Margaret Atwood called the summer solstice “the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar..."
I asked our guest curator, the writer Anthony Doerr, what the summer solstice signifies to him.
"When I first moved to Idaho, these June evenings were absolutely magic," he says. "You'd sit outside and it was still light enough to read at 10:30."
"If you're really, really, really lucky, Joel, you'll get 80 summer solstices in your life, you know? You should recognize and enjoy each one," he says.
Along the month's theme of solstice, Doerr also reads a short and stifling excerpt from his 2008 memoir, "Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World." Doerr's latest novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021), was a finalist for the National Book Award. He's also written a pair of celebrated story collections, and All the Light We Cannot See, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It's the final week of June. We are nipping at the heels of those dog days of summer.
