a year older than I am right now. It was the age that transformed her life. Over the course of two-hour daily lessons for two years, she became so fluent in French that she sounds like a native speaker,

In Chennai, he found a volunteer position with a Jesuit priest. One day, while playing the tabla at a Carnatic music concert, he ran into his future mother-in-law. She invited him to her home, and over the course of many visits, he eventually proposed the idea of marrying her daughter: Lakshmi.

For years, Ivan and Lakshmi shuttled back and forth between India and France. They ran a homeschool for their children in Tiruvannamalai, the town where Lakshmi grew up. After they married, Ivan inherited his grandfather’s farm in Prima Rette, which, together, they turned into a thriving goat cheesery that occasionally housed pilgrims. When they relocated to Auvillar, a more central location on the Camino, many pilgrims came back to visit, asking if Lakshmi remembered them. Often, she did not. She sees hundreds over the course of the year. But for the pilgrims who pass through — La Petite Inde is a place that lasts in memory. It’s easy to see why. On the first day I come to visit, Lakshmi gives me a tour of the hostel. It is a psychedelic experience. Every spare corner of the house is plastered with India paraphernalia— clay idols of Buddha, a flag of India, tapestries of Shiva, photos of sari-clad women sorting through bundles of vegetables. Lakshmi opens the door to a bathroom, where a poster of Lord Ganesha hangs above the toilet. “Poor Ganesha,” she says, casting me an apologetic glance, “I am sorry. It’s my husband.” Ivan shows me his old car hood, which also has a painting of Ganesha on it, and now hangs above the dining room table. “It’s unique, masterpiece,” he professes proudly, “you won’t find that anywhere in the world, but Little India. That’s why pilgrims come here, to see that Ganapati.”

It’s true. Back in Prima Rette, pilgrims were always disheartened when they were served a continental breakfast. “Why don’t you serve Indian food?” they asked, eyeing Lakshmi. So when time came to set up the gité in Auvillar, they decided to do exactly that. Amid all the posters and the idols and the car hoods, there is Lakshmi herself. The clothes she wears, the golden rings that caught my eye, the brown skin beneath it— all of it, she tells me, are part of the image. But I press. Surely she’s wearing them for herself— to hold tightly to her culture. She shakes her head, gesturing to her bindi, explaining that when pilgrims knock on their door and she’s the face that greets them, they know they’ve arrived: this is Little India.

Once, in kindergarten, my classmates were all staring at a globe, pointing out where their families were from. I saw their thumbs flit across state lines — Ohio, Kansas, Missouri. When it was my turn, I spun and spun till my gaze grew blurry. “India,” I gesticulated. I tried to point to my mother’s city, its name stumbling on my tongue — “Hida- Hyd- Heda” (Hyderabad, it was called) — but I couldn’t find it. While my classmates watched in innocent fascination, I felt a cavern open up deep inside my stomach. Staring at the world map in La Petite Inde, a home where you cannot escape India no matter what corner you hide in, the country balloons in size. My gaze is drawn to the shape of the nation, its triangular edges, the part at the bottom that hooks like a nose. The rest of the map blurs till all I can see is the green peeling house my mother grew up in, the endless street, the dosa cart, my grandmother singing in Telugu. Is this what it’s like to emerge from the margins— to find yourself at the center of the world? How comforting, I think, for Lakshmi’s children, to know how to point out their history on a map.

The pilgrims I speak with tell me that the India theme is a draw for many reasons— yoga, zen, calm. This, after all, is what many of them are seeking: not a Catholic devotional, but a spiritual reflection. Compared to the Middle Ages, when pilgrims walked in faith of St. Jacques, today only 30% of pilgrims walked for purely religious regions.

It’s the kind of spirituality many of the pilgrims who stay at La Petite Inde are searching for. One pilgrim from Germany, Salome, describes how she quit the Church, fed up by its taxes, scammers, and commerciality. Then she went to India and reconnected with her spirituality. When she came back, she became Christian again.

“We never ask them for what purpose they are here,” Ivan tells me. “For most, just hiking. Small part because facing difficulties in life, lost people or kids or someone close. For very small part of them, they walk for God.”

But many do not make the journey back. “I see people come to India, and change their religion, and they fly. I see the people go to ashram, and they become crazy. Oh my god, ‘Amma, Amma!’ They think they found religion and Gods, but it’s not real. For me, why I have to give up my religion if it’s good? We were Hindu or Christian, we were born like that. We shouldn’t change everything.”

“There is no more spirituality,” Lakshmi chimes in. “Perhaps some of them they hide themselves, don’t show they believe. It’s difficult in Europe, to say they believe in God. Christianity is collapsing because of too many narrow-minded people.” This is the problem Lakshmi finds with the church in Auvillar. “There is no love,” she groans, exasperated, “only sadness. Need to be open and smile. We say to the priest in French, pray as Papa, as dad, so more people will join. We have to give joy, so people catch the spirituality.” Lakshmi herself is still Hindu. We discuss the conspicuous absence of a temple in Auvillar, but Lakshmi says it’s not so great a tragedy: “I go to the church. For me, Shiva or Jesus, no matter. What’s important is God. I like to feel better with them. I find something I cannot find in the house,” she says, gesturing to the Hindu shrine she keeps above the cupboard, “Calm. Echo. Vibration. In church, I go and it is there.”

To Lakshmi, it is not about the religion you follow so much as the way you practice it. She enjoys Auvillar’s masses when the African priest is in town. “[When he preaches,] you can smile and get joy. [Pilgrims] laugh and spend half an hour only, but they are happy.” It is the same inexplicable energy that’s drawn Ivan and countless white pilgrims to India. “He tells the same things, but with smile, as in Indian gods stories. When someone is telling Indian god stories, they bring joy. [That’s why] some pilgrims come to India and then they return to their religion.”

Even now, Lakshmi grapples with the blurring of Indian and French culture in her spirituality. She tells me about the time she went to the Sanctuaire de Notre-Dame in Lourdes — a refuge for handicapped people. She was walking, and a man came up to her in the street and hugged her. She was shocked. It was not a thing people did in India. A man touching a woman. A stranger no less. “But I felt that God gave me this hug, God say something to me. Lots of people around. Why me? He wants to give this love.”

I’m eighteen, and I am a sinner. I have hurt people, wreaked havoc. So here I am, in the prayer room, adopting a squatting stance, arms crossed over chest, fingers clasped around opposite ears. Gunjullu are a full-body form of apology. Sai Baba, the 18th-century saint, stares down at me from his golden frame. His face is coiled in tender understanding, brows pulled taut as if by an invisible string. I wonder what force stretches his muscles in sympathy, if it’s the same one I encounter months later, in the concert-hall-turned-church on Chapel Street. It is Easter, and I do not want to be alone. Let me rephrase. I am lonely, and it happens to be Easter. My friend invites me to church with her. The pastor talks about how his wife ordered a build-your-own Peloton for their anniversary. One of the pedals wouldn’t fit in its slot. Come to find: he had been reading the manual wrong. That was his life before Christianity. Constantly trying to make screws fit without the right instructions.

