01 — Fiction
The Architecture of Forgetting
By Elara Voss
The house was smaller than he remembered. Not in the way houses shrink when you return to them after years away—that cliché he had been warned about, had prepared himself for—but in a more literal sense. The kitchen, which he recalled as a vast territory of linoleum and humming appliances, was barely large enough for two people to pass without turning sideways. The hallway to the bedrooms, which in childhood had seemed to stretch like a corridor in a dream, now revealed itself as nine feet of narrow passage with a ceiling he could touch if he stood on his toes.
Martin set his bag down by the door and stood very still, listening. The house made its familiar sounds: the tick of the baseboard heater, the refrigerator’s patient cycling, something in the walls that might have been pipes or might have been the house settling into its bones. His mother had lived here alone for eleven years after his father died, and in that time the house had absorbed her silences. The air itself felt quieter than he remembered, as though sound had been slowly drained from the rooms like color from a photograph left in the sun.
The lawyer had given him the key on a Tuesday. “She left everything to you,” he said, as though this were a gift and not a weight. Martin had driven up from the city on Thursday, taking the old highway instead of the interstate, passing through towns that had not changed in thirty years and towns that had ceased to exist, their post offices converted to churches, their churches converted to nothing at all.
Memory is an architect who keeps revising the blueprints after the building has burned.
In the living room, the furniture was exactly as he remembered it, which meant it was exactly as she had arranged it the year he left for college. The same plaid sofa with the threadbare arm. The same reading lamp with the brass stem that leaned slightly to the left, as though perpetually eavesdropping. The same bookshelves, though the books had multiplied over the years—she had been a reader, his mother, the kind of reader who kept a novel in every room, even the bathroom, even the garage.
He picked up a volume from the shelf nearest the window. Rilke. She had underlined a passage in pencil: “Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love.” The pencil marks were faint, almost gone, and Martin held the book closer to the window to read them. He wondered when she had underlined it. Before the diagnosis, or after? Was it a discovery or a consolation?
The upstairs bedroom had been his, once. Now it was a guest room in the loosest sense—she had kept his old desk but replaced the bed with a daybed that folded out, as though preparing for visitors who never came. His posters were gone, but the nails remained in the walls, small iron witnesses to what had hung there. On the desk, a pencil cup she had made from a coffee can wrapped in brown paper, decorated with stamps from countries she had never visited. He remembered making it with her on a rainy Saturday, the two of them sitting at this same kitchen table that was now nine feet and a lifetime away.
Martin sat on the daybed and looked out the window at the backyard. The maple tree his father had planted the year Martin was born had grown enormous, its canopy reaching past the second-floor windows, its roots surely buckling the foundation by now. In autumn, the leaves turned the color of fire, then fell in a slow cascade that took weeks to complete. His mother had loved that tree. She had written about it in her journal, which the lawyer had also given him, sealed in a manila envelope with instructions not to open it until he was ready.
He was not ready. He set the journal on the desk beside the pencil cup and went back downstairs to make coffee, to pretend for another hour that he was simply visiting, that she was simply out, that the house was merely waiting for the sound of her key in the lock.
04 — Criticism
Against Nostalgia
By Thea Blackwood
Nostalgia is not memory. This distinction matters more now than ever, when we are drowning in a culture that has confused the two. Memory is what happened. Nostalgia is what we wished had happened, burnished and re-edited until it glows with a warmth the original event never possessed. Memory is a document. Nostalgia is a forgery.
The word itself has medical origins. Johannes Hofer coined it in 1688 to describe the pathological homesickness of Swiss mercenaries serving abroad—a condition so severe it was thought to be fatal. The soldiers who suffered from it experienced actual physical symptoms: fever, irregular heartbeat, lesions on the brain. Nostalgia was, in its first usage, a disease.
We have domesticated it. We have turned it into an aesthetic, a marketing strategy, a political platform. Vinyl sales exceed digital downloads in certain quarters. Film photography has been resurrected not for its technical qualities but for its imperfections—the grain, the light leaks, the unpredictability that digital photography eliminated because it was, by any rational measure, undesirable. We have made virtues of our deficiencies because the deficiencies remind us of a time when we were younger and therefore believed the world to be better than it was.
The problem with nostalgia as an organizing principle for culture is that it is inherently conservative. It privileges what has been over what might be. It mistakes familiarity for quality. It asks us to return rather than to proceed, to preserve rather than to create. And it does so with a seductive emotional logic that is difficult to resist, because who among us does not ache for a past that never existed?
