Mara Hagen-Spath

A night to remember: Motif covers the most recent 2024 presidential debate

The pantheon of American politics gathered at its proverbial colosseum, ABC studios, on September 10. The night was young, the stakes were high, and Donald Trump was visibly suffering to not let the words to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” escape from his mouth as he shook Kamala Harris’s hand. Good thing she walked […]

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Are Libraries a Dying Breed?: A conversation with Rhode Island’s oldest library, and RI’s young students

Between paper-bound streets, a young man sits at a small desk. Around him are amassed towers of books, each title like a glowing yellow window in an elusive night. The book is a beacon of comfort in the dark, akin to the sight of a roaming silhouette traveling through the light canvas of city windows […]

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Annals from the Literary Salon: Laura van den Berg reads from her new book State of Paradise

It starts as not a particularly outlandish night. The sun has escaped behind thick clouds, a few raindrops hit the windows, and the wind moving through the leaves is louder than the cars speeding through the slick streets – just another fleeting summer storm, nothing more, nothing less. Inside Riff Raff, PVD’s only bar-and-bookstore, a […]

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Everything Isn’t What It Seems: Providence opens up its Weird portals for another year of Necronomicon

In the dark room near the bottom of the ocean a myriad of shadows float by. Strange, undulating fauna grow from an endless floor. Particles of flesh hang suspended between their blue curtains. Silence is a thick blanket where the sun doesn’t shine. The mind is left with nothing to process, it imagines the sounds […]

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From the Archives

At the Motif headquarters there is a corner full of white boxes. Their sides are emblazoned with dates, months, years, scribbled in different shades of marker. Some are crossed out and hastily re-written, some boxes lay coverless, or bound in a thick plastic tape. This hodgepodge corner is the Motif archives, and was my home […]

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