More Soon About Hopscotch, March 17th, 2024 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House To my friends, more soon about Hopscotch. |
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KFW: Hopscotch House Announcement 2024, March 11th, 2024 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House I would like to hear a reaction from any woman who has used Hopscotch House in the past. Please leave a message below, on Facebook, or via email. |
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What Do I Have in Common With Elon Musk?, March 10th, 2024 Categories: Philanthropy, New Mexico Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House His suit against OpenAI, just commencing in California, has some similarities with my struggles with what has become of the Kentucky Foundation for Women. |
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Fading Away, March 6th, 2024 Categories: Women Tagged: suffrage Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady Stanton I'm dismayed to see how rapidly the women's movement is fading, eclipsed by monstrous wars but also by young women's failure to engage. |
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So “They” Let Us Have One Month…, March 3rd, 2024 Categories: Women Tagged: feminism Women's History Month began without much attention and certainly without fanfare on March 1, 2024 and will end in deafening silence on March 31. |
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The Great I Am, February 28th, 2024 Categories: Religion Tagged: After finding a church where I feel at least to some degree at home and grow to love the Christian ritual… I hit an obstruction. |
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Pip Is Tired, February 25th, 2024 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Hiking Pip is full of self-will—one of the reasons we get on so well—and likes to dictate as much of his life as he can. |
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Letter to the Editor, The Courier-Journal, 2/19/2024, February 21st, 2024 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House I am writing to protest the just announced sale of Hopscotch House by the Kentucky Foundation for Women. |
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The Lost Cause, February 18th, 2024 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: The Stiles Letters As I begin reading the collection of nineteenth-century Stiles letters that may provide the core of my next book, I'm brought reluctantly to remember two long ago incidents when loneliness pushed me closer to belief. |
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This Beautiful Weave, February 14th, 2024 Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky Tagged: Santa Fe Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House It strikes me that I have days like Sunday which seem to be a beautiful weaving of threads: red, blue, and all the other colors of the rainbow. |
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On Memoir, February 11th, 2024 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing writing workshops Memoir writing is a much more serious task than it's often considered to be. It's not informal, it's not casual. It really is the writing of history. |
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Women Holding Things, February 7th, 2024 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: As a worldwide conflagration of violence has broken out, we women are not even holding our own. Our voices and faces no longer appear in the news. |
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Groundhog Day, February 4th, 2024 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House Groundhog Day Today I'm celebrating something that happened several decades ago when Hopscotch House, belonging to the Kentucky Foundation for Women in Louisville, was just getting started and we needed an executive director. |
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Silver Heads, January 31st, 2024 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Women Taken by the Shawnee It is with dismay but not surprise that I read a description of the reaction of two “Silver Heads” to Tracy Emin’s panels on the main doors of the National Portrait Gallery in London. |
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Truck Driving Woman, January 28th, 2024 Categories: Travel Tagged: Amtrak She is, she told me, a professional long-haul truck driver, steering eighteen-wheelers with enormous trailers across big swatches of this county. |
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Umbrella, January 24th, 2024 Categories: Women, Travel Tagged: California For my daily walk I borrowed a big black umbrella. But—how to open it? |
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Throwing Apples at Indians, January 21st, 2024 Categories: Politics Tagged: Amtrak Every time I ride the Southwest Chief East or West from Lamy, New Mexico—my preferred way of traveling—I meet at least one fascinating fellow traveler. |
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King’s Day, January 17th, 2024 Categories: Politics Tagged: Martin Luther King Jr. When I listened to Dr. King's speech on NPR Sunday night, I was moved by the great power of his church-trained voice as well as by his revolutionary message. |
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A Drop of Pure Joy, January 14th, 2024 Categories: New Mexico, Theater Tagged: dancing A few weeks ago, my beloved dance studio threw its bi-annual Showcase, an afternoon of dance performances by students and teachers for our own pleasure and satisfaction after a lot of hard work and many lessons. |
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Death of a Pack Rat, January 3rd, 2024 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe I read somewhere that the world is divided between those who only care about family and friends and those whose empathy extends to include people far away, strangers, never to be included in the near and dear. |
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The Feast of Saint Stephen, December 27th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico, Religion Tagged: Santa Fe As the old song says, "Ye who now do bless the poor/Shall yourselves find blessing." |
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Christmas Comes but Once a Year…, December 24th, 2023 Categories: My Family Tagged: Christmas Mary Caperton Bingham A Christmas Carol Favorites of 2023 I have such blissful memories of the Christmases of my childhood, first and foremost the firm insistence on going to church Christmas morning. |
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Christmas Miracle: Pip Is Completely Recovered!, December 20th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Black Pip Hiking Favorites of 2023 It took six weeks and three trips to the vet after his savage attack but we just took the first hike since that happened... |
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Azim’s Bardo, December 17th, 2023 Categories: My Family, Politics Tagged: Will's Things Little Free Library Favorites of 2023 In the tumble of donated books in the Little Free Library, I saw one with a title that spoke to me: From Murder to Forgiveness: A Father's Journey by Azim Khamisa with Carl Goldman. |
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A Kick in the Pants, December 13th, 2023 Categories: Politics Tagged: Radcliffe Harvard Favorites of 2023 Is it a coincidence that the head of Penn and the head of Harvard, one ousted the other threatened with ouster, are both women? |
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Smoke Signals, December 10th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Favorites of 2023 Today I'm wondering about the future of literature in our beleaguered country. |
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Second Childhood, December 6th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Christmas Favorites of 2023 We've spent too many words bewailing the sins committed against us in our childhoods, and they were sins, and they had drastic effects, and that matters; but Sunday when I bought this charming "Winter Fairy" at my church's St. Nicholas Bazaar, I decided it's high time to enter into my second childhood... |
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Multispecies Entanglement, December 3rd, 2023 Categories: My Family, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe marriage Taken by the Shawnee Favorites of 2023 I'm witnessing a surge in big, old-fashioned weddings for those who can afford up to half a million dollars to rent tents, clubs, hire staff, and buy the necessary clothes. |
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I’m Thankful For…., November 29th, 2023 Categories: My Family Tagged: As our first snow fell here in the southern Rockies, my granddaughter asked me why I moved to Santa Fe 35 years ago. |
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Two Ways to Help, November 26th, 2023 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Ozlem Ezer I feel as helpless and depressed as many of us do, watching the endless destruction wrought by the wars we largely finance with our tax dollars. |
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Moving at Sheeps’ Pace, November 22nd, 2023 Categories: My Family, New Mexico, Kentucky Tagged: Farmers Market Henrietta Bingham Thinking about Tierra Wools' herd of sheep moving from their summer in the highlands here, reminds me of the two orphan lambs I raised in Kentucky when I was growing up. |
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Winter at Wolf Pen Farm, November 19th, 2023 Categories: Women, Kentucky Tagged: Horses Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Favorites of 2023 It was never my intention to create a private estate, and it gives me great satisfaction to know that River Fields organizes seasonal wildflower walks at the farm, and that a generation of children is growing up in my three rental houses. |
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Fear of Flying Is Fifty, November 15th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Erica Jong Jong's courage in going to bat for all of us who couldn't speak up for ourselves is a quality I will always admire. |
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?, November 12th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Los Alamos Many who hear or read the phrase seize on its Biblical meaning which was literal and remains literal today, and as yet no one has suggested attempting to replace the book with Let Us Now Praise Famous Women. |
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These Are Those Who Have Come Out of Great Tribulation, November 8th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Homelessness Once a year members of my church here in Santa Fe volunteer to cook a week's supper for our unhoused population; I look forward to it. |
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The Price of Fear, November 5th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Favorites of 2023 A few days ago, my dog Pip was attacked as he lay sleeping on my patio here in the mountains, bitten savagely in three places. |
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A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, November 1st, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: New Mexico Reading Sallie Montague Lefroy Taken by the Shawnee ...Not exactly a wilderness but a great expanse of desert, south of Santa Fe, that goes on for miles and miles to the sprawling town of Alamogordo. |
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The Rewards, October 29th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Duke University Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture This is a time when we all need to be reminded that there are rewards for years of hard work, devotion and persistence. |
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Writing From the Point of View of Others, October 25th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing North Carolina Ideas are dangerous: it’s of their very nature, and it’s a danger that permeates the world of reading and writing. |
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Hands, October 18th, 2023 Categories: Women, Travel Tagged: Ireland Mary Caperton Bingham Favorites of 2023 Our faces show the inevitable effects of age but our hands seem to me to retain a little of our youthful hopefulness. |
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Taken by the Shawnee, October 15th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee Favorites of 2023 The design for the cover of my next book, my historical novel, “Taken by the Shawnee” just arrived from my publisher, Turtle Point Press. |
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Somewhere Out There You…, October 11th, 2023 Categories: Travel, Theater Tagged: New York City Ireland As I'm listening to long-forgotten but amazingly familiar tunes, I'm remembering the high point of my visit to Dublin last week... |
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Humans, Bees and Wildlife in 2023, October 8th, 2023 Categories: Politics Tagged: Today I’m headlining an important message from one of my friends, Arthur Firstenberg, author of the remarkable book The Invisible Rainbow. |
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Girls Take the Lead, October 4th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Women There's a shift of large proportions in what girls and young women are doing in this world. |
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Pick Up Your Socks, October 1st, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Los Alamos Nuclear Archbishop Wester The Federal government is having difficulty picking up its socks, in this case, the toxic waste left here in New Mexico and elsewhere as the result of sixty years of nuclear weapons building. |
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Equinox in the City That Lacks One, September 24th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: New York City Chaco Canyon Of course equinoxes happen everywhere even in places that seem oblivious like midtown Manhattan where I'm roosting for a few days... |
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The War on Terror Is at Home, September 20th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe When I pass a pretty adobe house on my street walking Pip, a disembodied voice suddenly speaks: "Hi. Your approach is being recorded." |
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The Ms. Book, September 17th, 2023 Categories: Women, My Family, Writing Tagged: Passion and Prejudice Gloria Steinem It arrived yesterday, a large, heavy, hardbound anthology of fifty years of writing from Ms. |
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Guys, Girls and Ladies, September 13th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Girls Women The New York Times I wasn't surprised to learn according to the "Newspaper Of Record" that "On the Internet, Everyone Wants to be a Girl." |
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As They Go, so Go We, September 6th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: pinon Years of drought and now weeks, perhaps months, of extreme heat have caused the loss of 2.3 million pinyon jays, which is 78.7 percent of their total population. |
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A Summer Romance, September 3rd, 2023 Categories: My Family Tagged: Cape Cod Favorites of 2023 Now with the summer coming to an end, I'm remembering what Labor Day meant to me growing up: the dispersal of the summer community. |
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Blue Moon, August 30th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Canyon de Chelly Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee Chaco Canyon Tonight will see the rising of the first full blue moon... I'm making deviled eggs to take over to my friend Doug's house. |
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What Happened to Hawaii, August 27th, 2023 Categories: Politics Tagged: Hawaii Queen Liliʻuokalani was the constitutional Queen of the Hawaiian islands before she was overthrown by the mainland government and its forces in 1897, ending her long struggle to preserve the independence of her people |
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Email Issues, August 20th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Friends, due to issues with my email there will be no posts for the indefinite future… I hope to be posting again very soon! |
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The March of Cell Towers, August 16th, 2023 Categories: Politics Tagged: HR-3557 would mean "unrestricted proliferation of cell towers...near homes, schools and playgrounds" and "on any structure that could support an antenna." |
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Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, August 9th, 2023 Categories: My Family, Art Tagged: Barry Ellsworth In the middle of all the shouting about the Barbie movie and the millions, if not billions, Hollywood plans to make, it's worth remembering that there was an earlier, much earlier, independent video. |
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California Dreamin’, August 6th, 2023 Categories: My Family, Travel Tagged: California It's no longer just the perfectly proportioned who wear thongs on the beach; the size of some of the buttocks on display is awe-inspiring. |
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Writing What You Don’t Know, August 2nd, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: writing workshops Writing workshop wisdom used to be write what you know, a doctrine I've found increasingly confining. |
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What’s the Matter With “The Runaway Bunny”?, July 30th, 2023 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Helena Lefroy Caperton Mary Caperton Bingham children's stories My mother didn't favor books written for children since she believed we could all absorb adult literature at an early age and be the better for it—and I think she was probably right. |
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Barbieheimer, July 23rd, 2023 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Robert Oppenheimer Favorites of 2023 The release of Oppenheimer at the same time of a new Barbie film is not a coincidence... But what is the connection? |
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Where Is the Match, July 19th, 2023 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Los Alamos Archbishop Wester It may be the role of our spiritual leaders—those we accept—to give us the wood for a fire but expect us to provide the match. I thought of that Monday |
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Summer Sports: Volleyball, July 16th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Women Black Pip As I sit on a bench in the shade waiting for him, I see a group of eight young people working at pegging the outline of a big square and digging in two posts for a net. |
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Dead Souls, July 12th, 2023 Categories: Politics Tagged: Los Alamos women's movement Episcopal Church What happened to the energy and hope that created the Women's Movement? The urge to reform capitalism that was a part of the 1960s? |
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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, July 9th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House Women's International Study Center Favorites of 2023 By an unfortunate coincidence, both of these houses are in danger of losing their primary purpose. |
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The Silver Fountain: A Granddaughter’s Dream, July 5th, 2023 Categories: My Family Tagged: train Amtrak I have passed on my fascination with trains to at least one of my granddaughters. |
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We Had to Be Unlike Others to Survive, July 2nd, 2023 Categories: My Family Tagged: Favorites of 2023 New thoughts about the way we are raising our sons are uppermost in my mind. |
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Why I Love Westerns, June 28th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Horses I try to ration my secret passion, or rather its secret satisfaction, like a love affair I don't want anyone to know about. |
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An Unexpected Reason for Our Sliding Backwards…, June 25th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Harvard It’s not a surprise to find that many young people are employed at firms where the parent of their same gender work, but since women are earning at a lower rate, I’d be surprised to find that as many young women follow their mothers into the job market as men follow their fathers. |
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Are We Sliding Backwards?, June 21st, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Santa Fe Women Writing Am I pessimistic? Maybe so. But it's a pessimism that I think is appropriate. |
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New Mexico Rain, June 18th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Bill Hearne I sometimes think the greatest disservice of many which has been done to women is the writing, recording and endlessly repeating of romantic songs. |
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Underpants on the Stove, June 14th, 2023 Categories: Women, My Family Tagged: Men I’ve just spent a few days with my son and grandson and am reminded of the delightful chaos of living with boys and men. |
