An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
It’s not a Star Wars character, nor the name of a deep sea creature. It’s a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the central autonomic nervous system. It’s caused (as much as is known) by long exposure to herbicides and pesticides. It’s … Continued
With my students, I’m reading a touching novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981) Set in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada before, during and after World War II, Obasan portrays the suffering of Japanese “relocated” by the Canadian government. It’s actually … Continued
Though I didn’t realize her power when she was first publishing, Barbara Tuchman has since become one of my top three favorite American writers about history–Barbara Tuchman, Joseph Ellis and David McCullough. Ellis and McCullough are still alive, but Tuchman … Continued
Last night I attended a “reading” of works from the recent issue of Water*Stone, published by Hamline University’s MFA Program in Writing. Since I’m an occasional teacher in the overarching program called Graduate Liberal Studies, I have a stake in … Continued
She’s been a favorite of mine for years, but in the last decade my appreciation has deepened. She’s become a moral guide. Item: in Pride and Prejudice, the configuration of family energy focuses on Mrs. Bennett and the two younger … Continued
When Erskine Caldwell wrote the novel Tobacco Road in 1934, the southern United States was still mired in the agricultural decline that began way before the Civil War and continued into the 1960s. My friend Jill Breckenridge describes its beginning … Continued
A wonderful class of graduate students and I have started discussing how history and story intersect. We began with Doctorow’s Ragtime and the movie made from the novel. Next we read August Wilson’s play, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” which the … Continued
It was my mother’s term, the snooty, smalltown mayor’s daughter from North Dakota–riffraff. Whom she meant, years ago when I began to hear her choice of words, I don’t know–maybe some of my teenage friends. But now it pops up … Continued
When I first read Fathers and Sons by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, I hadn’t been prepared first by Isaiah Berlin’s essay on the Russian intelligentsia. This time around I read Berlin’s essay which serves as an introduction to … Continued
Puccini’s La Boheme is the quintessential Italian love story. Yes, I know, there’s always Verdi’s La Traviata with Violetta (reformed high-class prostitute) dying of TB at the end. She’s left her middle-class lover at the instigation of his father–to “save” … Continued