March News
March 6, 2025
"I wish to be accorded the privileges of a protagonist." —Honor Moore
This March, Women’s History Month, we honor our bonds to the women who shaped our world, and the stories we carry forward.
A Termination by Honor Moore
A PUBLIC SPACE BOOKS
I began to draw women. Their heads, their faces, following the line my hand made. How fast can I get a face? Their hair was always long—rebuke to my mother, who cut mine short. Don’t take your hand from the pen or the pen from the page. Woman after woman. The one I just drew has a scribble for a mouth—the next is serious, looking off to the left. I always begin with the left eye—my own left eye sees less well. Wrench the woman to the center of her circumstances. Was it shut up, shut up, shut up that shook me to life, or was it the first pen I picked up?
This March, read Honor Moore's memoir A Termination, a powerful counterpoint to the moment it captures and to the moment we find ourselves in now. Copies of A Termination are available here.
"The Desert" by Naz Riahi
A PUBLIC SPACE No. 32
I put my camera very near her and examined the disembodied flesh.... Through the lens it looked like a map. The topography of my beginnings. I captured as many pieces of her as I could, her hands, her knees. I tried to meet the tenderness of her offering with my own gentleness, which never came easy. I asked her to pose for me, however felt most comfortable. She sat on a chair with her legs crossed, her arms still on each armrest and looked straight into the lens.
Order your copy of A Public Space No. 32—with work from Naz Riahi, Kirsten Kaschock, Kate Kruimink, Mike Lala, Art Smith, and more—here.
APPLY! THE 2025 WRITING FELLOWSHIP AT A PUBLIC SPACE
Apply by March 31!
Since 2014, the Writing Fellowships at A Public Space have supported early-career writers who embrace risk in their work and their own singular vision. Over the last decade, more than thirty writers—poets, essayists, short-story writers extraordinaire—have helped to shape A Public Space as Writing Fellows. 2015 fellow Arinze Ifeakandu was a nineteen-year-old writer when he submitted his fellowship story "God's Children Are Little Broken Things," which would become the title story of his Dylan Thomas prizewinning debut collection. 2018 Fellow Bruna Dantas Lobato submitted a story, "Diversions," that would develop into her debut novel, Blue Light Hours. 2017 fellow Cleo Mikutta was an art student in Amsterdam when she submitted “Meeting Points” and 2023 fellow Cory Howell Hamada was working as a journalist in Japan when he submitted his essay “Erosion.”
What will you submit? Applications are now open for the 2025 Writing Fellowship at A Public Space. Find all details, and the link to the application, here!
APS TOGETHER
The Finale of Our Odyssey with Stefania Heim
Join us March 18 on Zoom
"Meanwhile Odysseus, who had been sleeping / in his own native land of Ithaca / woke up, but did not recognize the place / from which he had been absent for so long." Athena’s mist literalizes the estrangement that is so often the condition of homecoming. How home itself cannot achieve the condition of our fantasy of home. —Stefania Heim
We are so enjoying reading The Odyssey together daily with all of you for APS Together. Odysseus has arrived in Ithaca, and the end of our journey is in sight. Find Stefania Heim's daily notes, and comments from our fellow readers, here. And join us on March 18 for a grand finale conversation about Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's epic with Stefania Heim and APS editor Brigid Hughes. Register for the online event here.
EVENTS WITH APS CONTRIBUTORS AND FRIENDS
Mónica de la Torre, Pause the Document
Thursday, March 13, The Francis Kite Club (New York City)
APS contributor Mónica de la Torre celebrates the publication of her new collection, Pause the Document (Nightboat), with Veronica Gonzalez Peña, James Hannaham, Valeria Luiselli, and Timmy Straw, who will read their own "paused documents," interpreting the title as a command, respite, or dictation. Mónica de la Torre's story "137 Northeast Regional" appeared in A Public Space No. 27.
Tove Ditlevsen, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die
Monday, March 17, Greenlight (Brooklyn)
Merve Emre, Elisa Gonzalez, Sophie Haigney, and Maris Kreizman discuss the poetry of APS Together author Tove Ditlevsen in connection with the publication of her selected poems. Dorthe Nors was our host for the APS Together reading of Dependency, the third volume of Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy.