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Hanging On, June 11th, 2023 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Kentucky Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Favorites of 2023 I'm visiting my old farm, Wolf Pen Branch Mill, ten miles east of Louisville, Kentucky for a few days, and find myself appalled, as always, by the spread of development. |
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A Patch of Blue Sky, June 4th, 2023 Categories: My Family Tagged: Lizzie Baker Favorites of 2023 I remember with increased gratitude the women I've known who, no matter what their circumstances, were able to continue to bring me light, warmth and humor. |
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Acequia Madre: The Mother Ditch, June 1st, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Acequia Madre To me the Acquia Madre's presence is a reminder every day of the central influence of women here in Santa Fe. |
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Me and Harry Belafonte, May 28th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: New York City kunm The role of popular performers in reshaping political opinions, especially for young people, has never been fully recognized. |
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The Glamour of Empire, May 24th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Virginia Woolf I'm reading Virginia Woolf's "The Years," the only one of her novels I haven't read. |
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Talking the Train Talk, May 21st, 2023 Categories: Travel Tagged: Amtrak Favorites of 2023 Everywhere I travel on Amtrak, I meet people who are dedicated to avoiding planes. |
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Old Friends, May 14th, 2023 Categories: Women, My Family Tagged: In the stories of my two old friends, both equally dear to me, I see a reflection of the problems of our country. |
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Hope, May 7th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Wildfires Los Alamos "'Hope' is the thing with feathers," Emily Dickinson wrote in 1861, wisely putting quotation marks around the word to signify its unreliability, for nothing is more easily crushed in our world today. |
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Student or Colleague? The Minimizing of Camille Claudel, May 3rd, 2023 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Camille Claudel Is it possible for us to be perceived as original when the shadow of this inevitably more esteemed man falls so heavily across us? |
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Why Are We Being Dosed?, April 26th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Women A dear friend recently sent me a surprising announcement from the Centers for Disease Control. Why am I not surprised? |
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Going Backwards, April 23rd, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Women It seems to me that, especially since Covid, we are going backwards in terms of equality, having made a bit of a progress before the plague. |
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Touching Camille, April 20th, 2023 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Camille Claudel Favorites of 2023 To me, Camille Claudel's story represents in heartbreaking terms the problems faced by talented women who depend on recognition by a better-known man. |
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Written by Worth, April 16th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Women Worth Bingham Favorites of 2023 We are still frequently silenced, either by our own fears or the manifest disapproval of the men and women around us. |
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The Other Mary, April 12th, 2023 Categories: Religion Tagged: Easter Surrounded as I am, and as all of us are, by unbelievers, I search for my own moments of connection with the Gospels, my own slender path out of the deep despair of agnosticism. |
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My Bear Is Back, April 5th, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico I know she/they are back because my tube bird feeders are lying on the ground, seeds scattered and gone. |
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Margaret in the Wilderness, April 2nd, 2023 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee Ukraine Surrounded by disasters of every kind, we are seeing the great strengths of our extraordinary adaptability, valued and valuable as it has never been before. |
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The Grip of the Past, March 26th, 2023 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Asheville Passion and Prejudice Favorites of 2023 I’ve just received word that my new short story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” has won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for 2023. |
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The First Day of Spring, March 22nd, 2023 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: The New York Times Here with the first day of spring yesterday in the midst of heavy snowfall—98 inches on the mountain, the most in many years—I am announcing the Revolution. |
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The Writer’s Life, March 19th, 2023 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Gertrude Stein Favorites of 2023 Gertrude Stein managed her life to make her writing possible. |
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Too Complicated, March 15th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Women Phyllis Chesler In this case, it's the opinion of scientists about female mice, attempting to explain why over the decades females have never been used in experiments. |
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Rose B. Simpson: Leaving Fingerprints Behind, March 12th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe Santa Clara Pueblo Rose B. Simpson I remember when I first met Rose at her booth in Santa Fe's August Indian Market. She had hung an astonishing large color photograph on the front of her booth... |
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Las Vegas New Mexico’s First State Female Wrestling Champ, March 10th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Las Vegas Optic The staunch Las Vegas Optic, one of a number of small town newspapers that have found the cash and the spirit to survive the universal collapse of print news publications, recently ran a photo and story on its front page that caught my eye. |
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Working With the System, March 5th, 2023 Categories: Women, Theater Tagged: Henrik Ibsen Reviews and revisions of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" sprout with each new Broadway season, an indication of how relevant, and how difficult this 1879 play continues to be. |
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In the Company of Women: Mabel’s House, February 26th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan House One of my pleasures here is eating dinner alone in a good restaurant and drinking a glass of wine. It is my best opportunity to watch people and to jump to perhaps wrongheaded conclusions about them. |
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Ash Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023 Categories: My Family, Politics, Religion Tagged: Ash Wednesday Jimmy Carter Over my long writing career, I've kind of resigned myself to being a Cassandra: the voice in the wilderness that speaks, or writes, about things most people would rather ignore and forget. |
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Promise, February 19th, 2023 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Anne Cooper Dobbins Twice in my life, I’ve had the rare privilege of encountering a young woman of promise. Only twice because promise is handed out randomly or according to a pattern I can’t discern. |
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Girls Reset the Equation, February 16th, 2023 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico As the country turns away from supporting issues crucial to girls' and women's health, the scorn that is faced by all women, especially those young enough to appear vulnerable, is creating a mental health crisis. |
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Wolf Pen Mill Runs Again, February 12th, 2023 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Resounding through the maple and sycamore forest, the clanking must have drawn farmers from miles around, loading their carts with corn and driving over the rough stone road to the mill. |
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Valentine’s Day: The Girl in the Red Velvet Dress, February 5th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Valentine's Day A few days ago when I was poking in one of my closets, I found a battered old scrapbook from the 1930, a big collection of greeting cards spasted onto the scrapbook’s yellowish pages. |
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Haunted Houses, February 1st, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: I discovered for the first time an idea I've been revolving in my own mind: that the past, and the settings and people of the past, are crucial. |
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She, January 29th, 2023 Categories: Writing Tagged: Judy Chicago Paz Winshtein Virgin Mary Must the divine feminine be denatured? |
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That Debutante Summer, January 26th, 2023 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Collegiate School Frontier Nursing University Favorites of 2023 My rebellion, uncomfortable as it was—for my classmates were my closest friends—also signaled my leaving the South, going to college, settling in the Northeast and marrying a man my mother's friends identified, with horror, as a Yankee... |
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Kindness, January 22nd, 2023 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Hiking Favorites of 2023 Such a bland word, and I haven't always appreciated its value, assuming that kindness is just one of our many gifts as human beings. |
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Two Lives Well Lived: Ruth Adler Schnee And Gina Lollobrigida, January 19th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Sometimes it seems we only learn of remarkable woman when their obituaries appear, even in the case of movie stars. |
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Oh Those Arms, January 15th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: We seem never to entirely escape from our fear of powerful women. |
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Sleeping With Animals, January 8th, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: Santa Fe Now that we are entering the coldest months of the year here in the Southwest, I’m saying a prayer of gratitude for all the animals I’ve slept with over the years. |
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Lipstick, January 1st, 2023 Categories: Women Tagged: New Year's Don’t make that list, just imagine it or dream it and make a totally unrealistic vow and watch it, in unexpected ways, come into being. |
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I Am My Grandmother’s Dream, December 28th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: It is appropriate to applaud the changes in our culture that have allowed these women to grow into adulthood free of the shackles—at least in part—of harassment and intimidation that made my young life such a challenge in the 1950’s. |
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The Virgin Goes Into Labor, December 25th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Christmas Mary Caperton Bingham Virgin Mary 20 Favorites of 2022 Oh the ghosts of Christmas past! We all have them. May yours wear holly wreaths and drag chains of tinkling bells if they have to drag chains at all. |
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Wearing the Armor of Our History, December 21st, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: feminism Gloria Steinem I like to remind myself of how radical our philosophy is, and how often targeted, diminished and deleted by the patriarchy that surrounds us like a woolen scarf tied much too tight. |
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Small Potatoes, December 18th, 2022 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Georgia O'Keeffe Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Rough Point 20 Favorites of 2022 One of those rare fortuitous meetings that make life so interesting occurred in the fall in a hallway at the New York Society Library, my home away from home in that city. |
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Cellphones: Sit Not in the Seat of the Scornful, December 14th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: In the New Year, I’m going to attempt something radical... |
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Where Are the Snows of Yesterday?, December 7th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico As we move into another dry, warm winter here in the high desert Southwest, it's sometimes hard to believe that this may be what we are going to experience for the indefinite future... |
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Margaret Erskine: “Taken by Indians”, December 5th, 2022 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee 20 Favorites of 2022 I started writing Margaret's story, based on a brief memoir she dictated to her nephew many years after her taking... |
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Kitty, November 27th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Los Alamos Robert Oppenheimer I’m always interested in the lives of women who jump into these ambitious, deadly federal projects—jump in, fall in, are pulled or sucked in. |
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Giving Thanks, November 23rd, 2022 Categories: My Family, New Mexico Tagged: gratitude Thanksgiving 20 Favorites of 2022 I will be giving a special thanks for those who read these thoughts, and whose mysterious presence in my life keeps me going. |
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Mary Jane Colter and the Making of the Southwest, November 20th, 2022 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Chandler O'Leary Mary Colter 20 Favorites of 2022 There’s nothing to equal to results of our ability to collaborate, and to remember and record our foremothers whom the powers that be usually neglect. |
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Saying No, November 16th, 2022 Categories: Politics Tagged: The power to say no. Without it, can we ever feel we are in charge of our own lives? |
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They, November 13th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: We feminists hope and even believe that the work we've done over the past decades has expanded the boundaries of what it means, and can mean, to be a woman, but that hope and belief seems to me to have foundered on the pronoun issues of gender fluidity. |
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Women Rule, November 9th, 2022 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: We plan, we get ready, and we go. Nobody hold us back. Our own fears don't hold us back. |
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Digging Out The Roots, November 2nd, 2022 Categories: My Family Tagged: slavery slaves Rose 20 Favorites of 2022 Times change. Time passes. A younger generation stands to inherit. One of its members challenged her ancient relative, the present owner, with what she feels is his guilt because of slavery. |
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Revising Ikons, October 30th, 2022 Categories: Women, Religion Tagged: Virgin Mary The image of Mary as "Virgin Mary, Meek and Mild" has been a problem for many women and probably some men during the 100 years when this became her most common representation. |
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Fascinating Women, October 26th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: feminism Guerrilla Girls Chandler O'Leary There are a lot of us. And many of our stories have yet to be written. |
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The Good Uses of Obsession, October 23rd, 2022 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: I never saw the Mickey Mouse Club, but I do remember adolescent obsession. |
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Telling the Truth, October 19th, 2022 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Our questioning of historical "truth" may be invalid when we are possessed of what we believe is the answer. |
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My Friendship Quilt, October 12th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: feminism Phyllis Chesler The power of the feminist movement always was and always will be drawn from the friendship of women. |
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Celebrating a Master, October 9th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: John Cheever “Master” is what John Cheever (1912-1982) was, and is, although largely forgotten now in spite of the acclaim and the many awards he accumulated during his long career as a successful novelist and short story writer. |
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Do We Collaborate, October 5th, 2022 Categories: Women, Writing, Art Tagged: Phyllis Chesler The idea of collaborating has always made me a little squeamish. |
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Woman Honks Horn, October 2nd, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Las Vegas Optic The Rio Grande Sun devotes a whole page to its police blotter. |
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Apache Mesa Ranch Resolved, September 28th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Apache Mesa 20 Favorites of 2022 The ranch is not really for us human beings with our thin skins and our need for comfort. |
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Women Lead the Way, September 25th, 2022 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico I find myself getting annoyed: not another fundraiser when I'd rather be taking Pip for his evening walk and making some more progress in the book I'm reading! |
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Fire Engines: Perhaps a Silver Lining?, September 21st, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Wildfires I didn’t realize until Saturday that the Hermit's Peak firefighters and their engines had come to us from all over the West. |
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What Dresses Meant and Mean to Us, September 15th, 2022 Categories: My Family Tagged: Helena Lefroy Caperton My first party dresses were sewn by hand—not machine—by my adored grandmother, Helena Lefroy Caperton, my mother's mother, of Richmond, Virginia. |
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Two Queens, September 11th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe Phyllis Chesler What could be more different than these two queens? |
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Thread Dresses, September 8th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe 20 Favorites of 2022 Just as I was beginning to feel discouraged came a revelation as I was getting a cup of coffee at my neighborhood hangout here in Santa Fe. |
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Killing the Mama Snake, September 4th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Apache Mesa I must write my story of this place… a story of the intersection of cultures here that seem to have no history or sense of conservation in common. |
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Is It Sunset Time for Apache Mesa Ranch?, August 31st, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Apache Mesa I haven't written about my ranch in south-eastern New Mexico, near the old town of Las Vegas, for some time. In the interval, a lot has changed. |
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The Personal Is Political, August 28th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Little Brother: A Memoir We may all be susceptible to thinking our “personal” stories are nothing more than personal, forgetting over and over again that, as Gloria Steinem said, “The personal is political.” |
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Finding Hope, August 24th, 2022 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: William Bingham Iovenko As I come to the completion of this draft of The Eyes of Addicts, I work hard not be overwhelmed with sadness... yet there is always light in the darkness. |
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Lux, August 21st, 2022 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: feminism At a fundraiser I was hosting the other day for New Mexico Women Rising, I met the publisher of LUX, a new slick magazine aiming to secure “The Future of Feminist Journalism.” |
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There Are Just Too Many of Us, August 17th, 2022 Categories: Women, Travel Tagged: feminism Overpopulation We've all experienced the overcrowding of big cities, from which some of us fled to small towns like Santa Fe, now overwhelmed too with commercial development and part-time residents. |
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Better Late Than…, August 7th, 2022 Categories: Women, My Family Tagged: inheritance Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham One of the most interesting facets of my biography of Doris Duke was the question of her inheritance. |
