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!…
The woods followed the road, stretching out across yards boasting a couple acres. In summer, the woods were drooping with black raspberries and mulberries begging to be picked. Most of the wooded areas nearby don’t host the berries—our family got lucky.
That’s where you’d find me in July: barefoot, and at times, bare-legged, picking black raspberries and placing them in a small plastic colander to make them easier to wash. I’d often have to fight ants, bees, and other insects for the ripest fruits. And even if they clung on after being picked, they’d be washed down the sink or drowned in the post-wash soak. Most of the berries would get eaten by my mom or my sister in a day. Mom might top her nightly dessert of vanilla ice cream with a few plump berries.…
I can see him clearly from my window, standing tall in the arena with his bodyguards, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Whatever it was, it excited a wild roar from the audience that boomed up through the loudspeakers to the 20th floor.
I knew why they were cheering. He was one of us. He cared. He saw we had nothing.
The crowd knew that. And they liked entertainment, accepting whatever gift he offered, even a shrug of his shoulders, his fingers pointing up as he illustrated some principle that others had forgotten. It didn’t matter what he was saying. The arena could have been full of slaves battling against beasts and they would have cheered with him. Because he knew what people liked.…
Amos rang the doorbell and stepped back over the “Llama let you in” doormat. He wrung his hands. The porch light cast his shadow over the llama’s shades. He had shades like that, looked better on the llama though. The gentle thud of socked feet approached the far side of the door. Now would be the time to run, make it all a ~totally sick prank~. Perry opened the door.
“Why’d you ring the doorbell?”
“Your parents aren’t home, so I figured… um.”
“Just knock, normal people knock, Amos.”
She was smiling, her hazel eyes glittered in the porch light. A moth bumped into her face. She flinched as though punched, sending her straightened hair into a crown around her head. It smelled nice, sweet, and floral.…
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.…
Flip a skirt hem and you have a lip to cradle tomatoes or questions or a bit of weather, make-do wings for the wrangling of life’s loose change, which is to say I lied about calling a truce. Enough with locks and keys. We each need more pockets to hide those broken parts of ourselves to be shared only under a moonless sky. What I bared and what I bore were twice the dare I could afford. With you my knees were forever hinged in remorse and ecstasy. Water flows down the easiest path. Icarus could have fashioned himself a raft, but who lunges for the sun dreaming of caution? You could call me abandoned or merely shipwrecked on a fickle shore. Here I am gilding my store of feathers, courting lost oarsmen and begging for a storm.…
