Skip to main content

Spring 2022

Spring 2022

Volume 98, Number 1

VQR’s Spring issue tends to coincide with a buoyant season. But just as the most recent surge of the coronavirus pandemic has ebbed, war has broken out in Europe. Anxieties are piling up, and yet people seem determined to step stubbornly into some semblance of an outdated normalcy. If anything, this spring is a conflicted and bittersweet season. The work herein—including Claire Rosen’s unforgettable cover image—embraces that tension. It’s a tension that animates Ellyn Gaydos’s feature essay on love, death, and life on a New York pig farm, where the brutal and the sublime intertwine daily. Conflicting sentiments run through other works: cruelty and tenderness in a boyhood memoir by Joseph Earl Thomas; Miranda Featherstone’s essayistic reflection on commitment in the face of agonizing losses; Ara Oshagan’s photo portfolio on disconnect and ritual among the Armenian diaspora; and a suite of fiction—by Karin Lin-Greenberg, Evgeniya Dame, and Gothataone Moeng—featuring familiar pasts fast dissolving into uncertain futures.

[toc] Table of Contents
Print:

$20.00

Digital:

$20.00

Spring 2022

Table of Contents

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

At Alice and Henry’s farm, it is time to mate the sows. Henry even bought a home pregnancy test for them—it is inserted into the vagina and simply beeps, with maddeningly little explanation, if it judges them to have conceived.

Editor’s Desk

Columns

Essays

Memoir

Fiction

Homing

Still Life

Photography

Author Profiles

Jim Coan is an American affective neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, writer, podcast host, human-rights activist, and psychology professor at the University of Virginia, where he serves as director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Labora

Miranda Featherstone is a social worker and a writer. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times and the Yale Review. She lives in Rhode Island.

Gothataone Moeng is a former fiction fellow in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.