You are forgiven. For a long while, it terrified me: Jesus forgave while Sai Baba sat in his frame and watched. What solace could I find in Christianity — the religion they shoved down my ancestors’ throats? What to do with the prayers preserved in my mother tongue? Did I dare uproot my history? So when it came time to pack for a month’s stay in Auvillar, all my qualms unanswered, I tucked a photo of Lord Venkateswara in my carry-on and You are forgiven in the hollow of my right cheek. It is only now, talking to Lakshmi, that I realize I didn’t have to choose one or the other. I half-want to laugh at his metaphor, the way he speaks like an announcer at an auction. In fact, the whole show — and it is a show — seems altogether too theatrical. Backup singers sway on stage with strobe lights. The crowd sings Jesus’ hymns from a megascreen, like it’s Saturday night at the karaoke bar instead of Sunday morning mass. But for a moment, he pauses. “Now, I don’t know what pain you’re carrying. I don’t know who hurt you or who you’ve hurt. But today, we gather to celebrate one truth: Jesus died for your sins. He died to give you a second chance. You are forgiven.” And even in that makeshift church, I felt it. The ache that started in a low squat a year earlier, after a splintered friendship that left me heavy with shame, finally wormed its way out. I had done a thousand gunjullu in front of Sai Baba, circled the idols at temple till my mind grew dizzy, all in search of the three words this pastor tossed at my feet like an alm.

“What’s important is God. I like to feel better with them.”

La Petite Inde is a bed, breakfast, and dinner. Pilgrims usually hike from Moissac, an urban center 20 kilometers away, home to the SaintPierre Abbey, and begin filtering in around 3 p.m. They are tired and weary. Lakshmi offers them cake and juice. They rest. Some go to mass. Then they come back for dinner at 7:30 p.m., where Lakshmi cooks an array of Indian food. On the night I come to visit, the spread is mouthwatering— tandoori chicken, carrot curry, daal, raitha, and the daily staple, rice. Then dessert at 10 p.m., which is when Ivan takes over— a chocolate cake ringed with panseared pineapple. Tonight, it’s a full house. Eight pilgrims sit around the table, along with Lakshmi, Ivan, and her kids. On nights like this, the two of them might not eat, to make sure the pilgrims have enough food. One pilgrim, Lionel, chats the whole night with Lakshmi, asking about India, about me and my studies. When I ask him the taboo question I can’t help but pose everyone on the Camino — Why? — he says many things: Exercise. Fresh air. The spirit. Lionel is the only pilgrim staying with Lol. On days when Lol is over, dinners stumble into the weary hours, induced by wine and laughter. For all the deep mirth pooling in his eyes, Lol, Lakshmi tells me, is a lonely man. No wife. Kids grown up and gone. He lets a few pilgrims stay with him, visits the townsfolk merrily for dinner until they jostle with drunkenness. Perhaps it is easier, to speak with the senses dulled. To ask not to be seen too clearly.

But I can tell that Lakshmi sees him. That is why, even when he keeps her up till 3 a.m., even when she is tired and has plates to clean, she lets him stay, lets him melt into the dinner bench, lets him swing his arm around her shoulder and insist she drink, though she never does. This is what life is about, another hostel-goer, Giome, tells me, gesturing to the merriment around the table. He is a businessman, but that is not who he is. The word he identifies most with is pilgrim. Life is the time spent on the road, meeting new people you will never see again, the moments you share with strangers. Giome tells Lakshmi she is très belle — very beautiful. She blushes, accepting the comment gracefully. She is tres belle, she is the tresest belle I have ever seen, with the evening coloring the pilgrims’ cheeks pink, a yellow haze cast over the dining room, bellies full from the food she has made. At nineteen, I’m the youngest at the table, save for Lakshmi’s kids, who have disappeared into the shadows with their gadgets. Still, it speaks to me, the journey these people are undertaking. I’ve felt restless all through my freshman year of college, uncertain about what I want out of life. I look around the table now — this connection crafted in a single evening’s knowing — and I know what I want, twenty years in the future, when I’m Lakshmi’s age: this.

In their bedroom, a black-and-white photo hangs of Ivan and Lakshmi in India from the day they got married, standing in front of a temple in Tiruvannamalai. Ivan wears a dhoti and Lakshmi a sari. Her face is unwrinkled by time. She is so young. “In India, it’s not so easy. At that time when I left, my parents didn’t have so much money . . . I carried water on my head, at least fifty meters with water on my head, and we have to go to cut the wood in the forest for food. No electricity. Wash and cook and everything by hand.” Her family was part of the Dhobi caste, a people who make their living washing clothes. Traditionally, only the highest castes in India, Brahmins, are vegetarians, but for her family, fish and eggs were too expensive to afford, so Lakshmi never ate meat growing up. Now, in France, even with delis around every corner, she still hasn’t been able to shake her distaste. She was happy when she got married, she tells me, but it did not feel good, wedding a white man. She had been set to marry her cousins, but they were alcoholics. Her mother wanted better for her, and Ivan was better, even if it estranged her family from the rest of town, even now, twenty years later. She had no qualms with Ivan but had heard about white people and their divorces. It would not do in her community. He promised he would never leave her. She only had one other question: “Do you have running water in your house?” He said yes, and so did she.

In the end, it was not a love story. But not a hate story, either. “When he came, just he came. He was a foreigner. From somewhere else. Even I didn’t know it was France. Thought he was American. White guy. He gave us some chocolate. He’s a good comedian. When he came all the street ladies are laughing, laughing, laughing. I get attracted by that. But I don’t know. I didn’t fell in love.” Love, Ivan says, was never something he expected. “How could it have happened? Lakshmi couldn’t have said ‘of course I am in love with him’ . . . Just imagine the neighbors. I told her to try to stay a bit away from me, because if someone sees me, maybe they will say something, what did she do with that foreigner, she’s a prostitute. That’s India. That you don’t live it in America. Even if your parents are Indian, you don’t have it. That pressure, that societal pressure. You don’t have.” All this time, I’ve been listening to Lakshmi’s story, wondering, wondering: Couldn’t she hear it? A white man who came to India and found a wife. The “strange feeling” in the streets of Chennai he can’t quite describe. He taught her how to use a fork and knife. The pails of water she could not carry. All she asked him was whether there was running water and electricity. “That’s India.” Her family estranged from the community.

“You know,” he says, as if sensing my judgment, “you are from America, you are born in America. You look like an Indian, but you are an American. Even if you speak the language, this and that, you are mainly American. This is not a reproach, this is a fact. Tell me if I’m wrong, but you are more American than Indian.” It’s not something I’ve ever considered. In America, my Indianhood has always been my identity, the first thing people see, the first thing I’m searching for in a crowded room. But here, in France, I suppose it’s true — my accent, my clothes, my classmates — I’m American. “For you the cards you have are not the Indian ones, or not the fully Indian ones. Lakshmi was not this kind of girl as you are. She was not as free as you are. She would not wear the same dress as you do. She was a full Indian young lady from a remote village.” All this time, I was so thrilled to find the only other Indian woman in Auvillar, because on the streets of this small, remote town in the south of France, she could be my mother, me her daughter. But we’re not the same.