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Lionesses, August 3rd, 2022 Categories: Travel Tagged: As Queen Elizabeth announced, the players had "set an example that will be an inspiration for girls and women today, and for future generations." |
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Truth and Reconciliation, July 27th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Los Alamos 20 Favorites of 2022 I want to draw my readers' attention to the extraordinary visit of Pope Francis to Canada to apologize personally for the destruction of thousands of Native children over the course of two centuries. |
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Volare, July 24th, 2022 Categories: Travel Tagged: Italy 20 Favorites of 2022 After graduating from college and becoming engaged with a ring that was too expensive, I was spending a month of a sort of pre-honeymoon with the man I was going to marry in the fall. |
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These Small Blessings, July 20th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe gratitude Little Brother: A Memoir Will's Things Actually not so small. |
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Learning From Virginia, July 14th, 2022 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: St. Johns College Virginia Woolf This summer is my sixth at Summer Classics, and I'm fortunate to be re-reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway with seventeen other people and two tutors, as professors are called here. |
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Where Are the Men?, July 10th, 2022 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: abortion Roe v Wade folk In the many debates I’ve been reading and hearing about the criminalization of abortion with the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, there is a major deletion: men. |
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We Go On Fighting, July 6th, 2022 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: abortion Title 9 Roe v Wade Margaret Sanger We always have, and we always will... |
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The Sea of Faith, July 3rd, 2022 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Farmers Market Roe v Wade This week’s dismaying Supreme Court decisions made me fear for the first time in my life for the future of our world, not our Democracy, always somewhat in doubt, but the spiritual, emotional and physical world we all live in. |
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Take Your Hands off the Wheel, June 29th, 2022 Categories: Politics Tagged: Capitol riots We must watch the ongoing hearings into what happened in Washington on January 6, 2021, not to hear more detail about Trumps' malfeasance—we already know plenty about that—but to hear about the acts of courage some of those around him displayed that day and in coming forward now to testify. |
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Happy Pride, June 26th, 2022 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Planned Parenthood Roe v Wade I doubt if any other town in the U.S. could celebrate Gay Pride with such a plethora of business and government floats. And with an enormous crowd composed of all ages and all genders. |
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Montana Was Made for the Wild Man: Women and Bad Boys, June 22nd, 2022 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Bill Hearne Little Brother: A Memoir We need to feel a connection to the heroic, so often defined as inherently male. |
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Leaving, June 19th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Carmichael's Bookstore Little Brother: A Memoir 20 Favorites of 2022 Whether I'm leaving on a short trip like this one or a long trip like the one next month, I feel the same mixture of nostalgia and apprehension... |
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Rules of the Heart, June 12th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: relationships I’ve really never imagined that there could be rules of the heart, but yesterday morning a dear friend laid his rules out in no uncertain terms. |
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In Praise of Book Groups, June 8th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: One of the many blessings of my life is my book group. |
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Woman, Writing, June 5th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: Writing Natalie Goldberg 20 Favorites of 2022 Writing in public insists that we exist as thinkers and creators of our own reality. It is of enormous importance. |
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Memorials, June 1st, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: I dug up a pinch of the holy dirt kept in a hole in the ground in a side chapel with convenient trowels laid alongside. |
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Tiffany Blue, May 29th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: Are we resigned, patient, wise? Or do we all learn sooner or later that pressing our noses against plate glass windows is the closest we will ever get to the goodies? |
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These Young Men, May 26th, 2022 Categories: Women, Politics, Religion Tagged: We are deep into another recreation of a woman-hating culture when the gains we'd painfully achieved in the 1960's are overridden by darkness... |
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Graduation Day in Snow, Colorado Springs, Colorado, May 22nd, 2022 Categories: My Family, New Mexico Tagged: William Bingham Iovenko The great benefit of an education in the humanities, now becoming a rarity, is its introduction via the Greek and Elizabethan playwrights to what they called "The tears in things." |
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Where the Bee Sucks, May 18th, 2022 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Shakespeare As a devoted reader of all of Shakespeare's poems, I've always been puzzled by the verb, "sucks" in this line from The Tempest. |
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Hope, May 15th, 2022 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Filson Historical Society This is the way we save our history. Otherwise much of what we know becomes irrelevant. |
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First We Burn, May 11th, 2022 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Wildfires Los Alamos Little Brother: A Memoir The national news, which almost never recognizes that New Mexico is a state—after all we have only five Congressional delegates—has been pricked into awareness by our five fires, one of |
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Escaping the Labyrinth of Nostalgia, May 8th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Wildfires Little Brother: A Memoir 20 Favorites of 2022 As the first copies of my memoir, Little Brother, begin to circulate, I’m struck by the way some friends have responded to the photograph of Jonathan on the cover. |
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Where Are the Men, May 4th, 2022 Categories: Politics Tagged: abortion Roe v Wade We really can't be expected by any sane human being to take ALL the responsibility for consequences that will burden and at times nearly destroy our lives. |
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Moscow Rehearsals, May 1st, 2022 Categories: Theater Tagged: Julia Miles The Women's Project The Women's Project Theater One of the serendipitous rewards of time spent in New York City is the rediscovery of long lost and forgotten connections. |
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Who Left the Prayerbook by the Road?, April 27th, 2022 Categories: Religion Tagged: Hiking Looking at it closely, I saw that it had been much used, the gilt on the edges of the pages half worn off, the pages themselves, thin as onion skin, dry and vulnerable. |
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Another Silent Spring, April 24th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Wildfires Los Alamos Adrienne Rich Would it have made a difference if a man had written it, a well-known scientist? I wondered that this morning as I walked through our parched and silent woods here |
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How Things Change, April 17th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: Harvard Harvard Club It’s a small example and yet, I think, a telling one: how women were admitted as members to the Harvard Club of New York City. |
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You Said It, April 13th, 2022 Categories: Religion Tagged: Easter Ukraine It was a surprise to find myself on Palm Sunday, at the end of a crowd of several hundred people, following a cross through midtown Manhattan with police cars barring traffic. |
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Doris Farewell, April 10th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Rough Point 20 Favorites of 2022 Thursday night I was privileged to present a conversation about my book and Doris Duke in one of the huge gilded rooms at Rough Point... |
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Doris Redux, April 6th, 2022 Categories: Writing, Theater Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan I'm about to leave New York City in its grey rain for Newport and Rough Point, the big house on Ocean Avenue Doris inherited from her father and that seems to have been closely associated, for her, with her mother. |
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Do I Grieve, April 3rd, 2022 Categories: My Family Tagged: Do I think grief is catching, like some new variant of the pandemic? |
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Fireworm, March 27th, 2022 Categories: Politics Tagged: Ukraine Sometimes it seems to me that we are all suffering from another form of Fireworm called War, or "Imperial Infantilism," as one commentator called it. |
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Getting to YES, March 24th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Silver Swan Little Brother: A Memoir Taken by the Shawnee Out of the sour ground of NO spring many hopeful sprigs, especially the generous responses to so many of my posts from you. |
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Something We Can All Do…, March 20th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe It’s a small idea. A simple idea: One day a week we don’t drive—to let the earth breathe, as a friend of mine described it. |
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Margaret in the Wilderness, March 17th, 2022 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee Ukraine Surrounded by disasters of every kind, we are seeing the great strengths of our extraordinary adaptability, valued and valuable as it has never been before. |
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Political Correctness: Carried Too Far?, March 13th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: New Mexico feminism Margaret raises what has always been a complex issue: should men be included in celebrations of women? |
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The Handmade House, March 9th, 2022 Categories: Travel Tagged: California I imagine the success of the Beach House was largely due to the energy of these women: Grandma on the rooftop, her three daughters, and their many daughters and nieces who enjoyed the house for three generations. |
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Remembering Will: March 3, 1970 – April 2017, March 6th, 2022 Categories: My Family Tagged: Southwest Chief William Bingham Iovenko 20 Favorites of 2022 Riding Amtrak's Southwest Chief, the only train left that travels east and west across our country and down to New Orleans, I notice as we cross the desert in New Mexico the small forgotten places... |
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Give Us This Day, March 3rd, 2022 Categories: Politics Tagged: Ash Wednesday Virginia Woolf Austin Brown Now, as always, there is the question of our minor influence as women on public events, even now when our faces and voices seem to indicate our ascendancy. |
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Lamentations, February 27th, 2022 Categories: Religion Tagged: kunm Native America Calling 20 Favorites of 2022 Lent is about to begin. Let us all get on our knees, whatever faith or lack of faith we hold and say one of the prayers from the Ash Wednesday service... |
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The Cruelest Month, February 23rd, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico spring T.S. Eliot It’s always fun to dispute with Mr. Eliot who used to reign supreme in English Departments all over this country. |
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The Right to Be Forgotten, February 20th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Los Alamos Innocent till proven guilty? A sword with two edges. |
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NO, February 16th, 2022 Categories: Writing Tagged: Taken by the Shawnee For me as a writer, the NO that seems to set a limit to all my hopes comes in response to an idea, a manuscript—or, in this case, a proposal. |
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The Woman in the Mink Coat, February 13th, 2022 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Lillian Hellman play "That's quite a coat," I murmured as she slid past me into the next seat. |
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Daughters, February 10th, 2022 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Virginia Woolf 20 Favorites of 2022 Last weekend I wrote about sisters. Inevitably I am now writing about daughters. Both posts concern lives of privilege but are not limited by that definition. |
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Two Sisters, February 6th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Taos D.H. Lawrence How does it happen that here in (relatively) remote and small Santa Fe, New Mexico, I’ve come to know about two sisters from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? |
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How Wonderful Is That, January 30th, 2022 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Farmers Market Little Brother: A Memoir 20 Favorites of 2022 In the midst of so much bad news, this astonishing performance of starlings, those little birds many of us have learned to hate, is a reminder of our ability to communicate and cooperate |
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My Father, January 26th, 2022 Categories: My Family Tagged: Louisville Willa Cather Barry Bingham Sr. Henrik Ibsen 20 Favorites of 2022 I never asked my father about his manicures. It didn't seem appropriate to raise such a frivolous topic with a dedicated newspaper publisher. |
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Roe, January 23rd, 2022 Categories: Politics Tagged: abortion Roe v Wade I'm finding it difficult to celebrate my 85th birthday, the anniversary of the decision half a century ago that legalized abortion, forbidding the states to outlaw abortion in all cases and asserting this freedom as a constitutional right. |
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That Voice, January 19th, 2022 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Martin Luther King Jr. Who is willing now to take these risks to try to preserve the future of the world? |
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Money, January 16th, 2022 Categories: Philanthropy Tagged: We are a long way from the feel and the look of coins and bills; we are being moved rapidly toward an economy which will operate only with various forms of credit. |
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Lipstick, January 12th, 2022 Categories: Women Tagged: The US economy has long been based on consumerism and it seems very likely to me that most of the consumers are us women. |
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Out of Darkness, January 9th, 2022 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Virginia Woolf kunm 20 Favorites of 2022 I have learned in dark times to turn to a few trusted resources. |
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Oh Those Resolutions!, December 29th, 2021 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: holidays 21 Favorites of 2021 New Year's A dear friend of mine reinvented the ritual of New Year's Resolutions this year, writing a letter on paper trimmed with gold stars to send to his friends... |
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Mary’s Birthday, December 25th, 2021 Categories: My Family Tagged: Christmas Mary Caperton Bingham 21 Favorites of 2021 No, not that Mary, who was busy having a baby, but my mother, Mary Caperton Bingham. |
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Bone, December 22nd, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: kunm Native America Calling Yesterday morning on KUNM, the invaluable National Public Radio Station where five days a week I listen to "Native America Calling," the only program in the country to showcase the tribes, I heard about a business in Arizona that makes prosthetic devices—arms, hands, partial hands and legs. |
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bell, December 19th, 2021 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Kentucky feminism I only met bell hooks once at a large feminist gathering—but as it happens when a powerful woman is in the room, her presence registered. |
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The Silver Swan Sails Again, December 15th, 2021 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Duke Farms Rough Point Shangri La 21 Favorites of 2021 Due to the generosity of a store here in Santa Fe called Travel Bug, I was able to give a reading from the biography a few days ago to a large and appreciative crowd. |
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Making Heroines, December 12th, 2021 Categories: Women Tagged: The Silver Swan Little Brother: A Memoir Where are our heroines? |
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A Page a Day, December 8th, 2021 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Kentucky 21 Favorites of 2021 Worth Bingham On a recent trip home to Kentucky, I came across a small worn black journal called "A Page A Day." |
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This Is the Hour of Lead, December 5th, 2021 Categories: My Family Tagged: Emily Dickenson William Bingham Iovenko Scott 21 Favorites of 2021 I think in fact there is no forgetting, but a different kind of remembering that goes on all the time in a deep, hidden layer... |
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We Will Never Learn, December 1st, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Debra Haaland kunm Native America Calling Finally, finally, the story of the Native American boarding schools in the U.S. has been sprung open by the discovery of the buried remains of more than a hundred children at a residential boarding school in Canada. |
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Little Brother Comes Home, November 23rd, 2021 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir 21 Favorites of 2021 Jonathan will be back in the place he loved best, and the only place he ever felt he really belonged. |
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Old Fire Dragaman and Women’s Anger, November 17th, 2021 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: feminism As long as guilt and fear hamper us, what weapons do we have to combat cruel and unfair treatment? |
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The Abandoned, November 7th, 2021 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Paris Camille Claudel 21 Favorites of 2021 An indication of the “treatment” they were given is shown in Lundy’s sketches of the medicine bottles she found: mercury cyanide, mercury chloride and tincture of belladonna (deadly nightshade.) The sketches are burnt into paper with a soldering iron. |
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Tractor Art, October 31st, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico South Pass Ranch This broken fragment means more to me than the vaunted collections of art I’ve seen in many museums, here and all over the world—this humble evidence of respect for handiwork and the human need to embellish. |
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Margaret, October 27th, 2021 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee We have no heroes and we blindly search for them everywhere. Women heroines need not apply. |
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Lipstick, October 24th, 2021 Categories: Women Tagged: Wordsworth I often smile now to think of my vow and my doomed attempt to get my friends to copy me. But I also love and admire that earnest girl who knew, even then, that I was going to choose a different path. |
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O for a Muse of Fire, October 19th, 2021 Categories: Theater Tagged: Shakespeare Ordinary, daily speech has always been sloppy, but what is sliding away is the higher use of words as in the great plays, great literature, and great poetry. |
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Why I Believe, October 11th, 2021 Categories: Religion Tagged: Episcopal Church Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir William Bingham Iovenko 21 Favorites of 2021 I have no other way to accept—or begin to accept—the tragedies over four generations that have engulfed my birth family. |
