Posts by Stephanie Barbé Hammer

The Beautiful Pilot

Came to sit with us at the Thursday afternoon wine tasting on the patio in the small town where we live in the PNW. Little buildings with white shutters and red doors, and right in back of that… the sea. It’s a Melville novel kind of place that might make you feel special at first glance or on your first couple of visits. Shops with sea glass and beachy type art made of driftwood and seashells and the kinds of things you think you’ll want in Waltham, Massachusetts, but you’ll schlepp it all home on the plane and realize you don’t want it and it was just the ambiance that wowed you. The promise of living by the sea in a faraway place on an island accessible only by ferry, and where – you think to yourself – things will be kinder and easier. You think that, but you’ll turn out to be wrong. It’s a very white people place with practical REI sandals and no makeup and cargo shorts and windbreakers, where you say hello to people on the street and they look away and zip up their parkas.

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Look Around

Our Winter 2022 issue invites you to look at the not so see-able and perhaps even to learn to seek out what cannot — normally — be perceived. Appropriately, this issue contains invisible babies, lunar seashells, unnoticed birds, unspoken tensions between families, paternal scars, and wondrous insects. What marvels lurk in laundromats and along the byways of the everyday? How do we — in this age of very real limits — quest for and discover the magical and the miraculous?

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Groundhog Day — A Little in Advance

One of my favorite American movies is GROUNDHOG DAY, which was directed by the late Harold Ramis, and features an egoistical and annoying newscaster (Bill Murray) who gets trapped into living the same day over and over again in a small town he despises. The town in question is Punxatawney PA, where the famous groundhog of said Groundhog Day lives. What starts out as a comedy becomes in short order a meditation on the lives we feel we are trapped in, a set of routines we are

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Better

I don’t know about you but I’m in a bad mood a lot these days. I can’t go to Macy’s. I can’t go to a concert, I can’t take a bus, I can’t go to a protest. I can’t go out for dinner, breakfast, or lunch, and I can’t go to the movies or even to a friend’s house. I can’t get on an airplane and go visit my family in Los Angeles. I can’t go visit my friends in New York. I can’t even go to the

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It’s a Man’s Life… or is it?

We are hearing and reading lot about of powerful men in the news these days. Our president for one, and the many men who support him. These men admire and are drawn to other men. Men with guns and men with money. Or with both. And of course, men with oil.

Then there are interruptions of that power. Angela Merkel visiting the Auschwitz death camp and reminding Germans that there is no way around that history. Our own Nancy Pelosi

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Literary Language, Interpretation and Practice

As our editors prepare to launch the latest issue of SHARK REEF, perhaps you are doing what I am doing. I’m reading the Mueller Report. Perhaps like me, you are trying to imagine what Robert Mueller and his team were thinking as they pored through thousands of documents, emails and text messages and as they engaged in countless interviews with individuals who ranged from clueless to highly incompetent. And like me, maybe you too are guessing what names and addresses, what actions and deliberations, lurk behind the black blocks marked HARM TO INVESTIGATION and GRAND JURY.

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The Winter of our (Dis)content

What better moment in our profoundly messed up time to quote Richard III? Shakespeare can really write about dysfunctional regimes. I find myself thinking about the plays that focus on the rot at the top: Richard the III of course, but also Hamlet, King Lear, and even Measure for Measure, where a predatory puritanical ruler tries to blackmail a beautiful novice into having sex with him. A lot of Shakespeare sounds familiar to me right now.

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