At the dinner table, the night is coming to an end, swirling to the gauzy hues of a Picasso painting. I help Lakshmi clean up. While we’re stacking dishes, I spot a jar of mango pickle in the kitchen and swoon. “It’s been weeks since I’ve had this,” I tell her, more passionate than I’ve ever been when eating it at home, a renewed sense of novelty instilled by 5,000 miles. “I didn’t think I’d find it in France.” Lakshmi beams at my recognition. She’d told me there were no other Indians in Auvillar, save the few passing pilgrims that stopped by for a day. I wonder how many years it’s been since someone’s walked into her home and known the words for things — pachadi, deepam, daal. The dish I’ve been dying to taste all week is a cup of chai, but when I ask her if she makes it for the pilgrims, Lakshmi chuckles as if I’ve asked her to cut me a slice of the moon. If a pilgrim ever asks for chai, she says, that means they’ve visited India. No one asks. She mostly serves coffee.

As the pilgrims start climbing the stairs for the night, I bid Lakshmi farewell. At the doorstep, we hesitate — Should I wave? How many more Merci beaucoups? Why does it feel like the chasm is widening? What do we really know of each other?— but she’s leaning in, and I realize that I am too. There is nothing more to say. We hug. Once, at the kitchen table, Ivan had joked: “Aanika, Lakshmi and I have talked, and we’ve decided to adopt you.” A smile cracked across my face, yolk spilling across the horizon as I let myself imagine it for a second: Growing up here, in Auvillar, this postcard town with parents as warm as Lakshmi and Ivan, with my Bonjours to the bookkeeper and the beekeeper, with my first kiss by the outlook gazing over the Tarn-et-Garonne bridge, with my restlessness and my ache to leave and discover the big city, with the war in my heart because I could never leave La Petite Inde, the place where my parents taught me how to point out my history on a map. How easily she let me into her home that day. Me, an Indian girl, a stranger — all I did was knock. Tomorrow more pilgrims will come. Would she have done it for anyone?

Weaversof Art The Quiet Brilliance

of the Elm Shakespeare Company

ummer approaches New Haven. Cherry blossoms grow, banners decorate Downtown lamp posts, and a peculiar wooden structure emerges amid a blanket of new green. For the thirtieth consecutive year, Edgerton Park transforms into an immersive theater. Long-time spectators know the drill: they know to pack their picnic baskets and to bring blankets for front row seats, chairs for the back. They know to throw their voice into the exuberance of the night’s crowd. They know they are welcome. The artists behind this operation come from the Elm Shakespeare Company. A storied New Haven cultural establishment, this theater company transforms the Bard’s famed plays into precisely designed and accessible modern productions, provides robust education programs for local creative students, and strengthens the New Haven community by making an extraordinary new world. In it, everyone is a creator.

THE WORK: REINTERPRETING SHAKESPEARE It takes almost eight months for the Elm Shakespeare Company to bring their summer Shakespeare In the Park production to life. Rebecca Goodheart, the company’s Producing Artistic Director, kicks off the process at the turn of the new year. Deep in the thick of this year’s audition cycle, she squeezed in our February interview between a packed schedule of commitments. She even had to postpone by twenty minutes when a few kids from her after-school program stayed late to pepper her with questions. That week alone, she was gearing up to see as many as three hundred auditions — ultimately selecting just sixteen actors for the show. “My job is an odd one,” Goodheart told me. She likes to call herself a “two headed monster.” As an artistic director, she dreams up infinite creative possibilities, but as a producer she understands the limits on what the company has capacity to achieve. It is precisely Goodheart’s understanding of the Elm Shakespeare’s physical and financial capabilities that allows her to take risks — to “swing for the fences.”

Goodheart’s emphasis on creative risk-taking means that her plays are pointedly unconventional. She fashions the In the Park shows to direct the audience’s attention to specific themes and ideas that interest her from the chosen play. Her team’s job is to embed those themes into every detail of their production design, from precise historical setting to mood lighting and soundscape. A few years ago, the design staff adorned the summer stage with a massive wrought iron gate and an open air tent, draped with fairy lights and topped with a statue of Cupid. This was Love’s Labour’s Lost set on the brink of the First World War. Because Goodheart wished to highlight the increasing complexity of the play’s world, she set it in a time of global transformation into modernity. Another summer, the park stage became a canvas for pastel tones, whimsical buildings, and Dr. Seuss’s Truffula Trees. The show was The Comedy of Errors. The play’s storybook setting, familiar and comforting to the audience, propelled them to watch for the simple morals — like those that come at the end of a

[Goodh does Elm these pl they are

children’s book — that might have otherwise been shrouded in the chaos of a comedy filled with mistaken identities and ironic emotion.

heart] believes — as m Shakespeare — that lays are only timeless if e accessible.

Goodheart strays from Shakespeare’s classical visions in this way so that the audience may connect more deeply with the work. She believes — as does Elm Shakespeare — that these plays are only timeless if they are accessible. Thus, Goodheart considers how to relate the script to her perception of the current New Haven community and the state of the world before translating it into a play’s staging. “What are the stories that need to be told right now?” she asks herself. Those stories that she finds most relevant to her contemporary and local audiences are the ones Goodheart carefully crafts her productions to accentuate.

THE PLACE: DISPERSED IN THE CITY The Elm Shakespeare Company is decidedly a New Haven institution. Not only does it draw in a diversity of local artists and audiences, but it is also physically present all over the city. Without a permanent facility, Elm Shakespeare is what Director of Development Alice-Anne Harwood calls an “itinerant company”. Its home base shifts as its productions do. Groups of staff take residence in theaters across town for each season’s smaller shows, reaching all corners of the city. Sometimes, the company performs out of Yale’s Schwarzman Center or in the Humanities Quadrangle. The more tangible spaces they occupy, the more people will have the chance to discover and interact with their art. Elm Shakespeare quietly integrates into the New Haven people’s idea of their city because it operates where those people can see. Another key way The Elm Shakespeare Company physically immerses in the New Haven

community is by working in its schools. From summer camps to after-school programs to classes within the school day, Elm Shakespeare’s education branch teaches New Haven students of all ages, guiding young performers to put on their own shows at school. This instruction is done using a pedagogy specifically designed to align with the company’s broader mission. Even its youngest participants are invited into Elm Shakespeare’s creative culture. Education Director Sarah Bowles added that the company’s teachers invite participants to “embody the text,” to learn their plays and make them their own. Under this model, children and teens are respected as creators. And when they feel that their imagination and presence is important, they can take the risk to engage with maximum enthusiasm. Bowles told me about a kid she taught several years ago who was obsessed with becoming a rapper. He spoke his lines from

A Midsummer Night’s Dream all in rap verses, interpreting Shakespeare’s words with rhythms from the hip-hop he loved. Without losing reverence for the theater tradition they are passing on, Elm Shakespeare teachers embrace

a series of performances from high school students who have participated in Elm Shakespeare programs throughout the year. Bowles described how special it was to see the kids’ reactions to each others’ plays, the entire crowd cheering

When students take the lead in interpreting their character, the performances are authentic in both content and emotion. students’ quirks, considering earnestly how they can be incorporated into performances. When students take the lead in interpreting their character, the performances are authentic in both content and emotion. Bowles beamed as she began to tell me about the biggest event of the year for the youth programs she oversees: the annual Elm Shakespeare Company Youth Festival. Inaugurated two years ago, the December festival comprises

at the top of their lungs. Director Harwood herself even cried when she saw a teenage girl’s tears over another school’s production of “Romeo and Juliet”. The student had only met the performers that day, yet their art moved her deeply. By facilitating that kind of profound experience for students through the youth festival, Elm Shakespeare invites a new generation of voices into the New Haven arts scene.

