Riding the MBTA
In Boston, territory is marked by color, on the map and off. As a Black or Brown girl, you will spend your first months learning to read its deceptively cheerful hues the way you learn to read an all-white classroom or low-lit alleyway.
Collected Evidences
A mother’s body is never her own. Hers is a body to be entered / to be opened / to be touched and sucked and pinched and pulled / to be squeezed and examined / to be evaluated / to be expanded and depleted / to be exited / to be always in service of someone else.
Smell Map of Kyoto in October
Smell Map of Kyoto in October Winner of the 2025 Multimedia Essay Contest by Fiona Lindsay Shen Having trouble viewing this essay? Click here to open in new window.
False Alarm
Head Trauma
Remapping an Unraveling
Read this choose-your-own-adventure essay that judge Kelcey Ervick called “insightful,” and “utterly immersive”
The Name Project
“The Name Project,” by Julian Long, is a brilliant meta-memoir experience, and was an honorable mention in our 2023 Multimedia Essay Contest.
The Body is a Vessel
Check out “The Body is a Vessel” by Jesse Lee Kercheval, honorable mention in our 2023 Multimedia Essay Prize.
Out of Body
Winner of the 2022 Fourth Genre Multimedia Essays Prize. Judge Wayne Koestenbaum called the essay “delicate and textured,” a work that “beautifully captures the feelings of absence associated with depersonalization.”
Chthonic
Can you remember your first underground tunnel? The bulkhead steps that were covered in spiderwebs? Your great uncle’s wine cellar? The New York subway system? Mine was a concrete pipe that the local creek ran through…