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Flashing on the Sixties, October 3rd, 2021 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir William Bingham Iovenko Lisa Law I am not an unequivocal admirer of that period, those people, and all that they caused—or helped to cause—to happen, in the early 1960’s and continuing to this day. |
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Two Women: Margaret and Doris, September 24th, 2021 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee 21 Favorites of 2021 I've come to believe over the years that there is a core similarity that connects the lives of all women. I think it is our ability to adapt. |
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Choice, September 19th, 2021 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: abortion 21 Favorites of 2021 No one in her right mind is "pro-abortion." I know from personal experience what a difficult decision this is. |
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My Grandmother Is Turning in Her Grave, September 12th, 2021 Categories: My Family, Politics Tagged: Helena Lefroy Caperton Richmond United Daughters of the Confederacy 21 Favorites of 2021 My beloved grandmother could never have imagined that the enormous statue towering over her hometown would be pulled down, carved up and crated off to an uncertain future as it was a week ago. |
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Bounty, September 8th, 2021 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe my garden gardening The soft, slow ending of the summer here brings much needed rain, coolness, and the coming to fruition of many fruits and vegetables. |
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Black Canyon, September 1st, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Hiking One of the many blessings of my life is the trail system in Hyde Park which starts about ten miles north of my house. |
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The Mother of All Bombs, August 29th, 2021 Categories: Politics Tagged: I have trouble saying "we" dropped the bomb. But ... we must accept a degree of responsibility. |
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Sorrow-Acre, August 22nd, 2021 Categories: Travel Tagged: Isak Dinesen Denmark Henrik Ibsen We pay the price for our many forms of immaturity—but I prefer that to what seems to be the ironclad maturity of the well-cared-for Danes. |
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Her Pact With the Devil, August 18th, 2021 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Isak Dinesen Denmark 21 Favorites of 2021 The habit of forming pacts to shape her chosen life began when Karen Blixen was standing on a granite boulder at Folehave with her younger brother Thomas, then fourteen. |
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No Phone No Gun, August 11th, 2021 Categories: Travel Tagged: 21 Favorites of 2021 The Danes are a practical people living within the limits of a limited world. |
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No water, August 8th, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Facebook BioLet My plight is not so dire as what will face all of us when our water really is gone. |
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The Judy, August 1st, 2021 Categories: Art Tagged: Judy Chicago Her life has been full of difficulties but she has made or forced her way through, never using excuses, always questioning why the art world, which has been so cruel to her until very recently, diminishes the importance of women's art. |
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Those Words Are Weapons, July 28th, 2021 Categories: Politics Tagged: Capitol riots A crucial question from a congressman: "Is this America?" |
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Guilty Until Proved Innocent…, July 25th, 2021 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Elizabeth Cady Stanton 21 Favorites of 2021 Does fearlessness on the part of girls and young women cancel judgement and common sense? |
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Colors of the World, July 14th, 2021 Categories: Politics, Writing Tagged: We are rounding the curve and coming into the homestretch—as we often do, both as individuals and as a culture—in the race toward what I'll call SUPERSENSITIVITY rather than its usual and somewhat discredited name, Political Correctness. |
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I Speak for Democracy, July 8th, 2021 Categories: Art Tagged: kunm I, along with thousands of other teenagers, did "speak for democracy" in a laboriously fashioned essay, presented on the radio, and winning me a prize—a black and white TV set my parents insisted that I return. |
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Murder in Mississippi, June 27th, 2021 Categories: Art, Travel Tagged: 21 Favorites of 2021 I know what to expect of Rockwell’s art, or I thought I did: homey sentimental depictions of an America that no longer exists and perhaps never did. |
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Staying Put, June 24th, 2021 Categories: Travel Tagged: Southwest Chief train Amtrak I still don’t want to go anywhere but if I go I want it to be on a train. |
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Voluntary Shared Abundance, June 13th, 2021 Categories: Philanthropy Tagged: As often the case with big gatherings (on Zoom or otherwise), there is often one phrase that stands out. |
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Tomorrow: The Vanguard, June 9th, 2021 Categories: Philanthropy Tagged: For all my friends who might be interested in attending the free online U.N. conference The Vanguard tomorrow, here is the final agenda. |
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Vegetables and Recovery, June 3rd, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: addiction For me, there's an irresistible connection between the baskets of glowing vegetables at our Saturday Farmers' Market and the hope expressed in this poster for recovery from addiction. |
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The Vanguard, May 30th, 2021 Categories: Philanthropy, Writing Tagged: The Women's Project Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Kentucky Foundation for Women I am looking forward to the rare opportunity that will be offered me, and I'm looking forward with even more interest to the fascinating variety of presentations that will make up the program. |
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The Way It Was, May 23rd, 2021 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Radcliffe Harvard Sylvia Plath Sexton We all want to forget our history, especially when it is shameful, and for this reason I am particularly grateful for a just-published biography of my peers. |
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Smashing the Canon, May 20th, 2021 Categories: Writing Tagged: 21 Favorites of 2021 We are still engaged—and will probably always be engaged—in smashing the canon. |
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Living in a World on Fire, May 16th, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Wildfires Driving down from Taos yesterday, I followed a dusty, beat-up pickup truck with an American flag painted on the tailgate. |
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Our Voices, May 12th, 2021 Categories: Women Tagged: Women feminism I have to recognize that we have not made the progress in the arts that women have made in journalism for reasons of class and white privilege |
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How History Is, May 9th, 2021 Categories: Art Tagged: Santa Fe I was delighted to visit, yesterday morning, Nikesha Breeze’s astonishing show, “Four Sites of Return: Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation, Reclamation” at form & concept gallery. |
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Saving Wolf Pen Mill, May 5th, 2021 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm 21 Favorites of 2021 Wake up, you well-off widows! We are all part of a world that is threatened by our individual decisions. |
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Huck and The Daughters, May 2nd, 2021 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: United Daughters of the Confederacy 21 Favorites of 2021 Mark Twain's novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, easily his masterpiece, was published eighteen years earlier and would have given the ladies palpitations if they had dared to read it. |
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May Stevens: A Life Well Lived, April 28th, 2021 Categories: Art Tagged: feminism We met one summer in the 1980's when we were both artists in residence at the remarkable Blue Mountain Center, situated on 1600 acres of woods in the Adirondacks in New York State. |
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Those Soft Kentucky Voices, April 22nd, 2021 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: We stopped yesterday in the middle of my class on writing memoir to listen to the verdict in Minneapolis that will send the policeman who murdered George Floyd to jail on all three counts. |
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The Techno Chasm, April 18th, 2021 Categories: Politics Tagged: bookstores We may not be able to stop this radical change that is ruining so many but that does not excuse us from doing whatever we can. |
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Father and Dame Ivy, April 14th, 2021 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Barry Bingham Sr. During a vacation trip to England years ago, I became aware, to my surprise, of my father's fascination with two British writers: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Ivy Compton-Burnett. |
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Goodbye and Hello, April 11th, 2021 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville 21 Favorites of 2021 The degree of change that has transpired since the long overdue advent of Black Lives Matter and the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville last spring is summed up for me in a Community Forum essay by columnist Quintez Brown. |
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The Lament of the Long Haul Trucker, April 7th, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: I can't forget an eloquent letter in The Santa Fe New Mexican recently from a man who is invisible to most of us except when his monster eighteen-wheeler rushes past on the throughway. |
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Jump Start, April 1st, 2021 Categories: Writing Tagged: Tillie Olsen, for me, is a startlingly loud call to continue to work, no excuses allowed. |
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Shooters, March 28th, 2021 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Los Alamos Little Brother: A Memoir Robert Oppenheimer How often have those of us—and there are many—whose sharp intelligence and ambition have not provided an escape from unresolved psychological problems found a route to normalcy through intellectual achievement and acceptance? |
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Why Teach, March 25th, 2021 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing writing workshops I want to persuade writers to use all five senses in their writing, instead of just the visual—and to sharpen visual descriptions with fresh, unexpected adjectives. |
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Doing the Laundry, March 21st, 2021 Categories: Women Tagged: I was converted a long time ago—one of the possibilities of privilege—to the belief that we women have more important things to do than the laundry. |
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Doris Duke: A Lifetime Search for Faith, March 17th, 2021 Categories: Writing, Religion Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan On Tuesday, March 9, 2021 I presented a talk to The Library Committee of The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico entitled "Doris Duke: A Lifetime Search for Faith." |
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Christa McAuliffe Middle School, FL, March 14th, 2021 Categories: Writing Tagged: On February 4, I spoke to students at the Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Palm Beach County, Florida over Zoom at the request of Dr. Alexander Bellas, Grade 8 English Language Arts Teacher. |
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When We Work Together, March 7th, 2021 Categories: Politics Tagged: New Mexico Debra Haaland Probably, these two women don't know each other but they share certain defining characteristics: age, wisdom, and a recognition that the earth is our mother. |
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Heterodoxy, March 3rd, 2021 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Women Writing Women's Lives Yesterday I was mesmerized by two presentations at our Women Writing Women's Lives Zoom meeting. |
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Barbie Forever, February 28th, 2021 Categories: Women Tagged: Mothers She's back in force. |
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Hacked, February 24th, 2021 Categories: Theater Tagged: Amazon I just received an email which appeared to be from Amazon—logo, etc.—advising me of a purchase of a laptop by a man named Craig something in Delaware and asking me to call. |
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Forgiveness, February 21st, 2021 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing writing workshops One of the problems with memoir writers, as I see it, is that we aim too low. |
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Vindication, February 17th, 2021 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan 21 Favorites of 2021 The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's grant of 1.6 million dollars to pay for the digitalization of thousands of tape-recorded oral histories of indigenous people has a special meaning for me. |
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Mothers Are Hurting, February 14th, 2021 Categories: Women Tagged: The New York Times feminism Mothers The problems have always been with us, but they were easier to ignore when the economy boomed. |
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Red-Headed Man, February 10th, 2021 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico I am proud of the Red-Headed Man. |
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Groundhog Pâté, February 7th, 2021 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House 21 Favorites of 2021 I might have forgotten Groundhog Day entirely except for a box that’s just arrived from my dear friend, Wren Smith, in Kentucky. |
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Fabulous Women, February 3rd, 2021 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: The Blue Box Here is the proof, internationally as well as nationally: women do more than survive; we lead. |
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My Dinner Guest, January 31st, 2021 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: My dinner guest sits quietly as the sun sinks in the west behind her, but her quietness is temporary. |
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The Blessing of Snow, January 27th, 2021 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Black Pip For anyone who lives where early January brings the first major snowfall, there is a feeling that everything is right with the world. |
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Pink Seesaws and My Birthday, January 24th, 2021 Categories: My Family, Art Tagged: I just passed a most delightful birthday with my Santa Fe family, outdoors, in 45 degrees, with coats and coconut cake baked by my eldest granddaughter. |
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We Must Listen, January 20th, 2021 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Capitol riots We are in the time now of the spouting of the dragon's teeth but the soil was prepared for them decades ago. |
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Reclaiming Our Flag, January 13th, 2021 Categories: My Family Tagged: William Bingham Iovenko It is still my flag, and ours. |
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We’ll Just Pretend It Never Happened, January 10th, 2021 Categories: Politics Tagged: Joe Biden Kamala Harris Capitol riots Sooner than we might expect, we will begin to blot out, explain away or even deny the importance of what happened in Washington, D.C. |
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My Mother’s 116th Birthday: December 24, 2020, January 3rd, 2021 Categories: My Family Tagged: Mary Clifford Caperton It has taken me so long, decades after her death, to realize what a blessed and blessing spirit my mother, Mary Caperton Bingham, was. |
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Two More Seconds of Daylight, December 30th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe my garden Where tribes were destroyed or driven out, many of us relative newcomers are not aware of the history that confronts us here in the Southwest every day. |
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Merry Solitude, December 25th, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: Sarabande Books Christmas gratitude Ozlem Ezer 20 Favorites of 2020 As I prepare to enjoy Christmas in blissful solitude, I'm particularly grateful for having learned during the past ten years how to love myself alone. |
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Fifteen Hours of Darkness: The Solstice, December 22nd, 2020 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: For me this solstice has special meaning, perhaps because last night at sundown I was hoping to see the close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, so close they are being called "The Christmas Star." |
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A Bright Light, December 20th, 2020 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Debra Haaland 20 Favorites of 2020 This week, president-elect Joe Biden’s appointment of Laguna pueblo native, Debra Haaland, as Secretary of the Interior, gives proof positive of change. |
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The Paper Carrier’s Prayer, December 17th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Santa Fe New Mexican gratitude Every year at about this time, Yolanda leaves a typed note with the newspaper. |
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Taos Pueblo and the Battle for Blue Lake, December 13th, 2020 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Blue Lake Debra Haaland Cooperation to restore rights, to serve justice, and to recognize the sacred. That's what I hope for when our new administration takes over in January. |
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The Way to Do It, December 9th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe coronavirus What has happened since to weaken our moral fiber and make some of us unwilling to sacrifice? |
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Beware, December 6th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Helena Lefroy Caperton Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir Can we be forgiven for signing these disreputable contracts, which often do not stipulate the amount of money we are expected to contribute to the publishing of our books until after we've signed? |
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Hidden Heroines, December 1st, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: The dramatic figure of Richard Oakes obscures two Native women who were crucial to the eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz. |
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Let Us Instead Consider, November 25th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Natalie Goldberg I've never been enthusiastic about writing prompts, but these were of a higher imaginative quality than anything I've encountered before. |
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White Privilege, November 22nd, 2020 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Mary Caperton Bingham Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir As I begin to re-read piles of research, looking for details I may have missed and will want to include in this final revision of Little Brother, I find myself face to face with this issue. |
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An Index of First Lines, November 15th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Poetry We all need comfort, especially now with the pandemic raging across the nation. I was reminded of my all-time comfort sources: an open log fire, a line of poetry, and a beautiful overblown pink rose. |
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Little Brother, November 11th, 2020 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir 20 Favorites of 2020 For the past four years, I've been chipping away at this complicated and difficult subject... |
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A President Who Knows Poetry, November 8th, 2020 Categories: Politics Tagged: Poems Poetry 20 Favorites of 2020 Poetry is essential in my view, the only art form complex enough to deal with the contradictions of human nature. |
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A Seat at the Table, November 4th, 2020 Categories: Politics Tagged: Santa Fe Donald Trump Regardless of who wins this election, we as a people need to think about the results of the disruption of the past year. |
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The Meaning of Art, October 28th, 2020 Categories: Art Tagged: Santa Fe A group of our local artists on their own initiative, without official permission or sponsorship, built an altar in the Railyard Park. |
