WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Diverse contributors explore the “murky business” of life’s pauses in an anthology that finds profound movement within the stillness of waiting.

In her opening letter to readers, editor Curto grounds this expansive collection in personal loss, recounting 10 minutes spent “wiping, wailing and looking up at the front door” for a mother who would never return. This scene sets a contemplative tone for the collection’s 29 writers and artists, who examine waiting not as a void, but as an active, “excruciating” state of being. Christopher L. Vaughan offers a masterfully rendered account of navigating cerebral palsy, where the act of waiting for his “fingers to relax” became a daily battle for control. Cooper Lee Bombardier provides a similarly grounded reflection on his “fallow year,” an agricultural metaphor for the profound inertia he felt after walking his mother “across the threshold out of this life,” only to have his wife leave six months later. Mariela Flores further anchors the book with a sharp critique of the guilt that first-generation immigrants feel when choosing personal goals over their families as she awaits the start of an MFA program over 1,000 miles away from her home. The collection’s structure occasionally suffers from a lack of cohesive identity. This variety of forms, spanning essays, poems, short stories, illustrations, and even a curated playlist, ensures a broad range of voices, but it also means the momentum frequently dips when the prose shifts from raw, lived experience into more detached, abstract territory. Without a stronger, more singular editorial hand to bridge the gap between the standout pieces and the lighter entries, the work lacks the narrative weight of a unified project. Despite these variations in intensity, the prose remains largely intimate, reframing passive delay as a courageous “battle with the man in the mirror.” Ultimately, Curto argues that waiting is not merely having “time without wanting it,” but rather the quiet space where a “new knowing” is born.

A dynamically curated exploration of the space between “what was” and “what is.”