Jaclyn Goddette

When her train pulled into the rural New Hampshire station in 1947, Lore Baer had already experienced more turmoil in her life than most 8-year-olds. Growing up as a Jew the Netherlands during World War II, she regularly hid from the Nazis in a dark hayloft. She had watched the Gestapo arrest her ill grandfather and survived the Dutch famine of 1944-45.

I discovered Sufjan Stevens' Illinois during a period in my life when my hometown was too small, an ill-fitting sweater. It was also a period in which I felt compelled to pin down the meaning of everything, so I spent a lot of time on songmeanings.com. I learned a lot about the album, like how Sufjan scoured historical records while also compiling personal anecdotes from friends and Internet chat room users during the album's songwriting phase. A lot of the allusions are to pretty famous events or figures—like the Sears Tower or Carl Sandburg, but I found myself drawn to reading about the localities mentioned in "Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Stepmother!"

My dad, who has been working in some capacity since he was an 11-year-old with a newspaper route, retires at the end of this year. It’s an exciting time for our family. My dad has been looking forward to this moment for as long as I can remember, and in the last few months, he’s been ramping up all the necessary preparations.

In the last few months, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four jumped to Amazon's bestsellers list and The Handmaid's Tale earned Hulu its first-ever Emmy series nomination. Such is the cultural landscape in which Eduardo Rabasa makes his novelistic debut with A Zero-Sum Game: an audience attuned to the way our society's biggest ills can be exposed through exploring an exaggerated depiction of them. Rather than Orwell's totalitarian state, it's neoliberalism that Rabasa takes to its logical conclusion.

A short, free-verse poem "Transubstantiation" was accepted into Good Fat Poetry Zine, a quarterly publication that showcases writers of the seacoast area of New Hampshire and beyond.