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Why Do Women Have to Be Nice?, October 25th, 2020 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Georgia O'Keeffe World War Two O'Keeffe's assertion of ownership of a mountain is outrageous and refreshingly so, in itself affirming that she was not a "nice woman." |
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At Last, October 21st, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Radical change is never achieved slowly and quietly. This is a conservative country, by and large, and we have to be shaken out of our complacency for anything notable to happen. |
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A Dream Deferred, October 18th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Apache Mesa 20 Favorites of 2020 I was unable to move through my bitter disappointment that my original dream, dependent on a man, had collapsed. |
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My Bear, October 14th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico She's not my bear, she's certainly not my friend, but I am very happy to share my porch with her. |
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Nevertheless She Persisted: 30 Years of Women Writing Women’s Lives, October 11th, 2020 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: biography Women Writing Women's Lives feminism Elizabeth Cady Stanton The conference reminded me that we women offer each other extraordinary support and encouragement in all walks of life, essential to our achievement and even to our survival. |
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Sallie Bingham Reads, October 7th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Silver Swan Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader A wise interviewer asked me yesterday what I hoped to achieve through the presentation of my two current books... |
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Loving the Bad Boy, October 4th, 2020 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump How often have we witnessed in our own behavior, in others' or in literature, what seems to be women's archetypal empathy for the bad boy? |
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Gold, September 30th, 2020 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Donald Trump Hiking At this time of year and on till the end of October, the hills around Santa Fe are heavy with gold hunters, carloads of people who want to look at the gold leaves on the Aspens. |
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Where Are the Religious Leaders, September 27th, 2020 Categories: Politics, Religion Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2020 I may have missed their presence at the demonstrations that have been happening all over the country, most recently in Louisville, Kentucky, but I doubt it. |
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Starting Something, September 23rd, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: New York City The New York Review of Books I attended some of those early meetings, since my then-husband was one of the founding group, but I don't remember venturing an opinion. In those days, the opinions of young women weren't usually regarded. |
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Intemperate, September 20th, 2020 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan San Juan Pueblo Blue Lake Mabel Dodge Luhan House We are riven, today, not only by righteous concerns for justice on all levels but by the need to express those concerns in very loud voices |
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Rage, September 17th, 2020 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: racism Whether it's black rage or white rage—justified or not—rage makes me uncomfortable. |
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There Was an Old Woman Tossed up in a Basket, September 13th, 2020 Categories: My Family, Politics Tagged: Lizzie Baker Cecil Beaton What we are all obliged to do now: to join in sweeping the cobwebs. There is a little time and a little space, provided by the pandemic, for such a sweeping... |
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The Best of the Best: Small Town Newspapers, September 9th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Las Vegas Optic This past week brought about the demise of the Los Alamos Monitor here in New Mexico, done away with by its owner Landmark, with the usual excuses about declining advertising. |
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Train Me, September 6th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Yesterday morning Pip and I started on a new adventure: our first obedience class. |
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Claudio, September 2nd, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe I saw Claudio the other day, waiting for his order of barbecued ribs at the van that sits these days of the pandemic in a parking lot... |
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What’s Good About It, August 30th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: coronavirus James Salter As we head into the sixth—or is it the seventh month?—of the pandemic, I'm reflecting on what sweet juice can be extracted from these sour grapes. |
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Smoke, August 26th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Wildfires climate change It happens every summer during these years of drought, and we should be thankful it didn't happen until last week... |
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Housedress, August 23rd, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: Women The housedress and its definition mark a shift in what we expect of women in the midst of this pandemic. |
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Brass Belles: The Missouri Ladies Marching Band, August 19th, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: suffrage Susan B. Anthony Gertrude Stein As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, I am remembering the role that music, as well as words, played in this extraordinary triumph. |
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Privilege and the Privy, August 16th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Henrietta Bingham BioLet If there is any excuse for privilege—and I don't think there's any hope of eliminating it in the near or long future—it's that inheritors have an obligation to preserve land. |
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Loving Indians, August 12th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico One of the saddest effects of COVID for me is the closing of our neighboring eighteen northern pueblos, especially as we are in the summer season of harvest dances. |
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Hats, August 9th, 2020 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Women's International Study Center Hats The Peruvian hat makers shown in this film made by Erica Nguyen, a fellow at the Women's International Study Center here in Santa Fe, are part of an ancient tradition. |
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Down Town, August 5th, 2020 Categories: Art Tagged: During the early years of the last century, American girls were shipped to England to find husbands lured by their family dollars... Winston Churchill's mother was one of these so-called "Dollar Princesses." |
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Wolf Pen and the World, August 2nd, 2020 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm 20 Favorites of 2020 We never escape our past or our responsibility for our past, as we never escape the future we have agreed to create. |
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Starting Again, July 29th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: James Salter John Cheever The rest of us have to find a way to write bold and glittering and daring fiction without their form of fairy gold. |
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Summer Evening, July 26th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico 20 Favorites of 2020 After supper on these warm evenings in Santa Fe, my dog Pip usually insists on a walk. |
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And Now, Margaret Sanger, July 22nd, 2020 Categories: Women, Philanthropy Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan 20 Favorites of 2020 Yesterday, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed the name of Margaret Sanger, "founder of the organization," from its Manhattan clinic because of her "harmful connection to the eugenics movement." |
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Bear, July 18th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico 20 Favorites of 2020 A few years ago when I built my studio on the edge of the Santa Fe Watershed in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I was visited by two bears. |
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Puttin’ On the Ritz, July 15th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: dancing coronavirus That's what we all need right here (wherever here is) and right now. |
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L’esprit de L’escalier, July 12th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Black Pip coronavirus We took our usual shortcut through an open field where an old house used to stand... |
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What We Can’t Say Now, July 8th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Milk of Paradise Julia Miles The Silver Swan Sarah Gorham Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader 20 Favorites of 2020 We need to define, and vigorously defend, the line between art and politics. |
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I Can’t Teach You to Write, July 5th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: writing workshops Taos SOMOS What I can inspire, if not teach, is the appetite for putting words down on the page that has been my theme and my salvation since I was a child. |
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Let’s Dance, July 1st, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: dancing 20 Favorites of 2020 Why dance now, when we are all wrapped to a greater or lesser degree in gloom, even despair, with worse times ahead? |
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Eat the Rich, June 28th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Where are we to turn for sustenance, the well-off as well as the less comfortable? |
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Paranoia or Self-Pity, June 24th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico coronavirus We tend to be rather forgiving of ourselves and others when we describe the fears we are experiencing as "paranoid"—whether they are or not. The same forgiveness is not granted to those of us who say we are "full of self-pity." |
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Searching for Community, June 21st, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm coronavirus There has to be some kind of work, it seems to me, to bind a group together. Socializing and shopping together are not enough. |
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Juan de Oñate—Brutal Conquistador, June 17th, 2020 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: As we are seeing all over the country, protests against police brutality stir protests against other forms of brutality—they are all the same, and recognizing this energizes all of us organizing for radical change. |
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Where Have All the Flowers Gone Two, June 14th, 2020 Categories: Politics Tagged: Will this younger generation find those flowers? I don’t know, but at least there’s a chance that they may try. |
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The Limits of Loving, June 10th, 2020 Categories: Politics Tagged: Equality How much of what is wrong with our world today could be fixed by an outpouring of love? |
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Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, June 7th, 2020 Categories: Politics Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2020 What destroyed the hopes so many of us had in the sixties and seventies, when the deep-rooted racism in U.S. culture seemed to have been... well, not uprooted, but at least disturbed? |
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Tear ‘Em Down, Slats and All, June 3rd, 2020 Categories: Politics Tagged: We won't change anything without violence and destruction. Good intentions have done all they can do. |
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Change of Pace: My Master’s Horse, May 27th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Short Stories I'm going to treat you—and it will be a treat—to bits and pieces of what I really want to write. |
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How Libels Take Hold, May 24th, 2020 Categories: Women, My Family Tagged: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 20 Favorites of 2020 Hearsay, sometimes passed down for three hundred years, sticks—especially if it is negative, and especially if it adheres to a woman. |
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Power Corrupts, May 20th, 2020 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: feminism Are women somehow exempt from the deleterious influence of power? We have so seldom exercised visible power in the past that the question hasn't been asked. |
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How Creative We Are!, May 17th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe climate change coronavirus Amazing to see the way friends and strangers here in Santa Fe do more than "adapt" to the virus—they make hay out of it. |
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Clearing Out, May 10th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Silver Swan As I put my files, copies of the originals at Duke, into boxes for the shredder, I glance at a few that came as such pleasant surprises when I first found them eight or nine years ago. |
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The Female Economy, May 6th, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: Women It is important for the 9% of U.S. women who belong to what the Harvard study calls Elite/Independent to step up to leadership roles. |
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A Queen Exiled at Home, May 3rd, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: Doris Duke Hawaii Shangri La If we treat ourselves as the queens we are, the example of Liliʻuokalani may inspire us. |
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Heroes in Breeches, April 29th, 2020 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Frontier Nursing University I didn't think the horseback-riding British midwives I worked for years ago in the Kentucky mountains were heroes. |
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Treason on Stage, April 26th, 2020 Categories: Writing, Theater Tagged: Ezra Pound theatre Off It was Ezra Pound's personal story of committing treason against the U.S. during World War Two and his even longer-lasting treason against the three women who loved him that drove me to writing this play. |
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Being Needed Doesn’t Mean Being Well Paid, April 22nd, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: Women feminism 20 Favorites of 2020 I was raised by one of the millions of women who then as well as now fill the most essential U.S. jobs. |
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Next Comes, April 19th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Sarabande Books Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader 20 Favorites of 2020 I like to write about risk... and risk, by its very nature, seems best suited to shorter forms. |
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The Delights of Research, April 12th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Rubenstein Library The Silver Swan 20 Favorites of 2020 There is nothing like opening a file box, with some unknown's penciled label at the top, and diving into an absolutely unpredictable collection of letters, notes, interviews—anything Doris Duke, in my case, decided to save. |
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“The Swan” Launches!, April 7th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Silver Swan 20 Favorites of 2020 I am so grateful to all my readers and potential readers and I look forward to being in touch with each and every one of you. |
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Here Comes the Swan, April 5th, 2020 Categories: Theater Tagged: Julia Miles The Women's Project The Women's Project Theater Instead of Swan talk, I’m attaching an announcement about the recent death of my dear friend and mentor, Julia Miles, founder of The Women’s Project and Productions in New York City in the 1980’s. |
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Zoom the Miracle and a Few Others, April 1st, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: I've always been comfortable with what I think is my healthy dose of vanity. Don't we all need it to enjoy our blessings? |
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The Good News, March 29th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Hiking We're learning—in small towns, in countries, in continents—the lessons we desperately need if we are going to survive... not only this crisis, but the far greater looming crisis of global climate disruption. |
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That Sweet Little Breeze, March 25th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: For all of us who have bad moments in the dark of night, try opening a bedroom window... |
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Brace Up, March 22nd, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: World War Two As we advance into—and, I hope, through—various stages of panic and hysteria because of the virus, I am reminded of what the British went through during the German Blitz in World War Two. |
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In A Dark Time, March 15th, 2020 Categories: Women, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women feminism Poetry How ironic and, yet, how strangely fitting, that this flying virus arrives at the middle of Women's History month and just before the April 7 publication of The Silver Swan... |
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Doris Duke is Born, March 8th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Cecil Beaton 20 Favorites of 2020 What do I hope my biography will accomplish? Nothing less than a complete reconsideration of Doris Duke. |
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Part Time Dancer, March 1st, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: dancing I'm so carried away when I dance that I sing along with the music and hardly know or care where I'm putting my flying feet. |
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The Wild West, February 23rd, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Taos For Taos, a small town in the Rocky Mountains near Santa Fe, another snow means first of all figuring how to move around... but there are other stories. |
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What Was Cut, February 16th, 2020 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Duke University The Silver Swan I suppose it’s a stretch—but then what is the point of writing without stretching?—but I think if Doris Duke had known about Julian Abele’s work, she would have admired him and regretted that during his life time, he was never given his due. |
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Votes for Women, February 9th, 2020 Categories: Women, Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan suffrage feminism In the middle of all the horrors in the U.S. Capitol, we need to remember that much more significant events are happening. |
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It Takes a Village.., January 26th, 2020 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Since I've never lived in a village, this statement, made by Hilary Clinton a while ago, never had much meaning for me until a now. |
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Firebrand in the Trojan Horse Part Two, January 19th, 2020 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Women's International Study Center Ozlem Ezer Sometimes the Trojan Horse is actually a country or some part of a country in the grip of intolerance. |
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Firebrand in the Trojan Horse and the Half Step Strategy, January 12th, 2020 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2020 I've had the singular good fortune to meet this past week a most remarkable young woman, Mara Zepeda. |
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New Mexican Women Claimed the Right to Vote Almost One Hundred Years Ago, January 5th, 2020 Categories: Women Tagged: suffrage Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady Stanton We are at a curious moment today, in terms of suffrage and of women's rights generally. |
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Dancing for the New Year, January 1st, 2020 Categories: My Family, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe dancing William Bingham Iovenko New Year's I'll be dancing in the New Year—out with the old, in with the new, and hope springing eternal. |
