"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 12

This week we serialize the penultimate chapter of 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

• Chapter 6

• Chapter 7

• Chapter 8

• Chapter 9

• Chapter 10

• Chapter 11

Submissions are still open for our next quarterly contest, whose deadline is January 28th, 2026. Finalists are awarded $500, and the Winner $1,000. We’re excited to announce that, due to subscribers like you, it’s free to submit for the foreseeable future. Spread the word (and 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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The day after Thanksgiving, Dan Boettner, who Elizabeth hadn’t heard from directly in almost a year (though he wrote regularly to her brother), asked to go for a walk, which had been their habit since early high school. And so they agreed to meet at God’s Acre Cemetery downtown, where all the original Moravians were buried.

—You’re going to meet Dan? Adele, who believed that the two young people were meant to be together, but had been told many times by her daughter to back off, asked.

—Just for a walk.

—That’s nice.

—Thanks Mom.

—You look nice darling.

Elizabeth wore a grey peacoat with a thick red scarf she had knitted herself during the school year; her long hair (she had cut it short freshmen year only to let it grow unabated since) falling over her shoulders.

—Thanks Mom.

—Dinner will be ready for you when you get back.

She was still with John, ...