Nostalgia edits. It cuts the scenes where we were wrong, the afternoons that were merely boring, the years we cannot account for at all.
I am not arguing that the past is worthless, or that we should not learn from it, or that there are not genuine treasures in what has come before. Of course there are. But nostalgia does not engage with the past as it was. It engages with the past as a costume—a set of surfaces that can be worn without consequence. The person who buys a vintage typewriter does not want to type on a machine with no delete key, no copy-paste, no spell-check. They want the idea of typing on such a machine, which is an entirely different experience.
This is what nostalgia does: it edits. It cuts the scenes where we were wrong, the afternoons that were merely boring, the years we cannot account for at all. It leaves us with a highlight reel that bears almost no resemblance to the game as it was played. And then it sells the highlight reel back to us at a premium.
The irony is that we are nostalgic for eras that were themselves obsessed with the future. The mid-century modern furniture we fetishize was designed by people who believed they were building tomorrow—who thought plastic and chrome and clean lines were the vocabulary of progress, not of heritage. We have taken their aspirations and turned them into heirlooms, which is perhaps the most thorough form of misunderstanding available to us.
What would it mean to live without nostalgia? Not without memory—memory is essential, memory is the foundation of empathy and justice and wisdom. But without the editorial gloss, without the sepia filter, without the comforting lie that things were once simple and good and have only recently gone wrong. Things were never simple. They were never good in the uncomplicated way we remember. And the belief that they were is not innocence but a refusal to look clearly at what was always, in every era, a beautiful and terrible mess.
I want a culture that looks forward with the same intensity that it looks back. I want artists who are more interested in what has not yet been made than in what was made well in 1962. I want us to stop telling ourselves that the best days are behind us, because that is the one story that, if believed, makes itself true.
1 Hofer, J. “Dissertatio medica de Nostalgia.” Basel, 1688. Translated by Carolyn K. Anspach, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 8, 1940.
2 The RIAA reported vinyl revenue of $1.2 billion in 2024, the eighteenth consecutive year of growth.
3 See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), for the definitive taxonomy of restorative vs. reflective nostalgia.
05 — Interview
A Conversation with Darian Okafor
Conducted by Lila Marchetti
You’ve said that your poems begin with sound rather than meaning. Can you explain what that process looks like?
It looks like me walking around my apartment muttering to myself, which I’m sure is alarming to my neighbors. But I mean it literally. Before I have a subject, before I have an image or an idea, I have a rhythm. A pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that feels like it wants to go somewhere. And I follow it. I follow the sound the way you follow a creek upstream, not knowing where it comes from, trusting that it comes from somewhere. The meaning arrives later, if the sound was honest.
Your second collection, Midwest Hymnal, was very much rooted in place. Is geography important to your work?
Geography is everything and nothing. The Midwest is important to me because I grew up here, because the landscape is in my body—the flatness, the horizon that goes on forever, the way the sky takes up more space than the ground. But I don’t think a reader needs to know Toledo to feel the poems. Place is a vehicle, not a destination. What matters is what the landscape makes you feel, and flatness is a feeling. Openness is a feeling. The particular loneliness of a prairie at dusk is a feeling that exists everywhere, even in cities, even in people who have never seen a cornfield.
There’s a lot of failure in your poems. Failed relationships, failed communications, the failure of language itself. Is that intentional?
I think poetry is, at its core, an art of failure. We reach for something with words and the words are never quite enough, never quite right, and the gap between what we mean and what we say — that gap is where poetry lives. Every poem is a beautiful failure. The ones that succeed are the ones that fail most honestly, that don’t pretend the gap isn’t there.
What are you working on now?
A sequence about my grandmother, who came to Ohio from Nigeria in 1971 and never talked about it. She died last spring and I realized I had been writing around her for years without writing about her. Now I’m trying to write about a woman I loved but never knew, which is maybe the most poetic thing I’ve ever attempted. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t know if poems about the dead ever really work. But I think the trying matters.
What advice would you give to a young poet starting out?
Read everything. Read the poets you love and read the poets you don’t understand and read the poets who bore you, because boredom is its own kind of education. And then write badly. Write as badly as you can for as long as you can, because the only way to write well is to write badly first, and the people who are afraid of writing badly are the people who never write at all. Also: live. Have a life outside of literature. The poems will be better for it.