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The Indignities of Age, December 30th, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: I think I'd rather fall down in the street, which would be easy to do today in snowy, icy Santa Fe—at its most beautiful, and, like everything beautiful, somewhat treacherous. |
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Christmas Eve in Santa Fe, December 24th, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Christmas The ritual of planting candles to light the way to church for midnight mass on Christmas Eve was brought first to Mexico by the conquistadores. |
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Meritocrazy, December 22nd, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: Now that we have it all, what will we do with it? |
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Exquisite Aloneness, December 1st, 2019 Categories: Women, Travel Tagged: California single blessedness 20 Favorites of 2019 There is an avidity, even an arrogance, and a superb energy I sometimes detect in those who live alone... |
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Maligned Because She Is Different, November 29th, 2019 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2019 The public shaming of Hill is yet another example of the hypocrisy of our culture, which pretends to respect or even worship difference, but is deeply and actively hostile to it. |
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Pigtail on Fire, November 24th, 2019 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump 20 Favorites of 2019 Dr. Hill... seemed to me, uniquely as a woman, to represent a fearless insistence on doing the right thing. |
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Rich Kids, November 17th, 2019 Categories: Philanthropy Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2019 From early childhood, the children of the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens receive the education, the grooming, the allowances, loans and preferential treatment that make the Dream (however it is defined) possible. |
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Dead Girls, November 10th, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2019 Anne Cooper Dobbins Except for so-called celebrities, or criminals, we are all forgotten within few years of our deaths. |
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Some Remarkable Women, November 3rd, 2019 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Judy Chicago Anne-Marie McDermott Linda Stojak Agnes Pelton Dorothy Brett 20 Favorites of 2019 I give you several women who have been seen as remarkable; they stand for a multitude of others who through timing, luck or geography are never given the accolades they deserve. |
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Bad Girls, October 27th, 2019 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Erica Jong Rosemary Daniell Sylvia Plath Joan Didion Kate Braverman Edna O'Brien 20 Favorites of 2019 The death of the writer Kate Braverman here in Santa Fe a few days ago led me to think about the accomplishments, and the legacy, of other Bad Girls. |
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Women Under Fire, October 20th, 2019 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: How often over the centuries women have banded together all over the world to stop invasion, conquest and bloodshed. |
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Rich Kids, October 13th, 2019 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: children 20 Favorites of 2019 New Mexico has been a blessing for me, which may explain (but not excuse) the fact that I had very little idea of the dire condition of many of our children. |
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“I just couldn’t bring myself…”, October 6th, 2019 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump 20 Favorites of 2019 It's a badge of honor, as well as proof of membership in a certain group, bound together by familiarity and a shared ethic. |
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The Third Fire, September 29th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: Activists like me who have spent decades working in various fields for social justices are, I think, right to assume that this new young militarism is drawing on our work of many decades. |
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Spring Chickens, September 24th, 2019 Categories: Politics Tagged: Santa Fe They are so beautiful, the young people—from press photos, largely young women—who marched through the streets of our cities and towns Saturday demanding crisis responses to climate change. |
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Liberation, September 15th, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: Adrienne Rich Andrea Dworkin Mary Daly Phyllis Chesler It's hard now to believe the extraordinary sense of liberation I as well as many other women felt during the early 1970s |
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Dogs of Santa Fe, September 11th, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Hiking We love dogs, we spoil dogs, sometimes we give dogs the love we can no longer afford to give human beings, after so many losses and disappointments. |
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Changing My Mind, September 8th, 2019 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Mabel Dodge Luhan D.H. Lawrence Seldom has a book caused me to change my mind... but D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia changed me. |
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Labor Day in These United States, September 3rd, 2019 Categories: Politics Tagged: When will we avid consumers quit going to Walmarts? Are lower prices really a defensible excuse? |
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Ode to Cerrillos, September 1st, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Bill Hearne Music How blessed I am to leave near a little spot in the desert that deserves, and is given, its very own ode. |
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Dry vs. Wet: Switzerland vs. Italy, August 25th, 2019 Categories: Travel Tagged: Italy Generalizations about countries are always questionable... yet as I reflect on my recent tour, the contrast between them seems to boil down to these qualities. |
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I Chose to Climb, August 16th, 2019 Categories: Travel Tagged: The heroic in some form is essential to our souls. |
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Reading Toni Morrison in China, August 11th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: The New York Times Morrison’s raw courage in confronting and describing the effects of incest, racism, and the tragedy of women forced into its confines will be with me always. |
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Sleeping with Strangers, August 7th, 2019 Categories: Travel Tagged: Women should not wear veils. A religion that insists on that is as culpable as a man who insists on it. |
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A Kiss Is Just a Kiss, August 4th, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: Abuse is screwed into the frame of the patriarchy. Top males so often exert their power over people they perceive to be weaker. Once, it was slaves. |
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Spanish Market and the Triumph of Craft, July 31st, 2019 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe Spanish Market These staring female saints, these progressing pilgrims, are as far as can be imagined from the images in European churches—or even in the "white" churches of the northeast. |
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Recording Two Women’s Friendship, July 24th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Mary Caperton Bingham What did these two stout scrapbooks mean to my mother? |
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How Do We Go on Living?, July 17th, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: New Mexico When I saw the Century Plant blooming in my dooryard garden yesterday morning, I remembered the letter Sido wrote to her son-in-law, Colette's husband, turning down his invitation to come for a visit. |
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Writing History, July 7th, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: feminism Taken by the Shawnee 20 Favorites of 2019 There are so many hidden stories that we as writers and readers need to write and to read—and to demand that they be written by women. |
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Drowned in the Rio Grande, June 30th, 2019 Categories: Politics Tagged: immigration The history of our shared responsibility, as U.S. citizens, for the deaths at our border is also our responsibility for our government's decades-long covert attacks on the democratically-elected leaders in those countries. |
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Flamenco: The I I Do Not Wish to Lose, June 23rd, 2019 Categories: New Mexico, Theater Tagged: dancing The whole tragic history of Spain seemed contained in this music and these movements. |
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Judy Chicago: The Master in Action, June 16th, 2019 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Judy Chicago Harwood Museum of Art Elemental, terrifying, and beautifully rendered—often in tender pastels—these images of women in the throes of labor and birth speak to the power we, as a gender, are often afraid to claim. |
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Children in Church, June 6th, 2019 Categories: Writing, Religion Tagged: Episcopal Church They made no noise, having been warned beforehand, and perhaps silenced by the the powerful male voices of the priests and the bellowing of the organ. But they moved. Oh, how they moved... |
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Legacy of Harm, June 2nd, 2019 Categories: Philanthropy, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke James Buchanan Duke 20 Favorites of 2019 Doris Duke must at least have wondered if her generosity, in all its forms, could ever compensate for the destructive effects of nicotine addiction. |
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What Is Lear, May 30th, 2019 Categories: Theater Tagged: I wonder if this is where we are going, toward a future where gender and even appearances are the last rather than the first details we notice and judge in friends and strangers. |
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At Last, May 26th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan 20 Favorites of 2019 In Manhattan last week, I was finally able to assure myself that The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, will be published next spring. |
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Unbearable Truth, May 19th, 2019 Categories: Theater Tagged: New York City Plays When I came out of the Roundabout Theatre production of Arthur Miller's play, All My Sons, I immediately faced an unbearable truth. |
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And It Does Go On, May 16th, 2019 Categories: My Family, Art Tagged: Ellsworth Gallery William Bingham Iovenko I am devoutly grateful for the lives of Will's two older brothers who have mourned him with me and yet managed to go on. |
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Who Was Magnolia?, May 5th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing Short Stories A short course in how a short story might be made. |
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The Secret Bunker, April 27th, 2019 Categories: My Family Tagged: Sallie W. Montague Sallie Montague Lefroy A big resort in the mountains of West Virginia, called The Greenbrier, figured often in my great-grandmother Sallie's tales of her girlhood in Richmond. |
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The Double Cottonwood, April 21st, 2019 Categories: Women, Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Georgia O'Keeffe SOMOS writers I find myself involved in three groups to my great pleasure and satisfaction, this after many decades avoiding groups as a waste of time. |
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She Is Burning, April 17th, 2019 Categories: Travel Tagged: Paris Notre Dame has always seemed to me a dark, brooding and august female presence presiding over Paris. |
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Faith, April 13th, 2019 Categories: New Mexico, Religion Tagged: Are we entering a time of converging faiths, offering hope to some, or only another giant step in the widespread agnosticism that seems at times a sure forerunner of despair? |
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Einstein with the Hopis, April 11th, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Harvey Houses Mary Colter Mileva... may have contributed to her husband's discoveries; in letters he alludes to them as "ours" although the question is unanswerable for lack of evidence. |
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When a Great Woman Dies, April 7th, 2019 Categories: Women, Kentucky, Art Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Ann Stewart Anderson 20 Favorites of 2019 When a great woman dies, we need to think about her again and again. |
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Letting Go of Apache Mesa Ranch, April 2nd, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Apache Mesa 20 Favorites of 2019 Continuing to own an unproductive piece of land at the end of a terrible road broke through several layers of my dreams—or where they delusions? |
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The End Is the Beginning, March 31st, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: Women's History Month ends today—one month out of the twelve to represent more than half of the world's people—with the hope and the promise that we are just beginning. |
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Burning the Forest, March 24th, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Wildfires What is it in men that delights in lighting fires? |
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Nearly Lost, March 19th, 2019 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Music 20 Favorites of 2019 The first issue, of course, is to level the playing field so that women have the same opportunities for education and performance as men. |
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Sometimes It Takes a While, March 16th, 2019 Categories: Kentucky, Art Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2019 Several decades ago, I became aware of the work and life of Enid Yandell, a Kentucky-born, Paris educated sculptor whose statues I used to see at various ceremonial points in |
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Amazon, March 10th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: A bookstore offers companionship, conversation, perhaps even a sense of community which nothing arriving by mail can ever hope to deliver. |
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Two Spirits, March 7th, 2019 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2019 Two Spirits have always walked among us, unrecognized and, at least in the past, often reviled. |
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W.O.W., March 3rd, 2019 Categories: Kentucky, Art Tagged: Judy Chicago Ann Stewart Anderson 20 Favorites of 2019 I immediately recognized the originality and daring of a kindred spirit. |
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18 Favorites of 2018, February 26th, 2019 Categories: Women, My Family, Politics, Writing, New Mexico, Kentucky, Travel, Religion Tagged: I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2018, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes. |
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Don’t Let Sex Distract You from the Revolution, February 21st, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: New York City feminism The discussions about gender were more congenial to me than the groups that confronted the problems heterosexual relations posed for women committed to some form of the revolution. |
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Teaching Girls, February 15th, 2019 Categories: Women, Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Louisville Collegiate School A small school in a southern city where girls were usually curbed physically or mentally, the Louisville Collegiate School for Girls and its teachers did not deal in... limits. My years there started me on my way as a writer. |
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Galentine’s Day and Our Great Leaders, February 14th, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: Valentine's Day feminism Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady Stanton My only problem with this pleasantly mad-cap idea is that it seems to focus on friendships between ladies... |
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Caught in the Act, February 10th, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: Doris Duke One of the most notable differences between women and men in public life is we seem to know better how to avoid scandal. |
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Cuba… What Can I Say? (2), February 3rd, 2019 Categories: Travel Tagged: I have more questions, most of them unanswered, which adds a piquancy to the beautiful aquamarine seas through which we are traveling off the south coast of Cuba. |
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Cuba… What Can I Say?, February 1st, 2019 Categories: Travel Tagged: I feel an affinity with what I can see of Cuban life today and what I know this island had gone through. |
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Kentucky Boys, January 29th, 2019 Categories: Politics, Kentucky Tagged: It was only words. But words have gotten us where we are now. |
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Making Money off Poison, January 24th, 2019 Categories: Philanthropy Tagged: Judy Chicago Brooklyn Museum of Art The cliche, "All great fortunes are founded on a crime" is true more often than not. |
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Mary Oliver Is Dead, January 20th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: Poetry 20 Favorites of 2019 Her gift seems simple and yet it is neither simple nor common but the "confiding intimacy" of her great poems. |
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The Work of Rose B. Simpson: Woman Warrior, January 13th, 2019 Categories: Art Tagged: Santa Fe Rose Simpson's warrior women become women of flesh and blood... this is a fearsome prospect for some, maybe many, women. |
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Inhabited by Poetry, January 10th, 2019 Categories: Writing Tagged: Poetry Beginnings of anything are always inspiring, more than middle or ends, which tend to be tedious. |
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Start by Getting Them in the Room, January 5th, 2019 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: feminism The opening of the U.S Congress, two days ago, showed us what happens when we are in the room. |
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Bare-Breasted, January 1st, 2019 Categories: Women Tagged: 20 Favorites of 2019 Let's begin the New Year with a salute to an astonishing woman, Agnes Sorel, the "acknowledged mistress" of the French king Charles the Seventh. |
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The Welcoming of Friends, December 30th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Christmas 18 Favorites of 2018 New Year's Over the twenty-seven years I've lived in Santa Fe, many people have come and many people have gone. |
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The Mustard Seed, December 25th, 2018 Categories: My Family, New Mexico Tagged: Christmas William Bingham Iovenko As a child, I planted seeds every spring and knew how likely it was that, when I forgot to water them, they would never spring from the dry earth. |
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Free To Be… You And Me, December 23rd, 2018 Categories: Women Tagged: Music For a while, there was magic in the air. |
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What Part, December 18th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Judy Chicago Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Ann Stewart Anderson Sometimes I'm grateful for the old Roman Catholic doctrine of Original Sin that held there is no innocent being, even a newborn, since Eve's fall. |
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The Ruts Remain, December 16th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Christmas dancing 18 Favorites of 2018 Bells are ringing all over Santa Fe and the Plaza is blindingly bright with tree-strung lights... |
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Pip in Winter, December 9th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Hiking My black dog Pip, now three and a half years old, fears not cold, snow or rain. For him it is all an adventure. |
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First Wolf in Yellowstone, December 4th, 2018 Categories: Politics Tagged: Yellowstone National Park There is something about the fierce wordless independence of the female wolf that stirs an atavistic antagonism. |
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First Snow, December 2nd, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe I will always miss the sensation of diving off the slope, at ten thousand feet, and sailing down the longest run with big curving sweeps of my skis. |
