Film is a trickster’s medium, an illusion of an illusion. Though it purports to capture objective fact—as if holding…
Mairead Small Staid
maireadsmst
Mairead Small Staid is an essayist living in Minnesota. More of her work can be found at https://maireadsmallstaid.com/.
“When you consider the plenitude of any word’s inheritance you might think all words are untranslatable,” writes…
If you only know two sentences from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, they are these: “My plan was to never get…
“Marcel Marceau’s first wife divorced him in 1958,” Shawn Wen writes of the famous mime. “She said he would not…
Pity the protagonists of old-fashioned novels—just about everything seems to happen to them. They have an uncanny…
A paradox lies at the center of any memoir about suicide, the fact that one can’t write about the desire to kill…
Giving birth is an apocalypse: one world ends, another becomes. In Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot, Cora sits alone in…