"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 11

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

• Chapter 7

• Chapter 8

• Chapter 9

• Chapter 10

Submissions are 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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Elizabeth read Boettner’s letters to her brother zealously and jealously. When she was done reading (she had read every word, trying even to memorize some sections on the fly), Elizabeth carefully put the letters back where she found them, and thought with satisfaction, that there was no way for her brother to know, or to prove, that she ever removed to them to read them; she would never tell him (under no circumstances would she tell him).

She found the way the two young men talked about art and literature intuitively irritating and infuriating; no one had given them the right to think this way about themselves. They had elected themselves poets and seers. And the two young men would later become poets. Why not?

Boettner had divided his affections and his passions so evenly in such a gendered way. Stephen received Boettner’s intellectual self, and she received Boettner’s sensual and romantic self. And she realized, reading Boettner’s letters, that ...