Archive • The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

November 30, 2025

December, we meet again. Braced for the cold, for the early dark, for the sudden onslaught of memory. Seeking solace in tea, in soup, in books read under...

a disembodied echo

November 23, 2025

A night of poetry at BAM, curated by Hanif Abdurraqib and featuring him alongside his friends Clint Smith and Sarah Kay and Anis Mojgani. Scrawling notes in...

I miss who we all were, before we were this

November 16, 2025

“We live in such bleak times and what keeps me going is living to the maximum without apology.” “To crip something is to bend, compress, twist, subvert, and...

The apps that I use for keeping track of these things tell me I’ll have spent around 30 nights in hotel rooms by the end of this year. A mix of work and...

We carry yesterday, today and tomorrow

October 26, 2025

This week: - planes, trains and automobiles- met two babies- had breakfast with someone I last hung out with in undergrad after running into them randomly at...

furious erasure

October 19, 2025

D’Angelo died, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. And as Saeed Jones wrote, “who gets to live a long life in America?” as I read that the singer had died after a...

It ended, and we woke up

October 12, 2025

A delegation of Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders were among hundreds of people from Chicago and the suburbs who marched from Maywood to Broadview on...

The search for lost verbs continues.

October 5, 2025

Every now and again, as if to prove to myself that I am still that kid and that teenager, I do things like decide to migrate all of the [embarrassingly large...

an attempt at fashioning / something pretty

September 28, 2025

Some causes worth supporting: local food banks. Give money.local libraries. Give money, get a library card, show up to events. local media organizations....

[housekeeping]

September 14, 2025

No newsletter this week; stymied by a flu that keeps threatening to be a chest infection. perhaps a good time to donate some money to a food bank; to wash...

I count my blessings

September 7, 2025

This has been a rough year for migraines. Some years are like that. My neurologist's office is closing: "With rising costs and decreased insurance...

I want all the rhythms

August 31, 2025

In São Paulo for work; conversations routinely start in Portuguese. Brazil, like Trinidad, is a place where I get the benefit of being assumed to belong...

touch us ALL with liberty,

August 24, 2025

I do not know what it feels like to only live in the places I am from, or from from. I do not know what it feels like to be embraced and protected by the...

so loud we / stopped hearing it.

August 10, 2025

In Cleveland, at a journalism conference. Some of us looking to turn information into meaning, some of us seeking to turn meaning into community....

they want rain without thunder and lightning.

August 3, 2025

Emancipation. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without...

it is still your village

July 27, 2025

The baby was brought to the pediatric department of Nasser Hospital on Friday. She was already dead. A worker at the morgue carefully removed her Mickey...

we do what we can.

July 21, 2025

I am interested in routines. For instance, every Sunday I send a newsletter. Sometimes — rarely — something goes sufficiently awry that I can’t complete that...

suitcases passports degrees of mobility

July 13, 2025

Took a class earlier today, about essays (the art, practice, and form of). When there’s a crisis I read because I want to be reminded of the necessity of...

a living monument of love

July 6, 2025

At least 21 children are dead in Texas, after severe flash flooding that took local and state officials by surprise. Against this backdrop of tragedy, I keep...