First, in the Saturday Interview, Tyrese L. Coleman talks with author Leslie Pietrzyk about her award-winning 2015 collection, This Angel On My Chest, and its relationship with real life events. The author explains her approach to writing about personal tragedy, which is “to write the ‘true’ things until the truth wasn’t as interesting as what I could make up.”

Meanwhile, in “Big Ideas, Little Cartoons,” Brandon Hicks breaks down the most difficult topics into bite-sized illustrated aphorisms.

Finally, Jennifer Fliss recalls the pain of childbirth against the backdrop of a particular setting, the so-called Rust Belt, in the Sunday Essay. The author juxtaposes the urgency and confusion of labor with the “plaid carpets” and “Star Wars relics” of midwestern homes and the unique “patina” of rust. Fliss writes, “If you get really close up, rust can be beautiful. Fissures create abstract shapes and symmetries… Streaks and splotches and cracked paint. None of it is perfect and that’s the beauty.”