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Too Many, November 28th, 2018 Categories: Politics Tagged: Women Environment religion Overpopulation We all know, if vaguely, that we are facing something we might call a catastrophe. |
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Victoria’s Secret Goes Down, November 25th, 2018 Categories: Women Tagged: feminism 18 Favorites of 2018 Debra Haaland I look for changes that seem small, even ridiculously small, and yet may herald changed attitudes in this slow-moving country of ours. |
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My Azure State, November 11th, 2018 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Debra Haaland I have lived here for twenty-seven years, and in all that time, I’ve felt and seen a slow progression in state politics toward justice. |
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A Woman Conducts, November 6th, 2018 Categories: Women Tagged: Music So what is the difference between a woman conducting and a man? |
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The Next Step, November 4th, 2018 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Silver Swan Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir Taken by the Shawnee 18 Favorites of 2018 How to live on nothing is a question the publishers have not condescended to consider. |
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My Mother’s Cookbook, October 28th, 2018 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: Mary Caperton Bingham I did make some progress... although probably my greatest accomplishment was mayonnaise made in a blender. |
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Losing Will, October 13th, 2018 Categories: My Family Tagged: William Bingham Iovenko 18 Favorites of 2018 The art of losing, if it can even be called an art, can’t be mastered. |
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Taos Day, October 9th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Farmers Market What a way to celebrate the vibrant heart of a small town. |
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The Tooth, October 7th, 2018 Categories: Writing Tagged: Food Since the tooth has been with me for a long time and has served me faithfully, I decided to write its story. |
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Two Women in an Elevator, October 4th, 2018 Categories: Politics Tagged: Women have been taught not to scream lest we be discounted as "hysterical"... and so the strength of our voices, and of our fury, has been denigrated and eliminated from public discourse. |
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Apples, September 30th, 2018 Categories: My Family, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe William Bingham Iovenko Like the medieval desert mendicants, holy men who lived their lives in remote caves and were sometimes fed by ravens, Will had long ago lost any interest in possessions, or any taste for food. |
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Will Walking Away, September 23rd, 2018 Categories: My Family Tagged: William Bingham Iovenko 18 Favorites of 2018 What is it about our world that destroys our young men? |
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From Dream to Reality, August 28th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Apache Mesa Taken by the Shawnee 18 Favorites of 2018 It is finished after almost two years of work, with many changes—some of them drastic, others simply disappointing—along the way. |
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Single Blessedness, August 26th, 2018 Categories: Women Tagged: friends single blessedness 18 Favorites of 2018 My self is precious, and it needs and deserves nourishing as the center of my life, not an outcropping. |
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Indian Market: When We Are All Together, August 23rd, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Native American art Santa Fe Indian Market Through all these years of turmoil and change, the Santa Fe Indian Market has persisted. |
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Do Right Woman: Aretha Franklin, August 19th, 2018 Categories: Women Tagged: Music No one can appreciate the depth of Aretha Franklin's influence as clearly as women, like me, who came of age in the Feminist Movement in the late 1960's. |
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The Fire This Time, August 16th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Wildfires Burning to prevent burning produces unwelcome results... even in the face of wildfires, we may do our forests a favor by leaving them alone. |
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Basket, August 12th, 2018 Categories: Politics Tagged: My friend Katie is a Cassandra, cursed by the god to know and speak prophesies that no one would believe... Her mission is the end of the world. |
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Girl 27, August 7th, 2018 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: The New York Times Elizabeth Cady Stanton Patricia Douglas was “Girl 27” on a long list of young extras who were invited to an MGM party in Hollywood, in 1937, under the guise of a casting shoot for a movie. |
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Pip’s Wild Friends, August 5th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Black Pip Life gets pretty boring for a lone dog like Pip, especially now—it is so hot and the hiking trails are so crowded we don't go there much. |
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Shoes, July 29th, 2018 Categories: Women Tagged: dancing Shoes tell a story. Many stories. |
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Celebrities, July 22nd, 2018 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Silver Swan Passion and Prejudice 18 Favorites of 2018 These days if a writer is smitten with the idea of writing a new book—a new analysis—of any supposedly well-known person, the obstacles to her research will be enormous. |
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Ranch Time, July 15th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Apache Mesa As always with a big new project, the day of reckoning comes at last. |
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The Century Plant, July 1st, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe my garden The wisdom of old age: to stay and savor, rather than leaving to experience more. |
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A Nation Afraid, June 29th, 2018 Categories: Writing Tagged: 18 Favorites of 2018 I've been wondering why we in the blessed U.S. seem so frightened of just about everything. |
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Doris Duke: Changing Faces, June 24th, 2018 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan 18 Favorites of 2018 We are all too complicated and contradictory to be explained. |
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City of Angels, June 17th, 2018 Categories: Travel Tagged: Los Angeles is somebody’s kingdom, maybe everybody’s kingdom, but I don’t think it’s mine. |
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The Extraordinarily Gifted, June 10th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe The last few days have brought me into contact with four extraordinary people... this seems amazing. |
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No More Water, June 7th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Wildfires In times like this, I'm grateful that—so far—Santa Fe has been spared, and perhaps the closing of our neighboring national forest will prevent disaster. |
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The Santa Fe National Forest Has Closed, June 3rd, 2018 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe Hiking We don't know how to behave in the woods. |
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Philip Roth Is Gone, May 27th, 2018 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Philip Roth John Cheever As a young writer publishing my first novel at the time of Roth's debut, I wondered even then why this gentle, pastel novel received so much attention. |
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Volare (2018), May 24th, 2018 Categories: Travel Tagged: Music Italy What do we do with the remnants of romance when we have long outgrown it? |
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To Be of Use: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, May 20th, 2018 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Charlotte Brontë 18 Favorites of 2018 A great collection is always based on a passion. It is not random. It grows from a strong root. |
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Kate Millett: A Beginning, May 13th, 2018 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Rosemary Daniell Adrienne Rich Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Bitch magazine Kate Millett If our coming together seldom includes our work, and is largely social, our influence on our communities is limited. |
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Doris Duke, the Patriarchy, and God, May 8th, 2018 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Duke University Duke University Chapel James Buchanan Duke My surprise almost outweighed my satisfaction when I found that in one letter, written in middle age, Doris referred to the patriarchy. |
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We Dance, May 6th, 2018 Categories: Travel Tagged: New York City dancing Walking back to my hotel through the nighttime madness and splendor of the city, I felt the hope that dancing always brings, the hope of not just enduring despair but leaping over it. |
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No Refuge but in Writing, May 1st, 2018 Categories: Writing, Travel, Theater Tagged: New York City Tennessee Williams I have been blessed this week by two immersions in the work of Tennessee Williams, a writer I've always adored. |
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Spring Has Sprung, April 29th, 2018 Categories: Travel Tagged: New York City Paris I am fortunate on this visit to find the dampness of New York City a great relief after the deadly dryness and manifold allergies of the Southwest. |
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Spring Planting, April 24th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky Tagged: my garden gardening Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm The Horsetooth Corn will grow vigorously to remind us all that fertility, growth and abundance is still possible. |
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The Little Bookstore That Could, April 22nd, 2018 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe I believe in books printed on paper, and a lot of others do too. |
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Training Mr. Pip, April 17th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip It has become clear that saying, "Come, Sweetie" in a treble voice may work with your lover but not with your canine. Actually it probably doesn't work with either. |
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Connecting, April 15th, 2018 Categories: Politics Tagged: Facebook James Buchanan Duke Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress brought to my mind James B. Duke’s testimony more than a hundred years ago explaining and excusing his tobacco monopoly. |
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Sanctuary, April 10th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Mabel Dodge Luhan Taos Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Apache Mesa I am blessed to have, in my life, several sanctuaries, one of which I am able to visit daily, the others at least once a week. |
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Faith, April 8th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico, Religion Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan Taos Mabel Dodge Luhan House I have been thinking about faith, manifested in two of its aspects in Taos: The Penitente Morada behind Mabel's house, and the nearby graveyard. |
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They Believe, April 1st, 2018 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Dear Believers, dear Marchers and Speakers, I beg you to immerse yourself in our history, in all the aspects of violence so deeply embedded in money-making and male entitlement. |
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Living with a Fool 2, March 27th, 2018 Categories: Art Tagged: Harwood Museum of Art I am ever grateful to the Harwood Museum, its board, staff and director, and especially to the two women who curated this extraordinary exhibit: Janet Webb and Judith Kendall who have the courage of their convictions. |
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Living with a Fool, March 20th, 2018 Categories: Politics Tagged: But then... an email from a dear friend who has been transcribing and editing and putting together a book of her interviews with Syrian refugees. |
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Womanhouse, March 16th, 2018 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: National Museum of Women in the Arts Judy Chicago Whether we dare, or do not dare, with our work and our voices and our actions to make trouble, we are living in the midst of trouble, nationally and globally, trouble that no amount of soothing the waters is going to solve. |
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Our Time, March 11th, 2018 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Santa Fe Women Not Women's Month or Women's Day but Women's Time—Our Time—long overdue but come at last. |
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Death of Ten Thousand Pricks, February 27th, 2018 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Charlotte Brontë 18 Favorites of 2018 Scheduled to be published in August, 2018, The Silver Swan is now delayed till sometime in 2019. |
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The Mysterious Diamond, February 25th, 2018 Categories: Women, Writing, Art, Travel Tagged: Mexico Luis Barragán Clara Porset I loved our tour of architect Luis Barragán's masterpiece in Mexico City, a great collection of brilliantly-colored walls, streams and pools. |
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Guns, February 20th, 2018 Categories: Politics, Writing Tagged: Ernest Hemingway Where are the fathers? |
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La Casa Azul, February 13th, 2018 Categories: Women, Art, Travel Tagged: Mexico Luis Barragán Clara Porset Frida Kahlo 18 Favorites of 2018 Mexico City seems to be a city of women. We are everywhere. |
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Only Connect, February 7th, 2018 Categories: Travel Tagged: Mexico Ezra Pound In all countries, in the midst of our confusion and fear, there is nearly always, somewhere to be found, a brief smile. |
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Chasing Wolves, February 4th, 2018 Categories: Travel Tagged: Yellowstone National Park Is it possible to be free, and also an active member of a community? |
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Recovery, January 21st, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe I believed that this hillside I walk past every day would remain desolate, the first evidence in my life of global warming. |
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I Want It to Be Said, January 15th, 2018 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico The Silver Swan Martin Luther King Jr. By now we all know that the discrimination that afflicts one group afflicts all of us. |
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Playgirl, January 14th, 2018 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: 18 Favorites of 2018 John Cheever Our desire to be liked and loved is passionate, unequivocal, and it makes us vulnerable to every rejection. |
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Doris Duke: Love, Sex, Power and Money, January 9th, 2018 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Jimmy Cromwell Porfirio Rubirosa 18 Favorites of 2018 Does it matter that she never found her match in terms of money, status and achievement? |
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New Year’s Affirmation, January 4th, 2018 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: dancing New Year's My wish for all my loyal readers and for the world at large in this fresh new year. |
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A Few of My Favorite Things, January 1st, 2018 Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Apache Mesa 18 Favorites of 2018 Mabel Dodge Luhan House I am particularly blessed in these special places that seem to have come into my life by chance or luck but are in fact the material manifestations of prayer. |
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Faith for the Faithless, December 28th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico, Religion Tagged: 18 Favorites of 2018 Faithlessness is, first of all, a failure of the imagination. |
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17 Favorites of 2017, December 27th, 2017 Categories: Women, My Family, Politics, Writing, New Mexico, Kentucky Tagged: As this year comes to a close (some might say thankfully), I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2017, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes. |
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Acting Christmas, December 24th, 2017 Categories: My Family Tagged: Christmas Mary Caperton Bingham Jonathan Worth Bingham 17 Favorites of 2017 The ritual that returns to me most vividly this December is one I call Acting Christmas |
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I Didn’t Sing for a Year, December 17th, 2017 Categories: Women Tagged: Sarabande Books Doris Duke The Silver Swan I remember being amazed when my young granddaughters and their friends listened, apparently unperturbed, to hip hop verses that demonize or degrade women. |
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Las Posadas, December 12th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico, Religion Tagged: Santa Fe There was a magic in the pretty Mary and her shiny blue gown next to the tall Joseph with his staff. |
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Tiny Little Things, December 8th, 2017 Categories: My Family Tagged: Paris The value of the collection I keep on the top of my bureau seems suddenly, mysteriously clear. |
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Andrea, November 28th, 2017 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Andrea Dworkin Gloria Steinem The great advantage we are gaining from enduring this age of suppression—internal and external—is that there are no unimportant words, no expression in a medium that is not political. |
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Happy Birthday, Doris, November 22nd, 2017 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke James Buchanan Duke Sometimes a choice of a name without family connotations means an attempt to break loose from the past. |
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FEAST, November 14th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Tesuque Pueblo It was with a feeling of gratitude and relief that I went Sunday to the Tesuque Pueblo traditional dance. |
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Music Hath Charms, November 12th, 2017 Categories: Art Tagged: The Silver Swan Music I grew up with almost no music at all. Music, after all, is not words and only words counted in that world. |
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Boys, November 5th, 2017 Categories: Women Tagged: We see their faces every few days on top of articles about various forms of mayhem—group slaughter, murder, violence against women. |
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Ring of Fire, October 31st, 2017 Categories: Women Tagged: Doris Duke Remarkable women are surrounded by a ring of fire... made up of glowing embers of gossip, innuendo, and misunderstanding. |
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Nine Months, October 29th, 2017 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump President Trump has been "in there" too long. We must gear up for a Caesarian. |
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Is There a Knife for the Peanut Butter?, October 24th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Willa Cather Canyon de Chelly Earthwalks Time in the wilderness is essential to my soul. |
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My Harveys, October 17th, 2017 Categories: Women Tagged: Radcliffe Harvard Harvey Houses 17 Favorites of 2017 My story is in different ways horrible from the gross physical attacks perpetrated by men I would not honor with the term, “sick.” |
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Doris Duke and the Sea, October 15th, 2017 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Rough Point Both Doris and Alleda developed physical strength, courage and confidence battling the waves on the beaches at Newport. |
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Doris Duke Goes to Press, October 8th, 2017 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Joey Castro Jimmy Cromwell Porfirio Rubirosa 17 Favorites of 2017 My relief in learning that “The Silver Swan” will be published next June prompts me to rejoice like old-time newspaper editors when the daily edition was put to bed. |
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Adventurer / Adventuresses, September 24th, 2017 Categories: Women, Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Title 9 17 Favorites of 2017 The threats we still face from the dominant culture, the insults and violence, have not stopped us. We still go for the outer air. |