Peter Trachtenberg, The Twlight of Bohemia
Tuesday, March 18, Westbeth (New York City)
APS contributor Peter Trachtenberg celebrates the publication of The Twilight of Bohemia (Black Sparrow), a history of Westbeth, America's first publicly funded artists’ housing project—and the precarious place of art-makers in a changing New York City. His story of the Chimney Girl, one of the residents of that iconic space, appears in A Public Space No. 32.
Diane Mehta, Happier Far
Thursday, March 20, P&T Knitwear (New York City)
APS contributor and wonderfully "original and feisty" author Diane Mehta discusses her new book Happier Far (Georgia)—essays on love, marriage, divorce, and the absurdities and dilemmas of becoming a writer—with Vivian Gornick. Diane Mehta's poem "Extended Melodies" appeared in A Public Space No. 31.
PUBLIC ACCESS
This month's Public Access—work from the magazine's archive, made free and open to all—is selected and introduced by Naz Riahi, whose story "The Desert" appears in A Public Space No. 32:
This year, the Iranian new year, Nowruz, synced with the exact moment of the spring equinox, is on March 20 at 5:01 a.m. EST. This ancient Zoroastrian holiday is the ushering in of spring and with it, great possibility. In advance of the new year there are rituals—from cleaning house, to jumping over fire—to close out the old and cleanse our homes and ourselves in preparation. There is, within this holiday, a surrealness to the memories we commit to reflection, a questioning in the twilight of what has happened and what is to come. These selections of stories and poems (two of which are by Iranian writers—Goli Taraghi and Kaveh Akbar) remind me of the end that precedes the beginning, the nebulous nature of memory, and the closing out that ushers in hope. At this moment, in this country, we are all faced with attacks on vulnerable people and needed systems of care. Let this be our dark before the dawn, our winter before the spring. Let us reflect on what hasn't worked and the possibility of a just and kind world. And let us consider our role in making that change a reality as we usher in a new season (and for some, a new year) this month.
The Funeral
Mahreen Sohail
There are many things we take to our graves just because there is no language for how to recount the experience of having lived through them. Continue reading.
For You I've Started Sleeping
Kaveh Akbar
it’s not the sleep
I mind it’s the waking always
such a startle like finding a drifter
in your kitchen cooking your eggs. Continue reading.
Night
Etel Adnan
Now waves of roses are blanketing memory, but childhood’s desire to enter time’s core remains. Continue reading.
The Pear Tree
Goli Taraghi
I told her to wait. Not to be impatient: I will come for you, just wait, until I have finished my book, until my comrades and I have saved humanity, until the final triumph of the working class, just wait. Continue reading.
On the Last Evening on this Earth
Mahmoud Darwish
on the last evening
we bid nothing farewell, we don’t find the time to end who we are...
everything remains the same, the place exchanges our dreams
and exchanges its visitors. Continue reading.
ELSEWHERE
"Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born." Mr. Dudron, Giorgio de Chirico's novel of "the relationship between the artist and their audience," translated from the Italian by Stefania Heim for A Public Space Books, makes an appearance alongside work from Maeve Brennan, Nettie Jones, and Edith Wharton in Rhian Sasseen's piece for The Atlantic on the "unfairly forgotten treasures" that are now in vogue.
Starting March 7, join our friends at Film Forum for a new 4K restoration of Frank Perry’s 1972 Play It as It Lays. The languid, bleak energy of Joan Didion's novel is visualized in Perry's raw adaptation, starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins and scripted by Didion along with husband John Gregory Dunne. Purchase tickets here for a film "about empty lives, acute anguish, Hollywood, and Hell” (Pauline Kael),
The Republic of Consciousness Prize, which celebrates "the commitment of small presses to exceptional literary merit," has announced the shortlist for their 2024 prize—five stellar books by five stellar independent presses: Like a Sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic, translated by Daniel Levin Becker (Fern Books); Melvill by Rodrigo Fresán, translated by Will Vanderhyden (Open Letter); Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber (Coffee House); The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated by Angela Rodel (Sandorf Passage); and Your Absence is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton (Biblioasis).