Bowles deemed the ESC’s Youth Festival a “vacation from competition”. With so many rankings and grades thrown at high schoolers, participation in Elm Shakespeare provides a rare chance to celebrate their peers’ successes as their own. “They got it instantly”, Bowles said. The entire focus of the festival is joy and congratulation. By putting its values of inclusivity and connection at the forefront of its projects — and ensuring that those projects take place immersed in its home community — the Elm Shakespeare Company creates a zone of safety from what can be a harsh world outside.

photos courtesy of The Elm Shakespeare Company

THE PEOPLE:

WEAVERS

If Elm Shakespeare’s mission is to reproduce Shakespeare for and with the voices of the New Haven Community — to be “weavers” of their art, as Goodheart puts it — then the people who attend their performances are essential. They form that very body of voices. Goodheart says that “we are responsive to our community” and “there isn’t a fourth wall”. The company’s In the Park performances take place nowhere but the vibrant landscape of Edgerton Park, sprawling between Whitney Avenue and Edgehill Road. Each new crowd of spectators is unique to that night. Those shows belong to them alone.

up past their bedtimes can participate. Goodheart recalls seeing a family bring their tiny little girls to dance to their hearts’ content.

For the final half hour before each In the Park show begins, the actors come on stage and sing with the audience. As the sun sets and clear blue twilight falls into place, the settling crowd enjoys acoustic music and smiling faces from the same people they will soon see transform into completely different characters. They get a glimpse of the performers’ humanity, their similarity to themselves. They get to join in the fun. This way, too, little kids who aren’t ready to stay

whole play and giddy every minute of it. Other families include parents who attended summer shows thirty years ago and have started to bring their own children. Not everyone packs a picnic, nor can everyone bring a loved one. But each patron brings their heart in anticipation of magic to come.

When the music faded, they went back home. As the years have passed, she sees them now every summer, old enough to stay for the

ART

ent continues for a few minutes, and then the crowd’s whispering fades. The spotlights flash on, pinpointing the focus straight ahead. And all is still; everyone inhales, waiting, ready. Somewhere out of view, the stage manager whispers “places!” and the opening speaker awaits their cue. I imagine

Not everyone packs a picnic, nor can everyone bring a loved one. But each patron brings their heart in anticipation of magic to come.

Then, the music dies down. The actors pick up their instruments and slip calmly behind a sweeping curtain. The buzz of excitem

that as the silent moments pass, a viewer’s laser focus lapses briefly because they can’t help it. Their mind has begun to wander because they are imagining the possibilities. They are dreaming up the incoming world, where everyone all around is safe in each other’s art and passion. Where, as Goodheart puts it best, “love changes things”. They imagine their own place in that world; they are sure of it. That is Elm Shakespeare.

by Carter Flemming 31

Seeing Through the Clay an interview with JinSu by Addy Gorton

Dias Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with an eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Everyone was like, “Oh my God, it’s awful you have this eye disease because you’re so young, and usually people get it in their 80s.” I was only in my 30s then. I was told I had a good eight years, “so make use of those eight years because after that’s all downhill.”

square

Jeanette Dias (or JinSu) is a ceramicist at Erector Square Studios, a studio complex home to 175 studios occupied by local New Haven artists. Born in India, JinSu emphasizes holistic wellness and medicine in her home, bustling with four daughters. Fifteen years ago, after being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare eye disease that causes progressive vision loss, JinSu found solace and spirituality in pottery. I was struck by the way she sees her relationship with clay as dialogue: listening to the clay and responding to its desires and callings. To her, clay is a form of healing.

Gorton What was it like returning to the studio for the first time years after your diagnosis?

I’m from India, so I do a lot of holistic medicine to begin with, and I said, “No, no, that’s not me.” So for the next 10 years, I went through everything that India had to offer. I went back to school, became a holistic wellness coach, and did my yoga certification – because I wanted to clean my body to an extent where this disease goes away. It definitely slowed it down. But then, a few years later, I began to see the degradation. Everybody’s witnessing this, and I’m not accepting it, but everyone’s saying, “Jeanette’s really going downhill.” So, I realized that I needed to find something that was mine and that would also help with my mental self-care. And so I went back into the studio.

Dias The one thing I noticed in the beginning was just about the form. I noticed everyone would always copy each other [in the studio]. I realized that with the eye disease, I couldn’t do what everyone else was doing. I had to create my own form, and I had to be okay with it. I had to make peace and surrender to what might not be what everyone considers beautiful. But I began to fall in love with it. I started to fall in love with the brokenness, the wonkiness, and the rough sides. I would find a bump in something and go, “Oh my God, I think I love you the most, more than any of these other perfect ones.” My third daughter once broke one of my bowls; she was horrified. She was like, “Oh my God, mom can never make this again; it’s broken, and I did it.” It was so funny because she was the one who actually pushed me back into the studio. I said, “Look, this is clay. The beauty of it is you create something wonderful, but when you’re done with it, you can return it to the earth. You give it back to the other.” I said, “That’s what I’m gonna do.” She said, “No, let’s glue it together!” I was like, “No, honey, we’re not doing that.” But my other favorite thing (and my family breaks so many of them, that’s why I make a lot of them) is spoons. I make spoons of all kinds and sizes. I put them on Christmas trees. I put them on everything I can. Gorton Do you know why you were drawn to spoons?

Dias It’s a spooning effect. I like caves. I like the warm, comforting feeling. Spoons also have to do with food and medicine, so I make medicinal spoons, which I have for each medicinal jar at home. It’s more than just a spoon for me; it’s a vessel. Gorton When you sit down to start a new piece, do you have a vision beforehand? Dias Some people would call it prayer, and some people call it meditation. It comes to me in dreams sometimes, and other times I will not sleep for days or nights because I’ll have this one thought in my head. Gorton What draws you to the medium of clay? Dias Clay has been there for me in my darkest moments. I’m an artist, and I have other forms of media that I love to work with: I paint, I also sketch, and I cook beautiful recipes that are appealing to the eye. So I do create in other ways, but clay has this beautiful… it’s like a love affair. Clay takes all my worries, my questions, my fears, and my judgment, and it literally sits with them and gives me this opportunity to witness all this sewage coming out. It allows me to, in essence, witness. Sometimes, when I force the clay, I’m like, “I know you’re dry, but I’m going to try and mold you into something I want.” And the clay is like, “I really want to help you out here, but you need to give me some more water and some time, and maybe I’ll give you what you want,” and I’m like,

photos by Addy Gorton

“fuck no.” And then three days later, there’s a big-ass crack. And I’m like, why did you do that? And I realize I would not have been satisfied with getting my way when it would not last anyway. There’s this learning with the clay that takes you to this place of deep wisdom within yourself. It gets me in a meditative state where I can open myself up to the other realms of communication — with art, food, and relationships. Gorton When you’re working with the clay, do you feel alone? Dias Yes and no. I don’t feel alone unless I’m struggling in some other area. Clay will tell you what it wants. I call it my

healing: what do I want to heal today? Do I want to heal my insecurities? Do I wanna heal my self-judgment? Do I want to heal my jealousy? And when I get on the wheel when it’s just sitting in silence, yes, I’m alone, but I’m not alone, really. Gorton Have you talked to any other artists who have conditions similar to yours? Dias No, I have actually not found anyone. I wanna work with people, especially regarding mental health, and also people who just have a disability with their senses because I think clay just teaches you to figure it out. Stop focusing on what you can’t, and focus on what mediums allow you to do — especially clay.

