Steve Edwards
Steve Edwards lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, their son, and a little dog who constantly steals his socks. He is the author of the memoir Breaking into the Backcountry.
A Good House
Two days before our family moved into a boxy, modern, three-bedroom home—our first house, forty miles outside Boston and across the highway from the poetically named Long-Sought-For Pond—the painters we hired to paint the bathroom found black mold in a wall. A chunk of plaster had bubbled up and fallen off at the lightest scrape of sandpaper. A week later, we spent an hour in the pouring rain with the home inspector—at last. The housing market was so tight that we’d only briefly toured the house before closing.
August 2025Luminescence
In the backseat on long car rides home from my grandmother’s house in southern Illinois, I cataloged light sources in the dark: gazing at flare towers burning above oil wells, watching the taillights of faster cars shrink to pinpoints, following the sweep of flood lamps up the domes of concrete grain silos.
September 2022A Thousand Cups Of Coffee
It’s like arriving at your destination after a long drive, only to realize your mind has been elsewhere the entire time and you have no memory of the lights you stopped at, the turns you made, the glide in and out of traffic. Morning arrives again, and I stand in the kitchen, startled to exist.
September 2021Rain Shadows
When you have been through something terrible, and you know deep down the outcome could have been otherwise, you develop a strange gratitude for everyday life. The smallest acts of generosity can make you cry.
February 2021Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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