"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 5

We continue this week in serializing our inaugural contest winner’s novel, Seasons Clear, and Awe, by Matthew Gasda. New subscribers can catch up with the previous chapters below:

• Chapter 1

• Chapter 2

• Chapter 3

• Chapter 4

Submissions are open for our next quarterly contest, whose deadline is January 21st, 2026. Finalists are awarded $500, and the Winner $1,000. Spread the word (and maybe throw your hat in the ring!).

As ever, if you support what we’re doing here at PILCROW, please consider offering a paid subscription.

“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.

Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.

O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,

Bequeath us to no earthly shore until

Is answered in the vortex of our grave

The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

— Hart Crane

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye

— Wordsworth

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

The next day, Stephen went to the Northwest Swim Club with his friends Ryan and Adam, driven by Ryan’s mother, Mrs. Connell, who tirelessly hosted their sons’ friends and took them to the pool or whatever else, occasional paintball games or trips to the mall. Really, whatever Ryan wanted. The Connells had a little more money than the Gazdas. So did the Vorns.

Adam’s family was from Holland. The name Vorn was Dutch. Adam’s dad was born in Holland, and people in Holland were very pale. Both Adam and Ryan were bigger than Stephen. Ryan was skinny but taller. Adam was taller and bigger; the best athlete, best at basketball, best at baseball. Adam and Ryan went to a different middle school after they met, ...