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Emily Harnett

Emily Harnett is a writer and teacher living in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, The Atlantic, Broadly, and Lit Hub.

A person is laying down on their back but only the shadow of their face is in the frame. Behind them is an orange halo lifting upwards.

Back from the Afterlife

I saw Heaven, or some version of it, in the late 1990s. This was on the days I stayed home sick from school, bingeing on Corn Pops and reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. Back then, the show was hosted by Robert Stack, a sort of Clinton-era Rod Serling with a raspy old-man voice and ...
A photograph by Jeremy Blakeslee of a coal mine drainage tunnel in Centralia, PA with bright sunlight shining at the end.

Smoke from Underground

Until the 1980s, it was possible to ignore the fact that Centralia was on fire. By then, the mines in this Pennsylvania coal town had been burning underground for nearly twenty years, but there was no roaring blaze, no Biblical conflagration. What you saw was mostly steam ...