"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 7

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

• Chapter 6

Submissions are open for our next quarterly contest, whose deadline is January 21st, 2026. Finalists are awarded $500, and the Winner $1,000. We’re excited to anounce that due to subscriber generosity, we’re able to suspend the contest submission fee 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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Stephen felt such pity for his mother, who was staring out the window: thin, pale, grimace-faced.

His father was upstairs with his sister, who had not stopped crying all day. Stephen was like his father in that the emotions of others blotted out his own emotions, compressed them, made them inarticulate and hard to understand, let alone express.

He was like his mother, however, in his desire to talk about things and try to work through the dense, quivering mass of human experience to try to get to some verbal encapsulation of it. His mother had always told him that he, like her, had a talent for it. His giftedness, his gift, was in giving shape to things in a lightning flash.

But what shape could he give to his mother’s sorrow, to his sister’s sorrow, to his father’s worry, and to his own queasiness at the first serious apparition of death in his own life (or if not quite death literally, because his grandfather ...