I had to make peace and surrender to what might not be what everyone considers beautiful. But I began to fall in love with it.

FAST AND GETTING FASTER by Cal Barton

At the end of the bar: laughter. The man is swirling his drink. He is saying this is what life is — life is a long ride in a taxi and the meter keeps climbing and at the end your driver asks the rearview mirror if he should let his wife keep the dogs when he leaves her — life is a footrace and the starter is waving his gun telling the runners to just hold on while he works out a problem with the trigger — life is a puppet show written and directed by a third grade teacher who routinely cries in front of the break room coffee maker — life is a prison — a circus — a sandbox — life is a public pool and the lifeguard’s the one who’s been pissing in it — life is a long stay at a twostar motel on the same street as the American Academy of Elvis Impersonators — life is the first word spoken by a baby who will grow up to be a maker of luxury doorbells — life is hell — is heaven — is the waiting room before the waiting room before purgatory — life is the internal monologue of the astronaut using his favorite toilet for the last time before

leaving the planet — life is the anti-gravity that supports a helium balloon haunting the corner of a poorly-lit ballroom — life is — (they are still laughing at the man’s drunkenness) — life is what a man has forgotten when he tries to drive his roadster off the road and he won’t chicken out this time — going fast and getting faster — not like last time when he remembered the size of the baby’s hand and took his toe off the accelerator — yes life is what he remembers when the shape of the ward-woman appears in the road and his headlights

turn her into a long shadow and he slams on the brakes — life is slamming the brakes and getting out to embrace the woman in scrubs — life is the woman kneeling down to touch the broken yellow line saying it leads somewhere — it leads somewhere — life is hearing yourself say it does, it does, it absolutely does.

art by Emily Zhang

SLOUCHING TOWARDS MODERATION For thirteen years, the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative has brought students from Yale and West Point to Palestine and Israel for a week of intimate dialogue. Are these fleeting encounters enough?

photos by Tashroom Ahsan

he speaker lineup encompassed Israeli Supreme Court Justice Daphne Barak-Erez and former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, but among them, Ariane de Gennaro ’26 remembered mostly the Palestinian girls. They wanted to hear about Yale and about college in America. They were her brother’s age. “We only honestly made friends with them,” she said, “We all sat in the school and ate lunch together.”

Israelis and Palestinians. Fellows say that PDLI fosters dialogue like few other spaces at Yale. They say that the trip to Israel and the West Bank was the most meaningful experience of their lives. Like De Gennaro, they cite moments of human connection as the most memorable of the trip: talking to a Palestinian woman in the old city of Jerusalem, speaking in Hebrew to a cigarette-smoking man, visiting a kibbutz.

Founded in 2012 by Uriel Epshtein ’14, the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative brings a competitively-selected cohort of Yale students and West Point cadets on a 10-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, as part of a year-long fellowship program. It is a fast-paced trip. Following itineraries designed by Yale student leaders, PDLI fellows travel to Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and parts of the West Bank. De Gennaro is one of hundreds of PDLI fellows who have learned about Israel-Palestinian relations from the proverbial horse’s mouth.

But what can little over a week of up-close interaction accomplish? Can empathy, with enough guidance, calcify into transformative insights on a century-long conflict?

Epshtein is staunchly proud of PDLI’s connections with the Israeli government and senior members of the Palestinian Authority: “if we’re going to hear from someone who avidly believes that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state, that person should come from someone who’s directly involved in the conflict.” For thirteen years, the program has endeavored to make abstract discussions about Israel and Palestine more tangible, allowing fellows to supersede state borders and step into the lived reality of both

*** In 2011, Epshtein was a sophomore at Yale, and had just heard rumblings of a potential public debate between Norman Finkesltein and Alan Dershowitz, two academics who had notoriously clashed over the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Finkelstein and Dershowitz’s sparring had long spilled over from intellectual disagreements to ad hominem attacks; in the most extreme instance, Dershowitz lobbied DePaul University faculty to deny Finkelstein from obtaining tenure. Although the public debate never ended up happening, the mere suggestion of it was enough to motivate Epshtein to act. “You had speakers being [suggested to come to] campus who represented the most extreme versions of their respective arguments,” he said, “and what it resulted in was always a shouting match.” Unhappy with what he saw as a

lack of interest in the “distillation of truth,” Epshtein wanted to create a space with a more moderate, nuanced approach to Israel-Palestinian relations. The program he created — the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative — relies on a high degree of buy-in. Epshtein is confident in PDLI’s selection process, resulting in cohorts who can “loosely hold strong opinions,” willing to dive into conversations about Israeli-Palestinian relations without attachment to dogma. Through occasional seminar-style discussions, PDLI fellows cover a range of topics: for the 2024 cohort, pertinent questions included — in addition to long-standing issues like religious groups in Israel and the Abraham Accords — “how to prevent another October 7th, whether Israel’s response was ethically proportionate, whether its [response] was a genocide,” Hassaan Qadir ’25.5 says. Despite the fellows’ with a wide spectrum of standpoints on Israel and Palestine, from involvement in pro-Palestine protests to pro-Israel groups, de Gennaro believes that PDLI was a uniquely moderate space during the 2024 spring encampments on Beinecke Plaza: “PDLI was actually one of the few places on campus where people were discussing the conflict in a really productive way.” Aidan Stretch ’25, another program alum, notes its difference from analogous spaces at Yale: “It wasn’t like [PDLI fellows] wanted to go to the [Yale Political Union] and argue and throw out their opinions.” To Epshtein, PDLI’s purpose is exactly the opposite of that of an

organization like the YPU: to promote unfettered dialogue, shielded away from the limelight of scrutiny. “The conversations that happen within PDLI are [...] never for a public audience, and that means that people can really be honest, and they don’t have to be afraid that they’re going to suffer some kind of social consequences for offering an unpopular opinion.” PDLI succeeds, he argues, because of its premise of mandated discomfort — every PDLI fellow enters the program knowing they will hear something that will offend them and endeavors to withhold judgment. Despite her involvement in pro-Israel groups on campus, de Gennaro says she found herself bonding with her roommate, a member of Yale Jews for Collective Liberation in Palestine (then called Jews for Ceasefire), about their mutual dislike for a guest speaker from the Israeli right. While they didn’t stay close friends after returning to Yale’s campus, other PDLI fellows say that the common ground of engaging in good-faith, intense discussions allowed them to forge close relationships that have persisted far beyond the program. Stretch, a 2023 fellow, notes the benefits of the PDLI alumni network, which has remained active via alumni group chats and meetups around the country. *** Epshtein had a secondary goal in founding PDLI, beyond bridging the divide between Israeli and Palestinians: closing the civil-military gap on Yale’s campus. Each PDLI cohort consists of 15 Yale

