Near the beginning of Raoul Peck’s documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin says that in 1957 he couldn’t stop thinking about a photograph he saw at every newspaper kiosk in Paris. It was of the fifteen-year-old black girl Dorothy Counts, who was surrounded by a white crowd filled with revulsion at the sight of her. Dorothy walked to school in Charlotte, North Carolina in the wake of integration in the south. Samuel L. Jackson voices Baldwin’s words: “There... Read more
This post originally appeared at Good Letters on June 5, 2012. I woke at one thirty with a start. My heart pounded in my ears. My wife was warm under the covers beside me, in the heavy rhythm of sleep. Through the hiss of the white noise machine I could hear the wet clicks of our schipperke, Sgt. Pepper, under the bed obsessively licking his paw. I was afraid. I did my quick mental inventory. Everything was as it should... Read more
On a November evening last year, I walked to my rosemaling class and sat around a table of women. We represented a wide range of ages and backgrounds, but we were all raised with rosemaling—breadboards and spoons and carved horses and Välkommen plaques all made of basswood. We were all trying to invoke the people we’d lost, the people who’d taught us who we were. Rosemaling, traditional Scandinavian folk-painting, depends heavily on brushstrokes and pattern, but it doesn’t ever feel... Read more
Psalm 27 is read by Jews from the beginning of the Jewish month of Elul through the Jewish High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Read more
I love poems that stitch together memories from opposite ends of a lifetime, connecting them to our collective story in surprising ways. This poem feels dreamlike in its skill at just this kind of stitchwork. How simple Stelmach makes it look: take a phrase from poetry (commonly, arbitrarily) held as the most beautiful, and test that theory out. This could become gimmicky or superficial in less skilled hands. Yet instead of skimming the surface, Stelmach’s poem descends. The poet takes... Read more
Ours is a confessional age, a time in which telling all is not only customarily practiced but also routinely lauded. To do less than unbosom oneself in the most candid of ways is both to endanger one’s mental and emotional health (a distinction I’ve never been quite clear on) and to frustrate the kind of eye-scalding “transparency” that the age calls for at every turn. The unleashed tongue becomes the agent of “honesty,” which is said to be warranted in... Read more
This post originally appeared at Good Letters on June 1, 2012. One of the toughest and most important jobs I have as an English professor at a small, women’s liberal arts college, is teaching students to write well. I would love to hold forth on Flannery O’Connor—my lifelong literary crush—but getting students to care about writing involves helping them find something they’re interested in, not foisting my predilections upon them. My job in first semester English composition is to make... Read more
Beside me this morning is a child at the breakfast table vigorously chewing a Fuji apple and explaining to me the mutative abilities of a small vehicle based on the particular placement of a certain Lego brick. Sometimes the vehicle is a plow, sometimes a combine, depending on whether that brick is before it, behind it, or occasionally, totally removed. He is absolutely enthralled by the powers of his own creation, as he sends the vehicle making tracks through a... Read more
The moment is freeze-framed in my mind: My eldest, Milo, red-faced with anger, his eyes hard but wild, a look I know means he feels both out of control and desperate to re-exert it. The yellow light of the floor lamps casts dark shadows over the couch and his face. Shoot it in black and white and you’d call it noir lighting. He’s holding my phone toward me in both hands, threateningly, and he’s beginning to twist… It had been... Read more
Dan Murphy has written a series of poems inspired by medieval miniatures: those marvelously detailed paintings crammed full with colorful life. In this poem, Murphy uses the miniature of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem to multiply images for our human need to reach for the beyond. I love the variety of these images: someone climbing a tree (“half- / Way marker of earth and sky”); “human form / As flag announcing spirit through / Flesh”; the boy reaching “for a bird... Read more
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