“When I met the man who would become my husband, what worried me most was the pair of cats he’d had earlier in life, and his memory that they’d scratched his vinyl records. Kids? Eh. But having cats was nonnegotiable.” “I Am Cat Lady” by Sandra Beasley: vqronline.org/fall-2024/beco…

A two-for-one special for my friends who teach: just in case your syllabus needs include "an example of a double abecedarian essay" OR "the firsthand testimony of a cat lady." vqronline.org/fall-2024/beco…

Bucket List Item: Get published in Virginia Quarterly Review. My essay/memoir about Berlin, “Time Out of Time,” is in the Fall 2024 issue. Saturday is the 35th anniversary of The Berlin Wall coming down. vqronline.org/fall-2024/memo…

“I thought Berlin had nothing to teach me, when it actually taught me everything.” Read more from “Time Out of Time” by Bethanne Patrick (Bethanne Patrick) in our Fall 2024 issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/memo…

My beloved Bethanne has a fantastic essay in the current isue of Virginia Quarterly Review. It's about Berlin in the 1980s, and life as a military spouse, Christa Wolf, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and accepting our dark side, and our desire—our need—to seen as fully human.

An essay that needed 35 years of reflection

Read Devon Brody’s poem “There are flowers in the median on the way down to New Orleans,” new in our Fall issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/poet…

“Grief is a shell game. The first time I tried to write about not having children, someone put forward the specter of the unbearable grief I would experience if I did not.” Read Sandra Beasley’s “I Am Cat Lady,” new from our Songs of Myself issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/beco…

“Gratitude is a hard emotion to hold on to. So is ethical ecstasy. Days slip by, then years, and you go on living. Even the scars that mark how you earned it fade.” Read more from Meera Subramanian in “A Measure of Gratitude,” an essay in our Fall issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/essa…

Read “Accomack Spit, The Protected Land,” new poetry from Forrest Gander in our Fall 2024 issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/poet…

“We don’t exist in a soup of probabilities. We each carve a narrow path through the breadth of the possible—the sum of all choices we’ve made and all that were made for us.” Read @KhatrySarah’s essay “Experiments in Light” in our Fall issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/essa…

I can now share a live link to this essay, included in VQR’s fall issue last week. It’s in no way about politics, but it is about glimpsing the possibility of other worlds, other lives contained within the here and now.

Read “I Take You Out,” new poetry by Lauren Aliza Green in our Fall 2024 issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/poet…

“Imagining a place is a way of loving it.” See “Memories of Distant Mountains,” a portfolio of illustrated notebooks by Orhan Pamuk, introduced by Merve Emre (@Mervatim), in our latest issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/art-…

“She wrote a poem about me too,” new poetry from Devon Brody in our Fall issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/poet…

Read Jordan P Hickey (@jordanphickey.bsky.social)’s #VQRTrueStory on an Arkansas town coming to grips with its past, new in our Fall 2024 issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/vqrt…

“In the face of all this time-distress, I try to keep foremost in mind that this world is full of beautiful and true things rather than reasons to watch the clock and become anxious.” Read more from Carlo Rotella’s essay “A Tempo,” new in our Fall issue: vqronline.org/fall-2024/essa…