The news from California this week is both terrifying and all too familiar: Fires raging, seemingly out of control. People fleeing their homes, racing ahead of the flames. Life in “The Burning Season” the title of Lindsey J. Smith’s powerful and haunting story of California when the fires come https://medium.com/s/the-big-roundtable-vol1/the-burning-season-4cf4fb4cd648 captures the dynamic of that race for survival — when to leave, what to take, all the while wondering what and who will be left when you return.

The biggest lie about OCD is that it’s funny By Emily Dixon Alex and I have OCD. We’re both twenty-four; he obsesses over the number three, and I obsess over the number four. His OCD is hand sanitizer, a rollercoaster, and a lifetime of going through the motions. …

After the presidential election, the tension in the nation has showed up everywhere — even in the local high school By Molly Duffy After the presidential election, some students at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids began parking their pickup trucks, Chevys and Fords, in a row outside the building…

Where a 400-year-old dreamer inspires modern undocumented children By Diego Courchay “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember…” Don Quixote, Chapter. 1 The school is best found in winter, when the days are short, or on rainy afternoons when the drizzle blurs…

Why Cedar Rapids? History provides some clues By Makayla Tendall Early this spring, Taha Tawil laid out a batch of letters — some handwritten, some typed — on a checkered tablecloth in the basement of the old Mother Mosque in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he is the imam. Just a…

My family once enslaved people. What do I do about that? By Claire Vernon Suddath One October weekend a couple years ago, I drove four hundred miles from my apartment in New York City to an all-day diner near Niagara Falls, to meet a man to whom I might —…

Yes, there is a fence and it does more than keep people out By Sandra Sanchez On a wind swept plain overlooking the floodway near the tiny South Texas town of Granjeno, there is a four-foot high yellowing water line on an 18-foot tall concrete flood wall, marking where the…

Yes, there is a fence but it does more than keep people out By Sandra Sanchez On a wind swept plain overlooking the floodway near the tiny South Texas town of Granjeno, there is a four-foot high yellowing water line on an 18-foot tall concrete flood wall, marking where the…

A farmer with a weather eye on trade, regulations, and environmental rules By Alison Gowans All Bob Hemesath ever wanted to be was a farmer. He grew up on the northeast Iowa land that his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father worked before him, and he never considered doing anything else. What…