healing Archives - Public Seminar

Music

Election Anxiety Mixtape

What a Public Seminar editor is listening to in order to alleviate election dread

November 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

For the past year, commentators from all sectors of the American political spectrum have remarked on the impending enormity of the 2024 US presidential election. I am here not to join them but to offer a token of wellbeing. This week, Public Seminar’s editorial team is turning to music for escape, ...

Multi-Verse

Multi-Verse Episode 6: CM Burroughs on Not Being Gentle

In three “Dear Liver” poems, a grieving sister demands response

October 31, 2022 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In Episode 6 of Multi-Verse, poet CM Burroughs reads her trio of “Dear Liver” poems and discusses themes of grief, agency, and healing with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham....

Literature

Libertie

In Brooklyn in 1860, a daughter watches her mother bring a patient back from the dead, in this excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel

December 15, 2021 • by Kaitlyn Greenidge

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic....

Interviews

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

In this interview with Public Seminar, the memoirist discusses complex mother/daughter dynamics, enthusiastic consent, and finding clarity through the “privacy of the page.”

October 20, 2021 • by Melissa Febos and Madeleine Janz

New School alum and bestselling author Melissa Febos sat down (virtually) with Public Seminar intern Madeleine Janz to discuss writing about those you love most, complicated “almost” traumas, and the inherited shame of female adolescence. Febos’s newest book, an essay collection entitled Girlhood (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), was on The New School’s Alumni Bookshelf this year and is available for purchase here. Madeleine Janz [MJ]: To ...

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

Literature

Savage Tongues

Light, language, landscape, and the political context of intimate violence

October 15, 2021 • by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

Halfway to the apartment, I decided to cut through the blind alleys of the old city, to climb up through its shaded streets and stout houses, their windows gazing at one another coyly, to the Plaza de los Naranjos. I remembered an old woman who ran a shop in the ...

Literature

Confronting Buried Sexual Trauma

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi talks with Alexandra Kleeman with about her new novel, Savage Tongues

October 15, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman and Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

On the publication of her new novel, Savage Tongues (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi sat down with New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman to discuss the rhythms of language, the influence of light, shadow, and landscape on prose, and the historical and political context of intimate violence. ...