Caroline Kurdej is a Graduate Student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Last spring, Kurdej worked as an intern for Dzanc Books, and currently provides writing services to iMiller Public Relations. You can find her work online at carolinekurdej.journoportfolio.com.
Every seasonal edition of They Call Us features a new adjective. Fall, “They Call Us Witches.” Winter, “They Call Us Bossy.” Year-round, They Call Us empowers.
This literary magazine is spellbinding—particularly the Fall edition. Magic happens when womxn gather, bewitching all with creative storytelling mediums of media, art, and literature.
This concept came to me in a cover packaging meeting. The book's Editor, Margaux Weisman, was explaining the fantastic story of how this pigeon, Cher Ami, helped in the war effort; it's bravery and doggedness to get to the other side with the messages it would carry. Often in one of these meetings, something will come to me, and I'll pitch an idea without reading anything. If I'm off the mark, I'll be shot down, no pun intended. If the concept is accepted, I'll still read the book to make sure and correct the refining details.
Perched comfortable on a sunken sofa in a Chicago café not far from her teaching job at Columbia College, Kate Wisel looks every inch the badass. Bits and pieces of her characters from darker pages of her prize-winning novel Driving in Cars with Homeless Men shine through in her outfit, a black hoodie and black jeans.
Adharanand Finn initially set out to complete an assignment about ultramarathons for The Guardian. What happened next involved a two-year journey comprised of hundreds of miles captured not in an article, but in a book, The Rise of the Ultra Runners: A Journey to the Edge of Human Endurance.
Scott Jurek ran 2,189 miles in just 46 days in 2015, and set a record for the Fastest Known Time attempt for the Appalachian Trail. That's an average of about 50 miles a day. Or, in more comprehensible terms, 84 back-to-back marathons. He just did it.
In North, out last spring in paperback from Little, Brown Spark, Jurek and his wife, Jenny Jurek, describe the resilience and exhaustion on their plunge into the wilderness, and readers hitch a hike for the mucky ride. The Jureks portray what becomes possible when you work to make a dream into a manifestation.
Wim Hof, “the Iceman,” practices cold exposure in order to accomplish incredible feats: climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts, for example. He also holds the world record for a barefoot half marathon above the Arctic Circle, and standing in an ice cube-covered container for more than 112 minutes.
Reporter Scott Carney’s investigative and participatory journalism book, What Doesn’t Kill Us, delves into Hof's methods, and explores how far humans have strayed from our evolutionary roots and the implications that has on our health. "The developed world—and, for that matter, much of the developing world—no longer suffers from diseases of deficiency," he told Spine. "Instead we get the diseases of excess.”
DePaul University’s nonprofit Big Shoulders Books press disseminates, free of charge, quality works of writing by and about Chicagoans whose voices might not otherwise be shared. The press is primarily run by students in the university's MA in Writing and Publishing and undergraduate English programs. Their most recent release, The Garcia Boy, shares the story of the late award-winning essayist and educator Rafael Torch, son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant.
