An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
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
Lately I’ve been smelling smoke. My heart is tamped down, the fire banked, but the melody lingers on. Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” (1920) comes to mind: Some say the world will end in fire;Some say in ice.From what … 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
We just saw the movie in a nearly empty, late-afternoon theater. I imagine it if were about a moose who’d lost its foot, the audience would be fuller, here midcontinent, with moose, so say the experts, edging off our U.S. … 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
Poet Jim Moore endeared himself to me years ago with a little poem in which he mused/amused himself with a tiny series of life notations, circa seven years old, ending with the remark that his mother had no idea that … Continued
I’m borrowing a title from Phebe Hanson and Joan Pride’s travel memoir because it applies to all kinds of motions–teeth, bows, feet. Item: in the last two weeks, I’ve been visited by two performances of Bach that were too fast. … 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