By Aaron Calvin

Reading Assignment is a new monthly series where online editor Aaron Calvin recommends essays and fiction from around the web. If you read something you think should be shared in this series, send it in an email to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil (The New Inquiry)
When an essay is written and published on the searchable internet and is returned to or rediscovered often by people due to its continued relevancy, it’s referred to as as “evergreen content.” This is, unfortunately, one of those essays.

Author Tracy O'Neill talks her new book Quotients and writing the systems novel (Assignment Magazine)
Read this short interview with Mountainview MFA faculty member Tracy O’Neill and check out her new novel, Quotients.

Abridged Abyss by Justin Taylor (Bomb Magazine)
A former faculty member and friend of the MFA demonstrates how lyrical essay writing is done in this piece centered around the loss of a beloved musician.

No One Should Have to Ignore Their Grief, Yet It’s Long Been Expected of People of Color by Nadia Owusu (Catapult)
Mountainview MFA faculty member Nadia Owusu’s column on being a woman of color in the workplace is must read writing and this installment is no different.

Sex and Sincerity by Sigrid Nunez (The New York Review of Books)
Garth Greenwell (Mountainview MFA’s visiting writer at the January 2020 residency) gets the holistic NYRB treatment, the song of his prose and poetry annotated.

Poem for May: “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay

… like making it easier
for us to breathe.