students and 15 West Point cadets, mentored by student leaders and two West Point professors, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Faint and Dr. Ruth Beitler. Faint and Beitler, who is the current director of Conflict and Human Security Studies at West Point, work closely with Yale student leaders to design the program’s themes, including its leadership training and civil-military components. As the program’s in-house military professional, Faint has also been an active resource during PDLI’s trip to Israel and the West Bank, explaining the “tactical capabilities of weapons systems or the strategic value of a piece of ground.” Before travelling together, West Point cadets and Yale students engage in cross-institutional exchange at the program’s kickoff “Military 101” presentations. On a trip to West Point’s campus this past January, Yale students visited the military academy’s on-campus museum, listened to a presentation about West Point life, and watched a hands-on demonstration of simulated military equipment. The program’s facilitation of relationships between Yale and West Point is so successful, Lieutenant Colonel Faint writes, that “at least one Yale/West Point wedding has occurred between [alumni].” Alongside the rumors of a Finkelstein-Dershowitz debate, it was the rumblings of antimilitarism sentiment and protests at Yale that planted the seeds of PDLI’s creation. In 2012, the Navy ROTC program had just been making its return to Yale after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a U.S. military policy that prohibited

LGBT+ individuals to disclose their identity during service. Yale’s decision to reintroduce the ROTC program was met with critical opeds and mass protests. Just a year later, the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine proposed a joint venture with the U.S. Department of Defense to create a training center, the U.S. Special Operations Command Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience. Again, Yale students chafed against the notion of increased military presence on campus, drafting petitions in tandem with New Haven immigration groups. In response, Epshtein published an op-ed in the YDN defending military presence on Yale’s campus, lamenting “the divide between those who fight this nation’s wars, and those in whose names the wars are fought.” The primary difference between civilian and military students’ mindsets seems to concern the question of utility. Christian Dionisio, an alum of PDLI currently serving in the Army as an officer, notes the military’s emphasis on identifying “confirmable facts” during discussion about Israel and Palestine, particularly after October 7th. Dionisio explains that as members of the U.S. Army and graduating army officers, West Point cadets tend to be very careful about “the partisan nature of speech.” Aidan Stretch observed that his West Point peers “did not have the liberty to think in theoretical or abstract terms,” approaching discussions instead with concerns about the “real contingencies for American troops or resources on the ground [in Israel and Palestine].” Rather than wrestling between pre-existing politi-

cal viewpoints, West Point cadets have historically been far more driven by practical questions: How do you go about getting the facts? Where do you get the facts? What facts do you trust? What is the truth? What can we confirm?

And then the West Point cadets will look at that same exact video, and they’ll say, ‘we studied that in class.’ That’s exactly what we do. That’s best practice.” The ultimate purpose of the American military,” Epshtein argues, “is to be lethal.”

Epshtein is particularly excited about West Point’s brand of apolitical empiricism. Unlike Yale students, who are often accustomed to history and political theory, Epshtein argues that West Point cadets bring nuance to the notion that “any type of military violent action is inherently awful.” Stretch agrees that by breaking down military action into its constituent parts — main stakeholders, environmental considerations, historical knowledge — the West Point perspective brings Yale kids back down to earth, compelling each PDLI cohort to engage with more pragmatic questions, rather than merely relying on idealistic approaches to a potential peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. Epshtein cited an instance in which he and PDLI fellows watched a video of a raid. The natural human response to the video, he said, “will be ‘oh my god,’ that is awful.’

*** The crux of the program, after months of conversation and YaleWest Point exchanges, is ultimately the trip to Israel and the West Bank — what many fellows considered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Numerous fellows and program leaders cited the trip’s presentation of Israeli multiculturalism as a large takeaway of the trip. They are eager to share their encounters with multihyphenated identities: visits to an Arab-Jewish Culture Center, meetings with an Israeli-Bedouin diplomat (Ismail Khalil) and an Israeli-Lebanese Christian LGBTQ+ activist (Jonathan Elkhoury). Beitler recounted a dizzying scene of coexistence in Tel Aviv. Next to a mosque during the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, religious Jews got ready for Shabbat alongside others

preparing for the Sabbath — all alongside a gay pride parade: “I remembered this Turkish student being like, flabbergasted. He just never knew that it was this open.” Beitler believes that in facilitating real, tangible contact with people they’ve never spoken to before — whether that be Israeli Jews or Palestinians — the trip to Israel and the West Bank tackles black-and-white generalizations, painting a more colorful picture of unexpected viewpoints. Stretch, who visited Israel and the West Bank in 2022, agrees. He recalls a visit to an Israeli settlement in the West Bank and speaking to families living there, many of whom were victims of violence or could not afford housing elsewhere. “Especially when you think about somebody being kicked out of their home and forced somewhere else, [Israeli settlements] can be hard to approach with empathy,” Stretch acknowledged, but “[the families] had all sorts of reasons why they were there and why they didn’t see themselves as colonists, or any other sort of word that we’d use to describe them.” *** The Department of Defense’s measures for U.S military personnel after October 7th have prevented Beitler, Faint, and West Point cadets from travelling to the Central Command Area of Responsibility — which includes Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, among other locales. In the 2024 cohort’s accounts of their PDLI experience, there is a noted lack of Epshtein’s language of military-style pragmatism. Instead, the fellows noted the gratitude they received from Israelis

and Palestinians for “coming to [visit] at such a hard time.” “People really do care when you’re American,” de Gennaro said, “it’s a big deal for them when you show up and listen. Because I think they know that matters.” Ultimately, it is the human element that sets the PDLI trip to Israel apart, pushing student’s horizons beyond academic jargon. Some of the most valuable conversations of the trip, fellows say, occurred with people on the street, who de Gennaro says “were almost more willing to engage in this discourse because they wanted [even more] to be able to live alongside their neighbors.” Tashroom Ahsan ’26, a 2024 fellow, recalls a memorable encounter with a cigarette-smoking man, who ended up divulging, in broken English, his experience in a refugee camp and political support for Hamas. Listening to “what sorts of frustrations [the Palestinian man] was experiencing in his family [...] felt more real than talking about geopolitics,” Ahsan says. The argument of PDLI, in staging opportunities for fellows to closely witness the human cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is that these interactions will inform the fellows, allowing them to use their American leverage to make nuanced choices and careful rhetoric. Through iterative conversations with Palestinian and Israeli people, PDLI trains fellows to corroborate their geopolitical knowledge with narratives emerging from the streets, constantly reworking their relationship to the “facts” of the situation. The Board of Directors

believe firmly that this visceral emotional experience — the gutting reality of Palestinian refugee camps and destroyed kibbutzim — will color their perspectives for the rest of their lives. But the events of October 7th have changed the trip’s itinerary. Fellows could no longer enter the West Bank, limiting the trip only to Israeli regions. The “on-the-ground” Palestinian perspective was largely supplied by Rami Nazzal, a U.S. citizen and resident of East Jerusalem who has been a decade-long collaborator of PDLI. A key new site added to the PDLI itinerary for the 2024 cohort was the Nova music festival site, along with Kfar Aza, a kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7th. One fellow described the experience of visiting Kfar Aza as one of cognitive dissonance. From the empty kibbutz — walls still tinged with blood from half a year ago — they could also see residual smoke from Israeli bombs striking Gaza, just a few kilometers over the border fence. ***

