"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 6

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

• Chapter 5

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.

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“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.

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Michael’s alarm went off at 5:30. It was Monday, the last week of school. He had students for two days and then three days of in-service, where only the teachers would have to go in and finish grading and closing up their classrooms. Michael had a 40-minute commute to East Stroudsburg South High School, which used to be just East Stroudsburg until Route 80 caused the population of the Poconos to triple in the 90s, mainly out-of-towners and Hispanics. So his classrooms tended to be this strange but workable mixture of backwards whites, Latinos, and Black kids, all of whom had a begrudging respect for each other because they were, at the end of the day, all working-class. A mix of different inflections and backgrounds. He had been teaching in some form or another since 1976. This was the end of his 27th year, and he was tired.

It was raining when he woke up, and he liked moving about the house in the quiet. These hours were entirely his. They’d always been entirely his. Adele woke up at 7, and the kids woke up at 8 ...