Prose

Sharing the Darkness

Carolyn Forché

I wake with a start at midnight. A nightbird striking the window? A bat in the eaves? Maybe someone in the theater of my sleep gave me a nudge—someone I don’t know in waking life. It is cloudy and warm this night, so the waning moon isn’t visible through the window beside me, nor the bright star Antares to the right of it. There is no wind. There have been no sharp knocks on the door as I seem to hear sometimes, and no imaginary bell. A stillness has descended on everything: the pile of books on the bedside table, the water glass lit from within, and across the room, a gallery of people looking out from their photographs as if through windows in the past. Nothing moves. Something has happened, is what the darkness says. It had to do …

Kata, a novel excerpt

Stacy Mattingly

Using Galaxy Clusters to Search for the Most Distant Objects in the Observable Universe

Dr. Felipe Andrade-Santos

Caramel and Chocolate Can Both Have Sea Salt

Gabrielle Honore

Willemien’s Promise

Paula Srur Carcar

Well, What Would Lincoln Do?

John Burt

Refugee Stories from Odesa, Ukraine

Translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

Two Short Stories

Naomi Leites

Student Book Reviews from Prof Beth Denisch’s class: Music, Gender and Society

Music

Berklee Alumni Column #1: Nicole Domagala

Joely Cromack-Kluko

This month, I had the pleasure of talking with 2024 Berklee alum Nicole Domagala. Nicole made for an intriguing first interview. Having completed a pro-music degree with a minor in production, she is a perfect example of the vast range of interests Berklee can spark in its students. Since graduating, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where she is completing an internship with Blackbird Studio. She participates in session set-ups in the very studio where artists like Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, and Neil Young have recorded. Nicole also works as a stagehand at Cannery Hall, a local music venue. However, music is more than just her career, as she spends her free time working on personal projects at her home studio. Nicole, like myself, started at Berklee in its first online semester in 2020. We agreed that it was an intimidating …

Berklee’s “Music of Women Composers” Course: 8 Essays

On the Formation of Clouds

Brian Turner

Escape Velocity

Joel Peckham

Tuning in to Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony

Katherine Dacey

Two Essays on the Body—Love, Broken, Beauty.

by Brian Turner

Kinds of Blues: 3 Songs & 3 Poems

Cornelius Eady

The Superpower of Conducting: Women Rise to the Podium

Anna Rakitina, Assistant Conductor, Boston Symphony Orchestra

Ghost Session

Pete Mullineaux

Film

GUADAGNINO – <em>CINÉASTE DE AUTRE TEMPS, or the death of the auteur and rebirth of the artisan</em>

GUADAGNINO – CINÉASTE DE AUTRE TEMPS, or the death of the auteur and rebirth of the artisan

Sean Brennan

Though Luca Guadagnino has of late become one of the cinema’s premier aesthetes, his demeanor when speaking about his work resembles a producer rather than a director of his renown. In interviews, he is just as inclined to spend ample time delving into minutiae of production design in his works as he is to rhapsodize the influence of aesthetes such as Bertolucci on his cinematic education. Indeed, many of his recent projects as director have spawned from him ‘reluctantly’ taking the reins when no one else would, moving easily from the producer’s chair to the director’s. And yet his body of work br¬¬eathes with a joy and a love for the cinema which, like all great cinéastes, has the potential to penetrate the material work of craftsmanship, always striving to access something deeper. A self-described “stalker of master filmmakers”, Guadagnino’s …