Despite Epshtein’s emphasis that PDLI selects for strongly opinionated students who often have personal stakes in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, the fellows’ experiences in Israel and the West Bank seemed to confirm PDLI’s vision of moderated dialogue, skirting around pointed critiques of specific administrations. In Stretch’s account of visiting the West Bank in 2022, he noted that the lack of crosswalks for Palestinian school children gave him an “entirely different way of conceiving of what their problems are with a certain issue, or the background they’re coming from,” but emphasized that he did not want to point to a specific cause for the West Bank’s infrastructural issues. The point of PDLI, Stretch intoned, is humility: “It’s not about [agreement or disagreement]. It’s just by virtue of the fact that we were in their home talking to them about their issues.” And despite the program’s concerted efforts to expose fellows to “reg ular people” in Israel and the West Bank, these interactions are

lives of Palestinians right now.” Whereas PDLI’s Palestinian speakers have little bearing on “on-theground” political realities in Gaza and the West Bank, fellows gain access to key players in the Israeli government, from Supreme Court judges to members of the Knesset.

highly mediated. Within the boundaries of their tightly-packed itineraries, fellows only get around one to one-and-a-half hours of free time to engage in the personal, oneon-one conversations they all cited as the most memorable parts of the PDLI trip. Compounded with a language barrier, students’ natural inclination to remain within their bubble of Yale friends means that “you don’t fully get a sense of what people are thinking,” Ahsan says. Rather, a large portion of “on the ground dialogue” during the PDLI trip consists of conversations staged between fellows and distinguished speakers, densely packed into the trip’s ten-day span. For the majority of their days, PDLI fellows speak with the upper echelons of the Israeli government and military — Daphne Barak-Erez, a justice on the Supreme Court of Israel, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Yona Yahav, the former mayor of Haifa, Kobi Marom, a former Israeli Defense Forces commander, and Colonel Stephen E. Gabavics, a Commander at Guanta-

namo Bay. Out of the more than twenty speakers scheduled for the 2024 trip, only two were Palestinian — Salam Fayyad, former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Khalil Shikaki, a political science professor. While Epshtein characterizes PDLI’s speaker lineups as deliberately diverse, aiming to counter a monolithic perspective of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, all of PDLI’s invited speakers are united by their “interest in communicat[ing] their story directly to Yale and West Point students” — an orientation that embeds an implicit narrative. Ahsan points out that in seeking voices who are amenable to the U.S., PDLI’s invited speakers skew bureaucratic, toward nonprofit founders, leaders of the PA, and diplomats. Fellows see the choice to only engage with former PA leaders, who have little real power in the West Bank, as one of the program’s key shortcomings. In Ahsan’s words, “it feels like a massive miss to not be talking to the people who have the most direct influence on the

In the pursuit of nuance, some fellows contend that PDLI’s speaker list and general intellectual atmosphere seemed to prize the presence of competing narratives over an analysis of how they interact with each other. The result is that the Israel-Palestinian relationship is presented as an ideological issue which can be untangled through the force of iterative discussions and policy reforms, rather than a material issue which can only begin to be untangled by resolving land disputes between the two states. The program’s method of “dialogue,” Ahsan says, is predicated on the premise that the central issue underlying the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is a “clash between two people’s ideas of how they should live together, as opposed to land conflict or dispute.” Indeed, Epshtein himself frames the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the terms of a “values” — as opposed to a black-and-white morality — debate. The issue, Ephstein believes, is not that there is one correct and legitimate state pitted against an incorrect and illegitimate one, but rather that they have competing notions of how to advance their own interests (though it is unclear what “values” Epshtein attributes to each state). “The [Israeli-Palestinian] conversa-

tion really is a never-ending one,” Epshtein stresses, “because this is one of the single most complicated conflicts in history, because there exists harm on both sides. There exists truth on both sides.” *** Across the board, PDLI’s program leaders also insist on their neutrality. Dr. Ruth Beitler emphasizes that the Directors “don’t hold a position or advocate” for a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Lieutenant Colonel Faint clarifies that he’d prefer fellows to leave the program with a “duty to understand.” Organizationally, Lieutenant Colonel Faint says, PDLI believes in the twostate solution — “two state for two peoples, [though] that will ultimately be a decision for the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.” Epshtein, who also claims neutrality, first formed his commitment to spaces of moderate dialogue through childhood trips to Israel, where his parents fled to as refugees from the Soviet Union. “That background informed a lot of my thinking, as I was first starting out to [be] politically conscious,” he says. He has a track record of advocating for the notion that the U.S. should occupy a central, active position in “achieving peace in the Middle East,” particularly through its strong alliance with Israel. In a 2012 op-ed for The Jerusalem Post, Epshtein wrote that “a broad range of Yale leaders agree that despite the many layers and complications that the region is famous for, America’s involvement is crucial to achieving peace.”

Indeed, the program’s cultivation of neutrality belies a larger vision: Epshtein is strongly convicted in strengthening the trajectory from PDLI fellow to future world leader. Citing alumni who were deputy assistant secretaries in the Biden administration, he believes that fellows who graduate from Yale will likely end up at the helm of government and spend their careers writing directives to the military. When it comes to the U.S.’s role in the current relationship between Israel and Palestine, Epshtein believes that there is a duty to act — to leverage the knowledge they’ve learned from PDLI as a mental model for “deal[ing] with incredibly complicated subjects and do something about it.” In providing Yale students with a better understanding of military concerns and lifestyles, Epshtein hopes to equip future policymakers with the ability to “explain to their soldiers why they are in a particular place, doing a particular thing.” Beyond the military, Epshtein hopes that the program will provide future diplomats or NGO leaders with “not pro one side or another,” but rather a “much deeper understanding of a very complex, difficult issue.” *** By pushing students to engage with questions of peacebuilding and pursue careers in foreign policy, PDLI gestures towards a definite resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The PDLI program ends with a required capstone project rather than an essay, reflecting Epshtein’s mission of moving students beyond mere rhetorical flourishes into paths that

“actually improve people’s lives.” Fellows themselves do not necessarily share Epshtein’s inclination toward solutions-oriented thinking. “I don’t know if I would say, like, I had, like, some political revelation. I think I just had a lot of moments of understanding,” de Gennaro admits. The closest thing to a solution PDLI provides, at the end of the day, is still the continuation of rhetoric — the asking of more questions and better questions. When asked if they believe PDLI’s model of dialogue should be expanded throughout Yale’s campus, or even across other colleges, fellows and leaders answer with a resounding “yes.” “I think that [colleges should use] some of the criteria that we use for PDLI[...] to select for students,” Epshtein says. He believes that higher education institutions should start shifting their admissions questions and prioritizing the core ethos of PDLI, asking: “How can you disagree without being disagreeable? How can you disagree productively?” Fittingly, Epshtein’s most notable example of a successful PDLI capstone project was the podcast “Intractable,” founded by Skyler Inman ‘17. Inman, who was so inspired by her PDLI trip that she moved to Tel Aviv after graduation, started the podcast in order to “offer American audiences a balanced, multi-faceted, and contextual look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Inman’s podcast makes the same promise as PDLI: with enough

one-on-one conversations with the right stakeholders, the Israeli–Palestinian relationship will cease to become intractable. Both the podcast and PDLI offer no answers, only more questions — wrapped in a haze of nuance.

