Byline: Sierra Stern

Prayer to the Stratosphere

“The chunks of Amie’s life were too insignificant to be measured in Christ or Common Era. Even her birthdays seemed an inaccurate measurement of the passage of time.”

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Only In Name: The Myth of Model Minority Assimilation

“There is a sad symbolism to this game of catch-up, a sense of sprinting after an ideal that is perpetually out of reach.”

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Telescoping Echo

To telescope, we begin with 300 words, then slice the word count in half for each successive section. We stop when the numbers stop dividing evenly. This week, eight Nass writers telescope the word “echo” (echo, echo). Lucia Brown At … Read More

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Friendship, Inside-Out

“I was never the kid to get tangled up in chatroom relationships and online communities like many of my friends in middle and high school. I repent now, for the way I invalidated, even in my own head, the authenticity of their attachments. Laughter over Zoom is still laughter.”

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Sally Rooney and the New Amorous World

“In part, the devastation of Conversations with Friends lies in its ability to pinpoint the impurities that taint how we care for one another, without offering a clear or optimistic way out.”

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Lincoln

“He wouldn’t have taken it normally, but there was a girl at Lincoln’s shoulder, a fiber science major who kept touching his button-down to inspect the weave, and he couldn’t tell afterwards whether she’d only kissed him because it was 100% cotton.”

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Family Bones

A fiction piece reflecting on how to cope with impending loss.

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Telescoping Space

To telescope, we begin with 300 words, then slice the word count in half for each successive section. We stop when the numbers stop dividing evenly. Looking around and beyond us, this week we telescope “space.”

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At the Expense of the Invisible: the White Male Perspective of Cartoon

“Perhaps children of the early 2000s should be grateful for tamer coming-of-age protagonists who dealt with school bullies, boogers, and cursed slices of cheese within the vacuum of endless middle school.”

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A Mysterious De-Personing

“More than a few miles from home, I conclude this first sliver of college convinced of the notion that I’m more fiction than fact. Now more than ever, I feel like a character, and not a good one.”

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