Carol Van Den Hende is a speaker and author whose award-winning novel, Goodbye, Orchid (which was named a 2020 Favorite Book by The Write Review), deals with themes of love, loss, and disability. The story is inspired by combat-wounded veterans and centers on a wounded entrepreneur named Phoenix Walker who questions who he is post-accident and how he’ll continue a relationship with a woman named Orchid. A portion of profits is being donated to charities including USA Cares.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Van Den Hende about the inspirations and processes that went into creating Goodbye, Orchid, as well as her interest in Jack White’s music, her strategies for marketing her work, and much more!…
Within the industrial design world, Eva Zeisel is a legend, but I had no idea when I began working for her. It was 2000, I was 24, and had recently moved to Manhattan. I responded to an ad in the Village Voice that promised $12 an hour for an administrative assistant to a designer. The next day, I took the number 1 train to 116th & Broadway and entered her large, cluttered apartment for an interview. Immediately inside were floor-to-ceiling overstuffed bookcases. “Come in dah-ling,” I followed the voice through a maze of tables dotted with lamps, vases, and bowls (which I’d learn were all her own designs) to find an ancient-looking woman. With fluffy white hair and cloudy eyes, Eva sat in a pink and gold wingback chair.…
My reticent leanings began at a young age. I was about eight years old when my younger sister died from leukemia. Life for us before that was idyllic. Our father worked for a multinational oil company and we’d lived abroad starting soon after I was born, with all the benefits bestowed upon expatriates. My sister, Gail, was born in Jamacia, which for us in the 1950s was a paradise, very safe and very British. Gail’s cancer put an end to all of that. We returned to the United States.
Gail’s death was my fault, as far as I knew. I’d failed to do what a big brother was supposed to do: keep her safe. Sixty years later, I’ve not convinced myself that isn’t true. And I don’t expect I ever will.…
“Maybe it’s just our generation, but there’s always been this constant pressure to actively work towards success, money, or fame… There’s this fear that if you haven’t made a name for yourself by the age of twenty, you’ll never be successful,” says a member of Kindergarten Breakfast, a highschool-based satire band, “And when you’re working with the arts, that pressure is even more extreme. You have to be amazing. You have to be the best. You have to be something the world’s never seen, or it feels like you’re nothing at all. It’s absolutely dreadful on the mind—it makes you feel worthless, it makes you feel guilty if you’re not always working, working, working . . . and it’s exhausting. Oh boy, is it exhausting.”
Reflecting on his life and memoir Conducted by Emily Bond
Michael Long was born with an intellectual disability and cerebral palsy. He’s an education advocate for people with disabilities and recently his memoir, A Life Like Anybody Else: How a Man with an Intellectual Disability Fulfilled His American Dream, was re-edited and re-released. I spoke with Michael about the anniversary of the Americans with Disability Act, his book, and his life right now.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) marks its 31st anniversary this July 27th. The act officially became law in 1990. In 1992, Governor Pete Wilson hired disability awareness activist and speaker Michael Long in the role of a Consumer Coordinator at the Department of Developmental Services (DDS), making Michael the first person to be officially hired by the State of California with an intellectual disability.…
Fayyaz Vellani is a British-Canadian writer who has lived in London, New York, Toronto, and Philadelphia, where he teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His stories have appeared in The Bookends Review and F-Word Magazine, and his first novel, Tea with Ms. Tanzania, will be published by Africa World Press in 2022.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Vellani speaks with Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum about his recent writings, as well as his love of music, his diverse experiences teaching in different countries, and more!
Spinning to Mars by Meg Pokrass (Blue Light Press, June 2021) is an introspective collection of linked micro-fiction. For those who might be unfamiliar with this form, micro-fiction is an even more abbreviated style of storytelling than flash fiction, though micro still technically falls under flash’s umbrella. Pokrass is an award-winning expert of the genre, and reading this collection highlights the form’s charms, strengths, and possibilities.
The inciting incident of the book as a whole is the loss of the protagonist’s father when she is five years old. The feeling of his absence permeates the sequence. It is as though he is on another planet, unreachable and alien. The fatherless protagonist grows up spinning (sometimes sure of what she wants, other times disoriented and confused).…