by Ashley Wang

by Will Sussbauer In the parking lot, high wind whips dead leaves from faraway trees into little twisters. Cars sometimes trundle over the speed bumps. A few errant leaves wander into their path, lodging in the grates of the cars or crinkling under their weight. Daniel sat and watched through the window. He was tucked along the edge of a large café that itself was tucked in the elbow of a strip-mall. It had tall booths and three registers and tables with rounded sides to limit the pain of corners. His now-empty food-tray sat centered and perpendicular. He ate already because he was meeting a woman for coffee, and when they telephoned the day prior, after colliding in the frozen aisle of the grocer’s, she said she did not often eat lunch. He did, so he arrived early. They had known each other as children, and re-met intermittently, happenstantially, since. He admired her—she was pretty, and her brown eyes glimmered orange with an awe towards the world. His watch, resting on the table with its strap flush with the tray, indicated nine minutes until she arrived. He would bring up his tray before then, but for now, he waited and read a book about God. It was the sort of book that made him wonder if he had a soul, if he was condemned to his nature, if he might have been a different man had he known God when he was a child. As Daniel wondered, the past decided to flicker into his periphery. He glanced up from his reading

and saw a child’s face pop over the booth-wall. The boy had a floppy mop of beach-blonde hair. Blue eyes that darted about with that bare joy of uncertain mischief. Little brown polka-dotted boots and blue elastic-waisted pants and a grey sweatshirt with dinosaurs all over. As if Daniel stared at some image that wandered from his memory into his eyes, superimposing this café with another, this little boy with another with the same face. This boy stood, and his head barely crested the booth. Then he walked, dragging his chin on the smooth wood. His mother called for him to stop, but his mischief surmounted his obedience. He reached the booth’s end, and trembled at the two-foot drop, only just now realizing the length of his legs and the solidity of his feet. His mother called for him to stop again, and stood, and Daniel saw his mother. The boy scooted off the booth. He ran to the edge of the carpet and looked back, and wheeled his arms, and looked around, right into Daniel’s eyes. He waved, but the boy did not register, and wheeled his arms and turned back to his mother. Daniel wondered what she was thinking: was this regular? Did she come to the café and anticipate her boy to run around, to crawl under empty tables and hang on their edges like monkeybars, as he did now? Or did she hope he would just sit and eat and glance around and learn? Anticipation and hope often co-

exist. Daniel’s mother knew this. She knew he was a rascal. She protected him from everything. He first met doorways as marred by complicated white gates. He spent hours trying to decipher them. A button loomed in the top corner, but he could only reach it if he stood on his Hess firetruck. But its bells and ladders hurt his feet, and his mother saw him once and told him never again. She opened the gates with such ease. It seemed that button was magic. Or she was. When he was born he learned that walls had streaks and air smelled of turpentine; his mother was deep amidst repainting. The white walls were becoming blue, the same blue as on the bathroom sign at preschool, a blue lighter than the sky ever was, lighter than oceans or blue jays. But when she was finished, the wall had a little dot of grey. He thought it was a polka-dot, like on his brown winter boots. But, once, he saw his mother remove the polka-dot, leaving in its wake three little holes. One round, two rectangles, stacked like a face surprised. He ran to the holes to see what lurked inside, but his mother stuck in the pointy end of the vacuum-cord and they disappeared. He did not like the vacuum so he went to the opposite corner of the living room and crouched and covered his ears. When she finished and the thundering passed, he turned around and just saw the polka-dot. Later he learned that it was a stopper, and that the holes held elec-

tric power, and he was shocked. With his fingernail, he pried the stopper to the floor, where it landed on its back like a very sad insect. His forefinger wormed into the face’s mouth and got bit, then his arm got bit, then his shoulder and torso and legs and feet all got bit. His eyes blurred and seemed to drown; his mother rushed in, hooked her arms under his, and carried him away. Only when she laid him into the tub, sloshing with lukewarm and cooling water, did he stop drowning and notice her eyes quiver and gleam in fear and self-anger. He submitted and let her wash the tingling off his skin. That day for lunch they went to the café, and he ate in silence. Daniel remembered wanting to stand on the booth-cushion, wanting to run and explore around the counter, wanting to stack his fries like logs, but his mother’s eyes still quivered and gleamed such that he did not know what she would think, so he just sat and ate and glanced around and learned.

This boy hopped off the booth-cushion as his mother brought their trays up to the refuse podium. She let him throw the receipts in the trash. He ran back to the table; his mother went to use the restroom, walking past the register and leaving the boy with the other woman, an older woman, maybe his grandmother. Daniel did not remember his Grandma being there that day, but here she was. As Grandma stood by and watched, he ran around once more. He hopped from floor-tile to floor-tile and shouted, “Ribbit!” His voice bursted with the light joy of knowledge. Daniel wondered when he learned about frogs. He hopped and shouted “Ribbit!” again and another family entered. A mother pushed a stroller, and behind her walked a little girl with brown hair and a flower-jacket. Her eyes glimmered orange with sunlight and awe. His mother came back from the restroom; the boy ran to her; the new family approached the register; they all col-

lided as a matter of chance, of the simple alignment of movements through time. But chance can be curbed into destiny with love and retrospect. Lives emerge when movements align: people float and intersect and sometimes converge, run parallel for some length. The blonde boy and flower-jacketed girl stared at each other. They both stopped moving; they stared at each other, locked eyes, registered the other as a peer or compatriot. She clutched her jacket, with pride and uncertainty, it seemed. His little brown polka-dotted boots did not stomp, nor trudge nor hop. She faced Daniel, and he saw her smile, and imagined he smiled too. When she smiled she seemed to age a dozen years; her smile inhabited the calm of a woman confronted with some inevitable but nonetheless surprising encounter, like she knew all this was going to occur but did not know quite when. And it was now. But his mother ushered him along, and his arm outstretched as he

art by Luke Louchheim 47

walked away. The girl’s mother grabbed her paper bag and cup of coffee and they exited. The boy did not turn to watch. Neither may remember this. Neither child may remember the other. Their eyes sparked with destiny as they saw each other, but any present-tense bursts with destiny: moments come and they go. These children may grow older and remeet, neither knowing that once they registered destiny in the other. Or, maybe they will not. Maybe it only emerges in retrospect, a manner of replacing the clear-eyed gasp of the present with florid recollection. The boy and his mother and grandmother all left as well. As they walked through the swirling leaves, the boy tried to catch one, releasing himself from his mother’s hand and twisting himself dizzy. She allowed this, grabbed him before he fell, and snatched a leaf for him. He took it gently and held it tight in one hand, lost in its details as they walked to the car; his other hand clutched his mother’s. It still tingled, either with electric shock or destiny. Children do not know of such things. Daniel watched them leave. His book nearly dropped from his grip; his tray sat perfectly aligned; his watch had spun itself thirty-five minutes. But he did notice.

art by Neve O’Brien

art by Malina Reber