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Adventure / Adventurer, September 17th, 2017 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Horses Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Barry Bingham Sr. The price exacted by a culture determined to keep us in our place is high. It has always been high and I think it may always be high. |
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Doris Duke and Rich People’s Secrets, September 12th, 2017 Categories: Women Tagged: The New York Times The Silver Swan 17 Favorites of 2017 Our culture is unjust because we, its citizens, are satisfied for it to be that way. |
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Sexual Politics, September 10th, 2017 Categories: Women Tagged: Sweet Honey In The Rock feminism Kate Millett Phyllis Chesler Kate Millett, a great leader and inspirer for many of us in the 1970’s and 80’s has just died at 82. |
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What a Summer…, September 5th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: May we all sail into the fall, feathers ruffled, but still gliding ahead. |
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Earthwalking, August 29th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Navajo Canyon de Chelly Earthwalks I hope the day never comes when I am dead to adventure. |
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Step: The Miracle, August 25th, 2017 Categories: Women Tagged: Wherever you live: search for it, go to it, even if it means a big change in your plans. |
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Queen Moon, August 21st, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Navajo I’m honoring an ancient tradition which probably predates the negative connotations of the eclipse and of the moon herself. |
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Saving a Dream: Making a Ranch, Apache Mesa NM, August 20th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Apache Mesa 17 Favorites of 2017 An escape, a refuge, to write my next two books seemed not a luxury but a necessity... |
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We’ll Marry Your Girlfriends, August 15th, 2017 Categories: Politics Tagged: I don’t ordinarily bother with YouTube... but this time, the title got me. |
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Tea Cake, August 13th, 2017 Categories: Politics Tagged: Zora Neal Hurston Donald Trump 17 Favorites of 2017 There is something about Donald Trump that makes his misogyny, vulgarity and ignorance seem not only amusing, perhaps somehow alluring. |
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Small, August 10th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Las Vegas Optic For me, a worthy emblem of smallness is the Las Vegas, New Mexico newspaper, the Optic. |
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Godiva, July 9th, 2017 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Los Alamos Would it matter if women or members of minorities were working in executive positions at Los Alamos or any of the other dozen or so bomb factories scattered throughout our country? |
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Life Is What Leaps, July 6th, 2017 Categories: My Family, Politics Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Palgrave's Golden Treasury California How to keep a spark of hope alive in our so-called democratic process? How not to drop into numbness and apathy? |
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The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, July 4th, 2017 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Shangri La 17 Favorites of 2017 Changing the title of my biography of Doris Duke, especially after more than six years of work, is a big deal. |
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Angel Sallie, June 25th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: David Richard Gallery Harwood Museum of Art No longer subject to colonization and condescension, have we found our landscapes, at last? |
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Enough Is Enough, June 18th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Food Local, organic produce is of the blessings of our age—which at times seems cursed. |
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A Working River, June 13th, 2017 Categories: Travel Tagged: Paris Life is to be lived, and it is also to be walked. |
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Camille Claudel Lives Again, June 11th, 2017 Categories: Art, Travel Tagged: Camille Claudel In the end, France comes to honoring its extraordinary women |
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Food—That French Thing…, June 8th, 2017 Categories: Travel Tagged: Food Dazzling as this food was, it was not as impressive as the army of back-suited, beautiful young men and women who flew between the tables. |
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French Tennis, June 6th, 2017 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Great athletes inspire. This is not something I have always known. |
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Innards, June 1st, 2017 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan Rough Point I am blessed—and have been for six long years—in being given the responsibility of writing Doris Duke's biography. |
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Forgiving Myself Forgiving Ourselves, May 28th, 2017 Categories: Women, Writing, Art Tagged: Camille Claudel Artists use all the material our lives deliver to us–but the professional cost can be very high. |
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Mother Tongue, May 23rd, 2017 Categories: Writing Tagged: Zora Neal Hurston David Whyte Now that writers are abjured not to write in dialect, we may be losing a connection to an older source than standard English. |
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Eating Alone, May 21st, 2017 Categories: My Family Tagged: Food 17 Favorites of 2017 Last night I noticed how a repetitive task—each leaf pulled off the stalk, dipped in French dressing, and eaten—demands a particular sort of attention. |
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Counterculture Culture, May 18th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe Women Mabel Dodge Luhan Taos Lisa Law For most of Grandfather's neighbors and friends, memory of the communes is sharp and sour. We have yet to sweeten it. |
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Dogs, Horses—And Fish, May 9th, 2017 Categories: Kentucky, Travel Tagged: Horses Black Pip “Don’t feel sorry for The Teaser,” our guide told us, though it seemed to me more likely we might feel sorry for the mares. |
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Art, May 7th, 2017 Categories: Art Tagged: Art doesn’t “fix” pain, but it provides a version of that tiny interval after the sufferer wakes and before the pain is remembered. |
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Work, May 4th, 2017 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Pam Houston I'm annoyed at the concert of writing in newspapers, magazines and books that claim that women don’t really want to work. |
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The Rocking Chair Tour, April 30th, 2017 Categories: Women, Theater Tagged: We never even got as far as humor when attempting to redefine manhood. Will humor get us nearer the starting gate when redefining age? |
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Claiming the Broom, April 25th, 2017 Categories: Women, Politics, Kentucky Tagged: The Silver Swan Hillary Clinton Little Brother: A Memoir The witch with her broom is also the woman tossed up in a basket—the high flyer, the visionary, terrifying to many... and more necessary now than ever. |
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Re-Imagining, April 20th, 2017 Categories: Women, Religion Tagged: Reimagining the way the Christian Church in all its forms might benefit women... raises, inevitably, the issue of language. |
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Digging In, April 18th, 2017 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Rubenstein Library Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Henrietta Bingham Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir 17 Favorites of 2017 Certainly my methods of research are sometimes unorthodox... but I am not saddled with the literal-minded over-reliance on facts that a PhD sometimes confers. |
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Why I Didn’t Get Pregnant, April 11th, 2017 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Doris Duke "Winter Term" Donald Trump 17 Favorites of 2017 With our silence, we are promoting, however unintentionally, the Trump administration’s war on women. |
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Border Radio, April 9th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Bill Hearne dancing I find my solace in all my familiar places, none more familiar, or more comforting, than the Country-Western songs I listen to on KUNM or KSFR. |
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Flute Making and Hot Springs: Jemez New Mexico, April 4th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: Earthwalks Many of us come to New Mexico to visit and find ourselves over weeks or months deeply engaged. |
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At Long Last, March 30th, 2017 Categories: Women, Theater Tagged: The Women's Project Theater Broadway... really can’t maintain its status as the place where new playwrights, especially women, go to gain recognition. |
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Ugly Words, March 21st, 2017 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Donald Trump 17 Favorites of 2017 The only possible solution is radical, and like all radical ideas, it is impractical and idealistic, like some of the programs that will be cut. |
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Girl vs. Bull, March 12th, 2017 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke St. Johns College The Silver Swan 17 Favorites of 2017 I know Doris Duke would have enjoyed seeing the statue of a little girl confronting the bull of Wall Street. |
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A Day Without Women, March 9th, 2017 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe I’m honoring the day by writing about the businesses here in Santa Fe that are owned by women, said to be somewhere around forty percent. |
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This I Can Do, March 5th, 2017 Categories: Writing Tagged: St. Johns College Black Pip Writers have never been paid a living wage... never a princely—or princessly sum—our incomes are now not equal to sustaining even a modest life. |
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We Have Done It Before, February 28th, 2017 Categories: Politics, New Mexico, Religion Tagged: Santa Fe 17 Favorites of 2017 We rounded up men who had committed no crimes, on suspicion only. We are doing it again. |
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We Did It, February 26th, 2017 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe immigration 17 Favorites of 2017 On Wednesday, the Santa Fe City Council passed, unanimously, a resolution reaffirming our status as a Sanctuary City and spelling out exactly what this means. |
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One Beakful at a Time, February 21st, 2017 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Donald Trump 17 Favorites of 2017 I’ve found a solution to these times that will work for me, and perhaps be helpful to all of you. It’s the example of the hummingbird. |
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Wild Animals I Have Known, February 19th, 2017 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Ernest Thompson Seton Seton's animals remind me of how essential that bit of wildness is to us, not only in the precious few wild animals nearby but as an essential bit of our own souls. |
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Women Writing Women’s Lives, February 16th, 2017 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Erica Jong Rosemary Daniell The Silver Swan Women Writing Women's Lives Where, now, are the women writers we could call “outrageous”? |
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How to Be a Goop, February 12th, 2017 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump children's stories Many of the actions described in today's news could have been carried out by Goops. |
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A Perhaps Hand: Art and Crisis, February 9th, 2017 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Lensic Even now with our country in a state of hysteria over the goings on in Washington, we can’t seem to summon the will, or the skill, to write plays—or fiction, or poetry, or paint, or sculpt—in ways that would be relevant to our crisis. |
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41%, February 1st, 2017 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Donald Trump 17 Favorites of 2017 We elected him. We can’t comfort ourselves with signs that say, “Not My President.” |
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What a day what a day what a day, January 23rd, 2017 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Santa Fe Here, in the blessed city of Holy Faith, Santa Fe, there was the biggest, happiest, most determined march. |
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We March / We Dance, January 19th, 2017 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Bonnie Lee Black Donald Trump 17 Favorites of 2017 Let's all smile as we recognize that the violence of this backlash represents the enormous progress we women have made in the past century. |
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The Best Photos of the Year, January 8th, 2017 Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky, Travel Tagged: New Mexico Kentucky Writing Earthwalks These are my favorite photos of the last year, with links to their blog posts (if any)—Sallie Little brother made up for Christmas play, my next book…: This Writer’s Life |
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Breakfast with Deer, January 1st, 2017 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Jennifer Louden SARK Food Something about the grazing deer and my breakfast in bed made me want to start the New Year with a few words about self-indulgence. |
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Your 16 Favorites of 2016, December 26th, 2016 Categories: Women, My Family, Politics, Writing, New Mexico, Kentucky, Art, Travel, Theater, Religion Tagged: As this memorable year comes to an end, I've chosen my sixteen most popular posts of the year, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes. |
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Light in a Dark Time, December 24th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Christmas gratitude Harvey Houses There are roses blooming even in the darkness of this December. |
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Nasty Women, December 20th, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: The Women's Project The Women's Project Theater theatre Women do not see their crucial concerns acted on the stage, we do not read theatre reviews written by women critics, and... women do not buy the majority of tickets to the plays we write. |
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This Writer’s Life, December 18th, 2016 Categories: My Family, Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Christmas Jonathan Worth Bingham Little Brother: A Memoir Taken by the Shawnee 16 Favorites of 2016 The writer's challenge is always to create the life rather than the theory or the explanation of the life... |
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Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, December 13th, 2016 Categories: Writing, Art Tagged: Adrienne Rich It took a revolution in critical standards for the way women work to be given equal status with the way traditionally men have worked. |
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Sleepless in Santa Fe, December 11th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico The excitement of the season plus a few flush-inducing angers led to one of my rare sleepless nights, here in the mountains north of town. |
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The Blue Bubble, December 8th, 2016 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico 16 Favorites of 2016 Our blue bubble here in New Mexico may be where we are all heading as we fight our way our of this crisis. |
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Holy Family, December 4th, 2016 Categories: Women, Religion Tagged: 16 Favorites of 2016 The American Dream didn’t just promote home ownership. It also promoted large families... The ideal, for some, was The Holy Family of the Bible. |
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Fidel Castro Is Dead, November 28th, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump If our president-elect has his way, despotism will return to this country, but without any commitment to or understanding of equality. |
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Thanksgiving for the Kindness of Strangers, November 24th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Thanksgiving May it be this way for all of us, this blessed season: hearing new opinions, based on experience, that contradict a doctrine of faith. |
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Art in a Time of Danger, November 22nd, 2016 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: National Museum of Women in the Arts Million Women March Agnes Martin Ann Stewart Anderson I felt the absence of art, in any form, during the last, terrible week. |
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The Female of the Species, November 20th, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics, Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Hillary Clinton Donald Trump Million Women March 16 Favorites of 2016 No connection erases the primal fear that is a constant in our culture: the fear of the power of women. |
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How to Celebrate, November 16th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe The Blue Box Canyon de Chelly Earthwalks What a party it was! |
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Notes for a First Lady, November 13th, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump Certainly they will send you advisors from the campaign, but you might be more comfortable with a few homey tips from well-meaning strangers. So here goes. |
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How to Raise a Boy President, November 10th, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Donald Trump We have elected a boy to be our president and we are going to have to help him to grow. |
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I Didn’t Believe It, November 6th, 2016 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville 16 Favorites of 2016 My hometown city of Louisville, Kentucky is blooming as it never has before. |
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Over the Hills and a Great Way Off, October 25th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe my garden In the midst of the confusion and chaos of this presidential race, I’m comforted by my daily walk to the pond. |
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Tony’s Stairs, October 23rd, 2016 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Doris Duke Mabel Dodge Luhan Hillary Clinton Mabel Dodge Luhan House Little Free Library In Mabel's case, as in the case of so many women, it’s the myths rather than the facts that are remembered. |
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Standing with Standing Rock – Update, October 19th, 2016 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Standing Rock An auction to benefit the tribes gathered at Standing Rock may not have raised a lot of cash, but it did help us in the audience to have a clearer sense of what is happening. |
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Standing with Standing Rock, October 16th, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Margaret Erskine Standing Rock 16 Favorites of 2016 At issue is the question of whether Native American sovereignty has ever really been recognized or accepted by the powers that be. |
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You Come Too, October 13th, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan I'm asking you, my able and loyal readers, to “come too” as I head into yet another revision of my biography on Doris Duke. Originally set to be published in 2016, it is now delayed until October, 2018. |
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Too Much, October 11th, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Hillary Clinton Donald Trump 16 Favorites of 2016 I’ve avoided writing about what is going on in our presidential election, not wanting to focus more attention on this ignoble display. But Sunday night was too much. |
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A Walker in the City, October 9th, 2016 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: New York City My visual recordings of New York City are written in words, not images, as part of my new venture which is called, “You Travel, You Write.” |
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An Independent Will, October 6th, 2016 Categories: Writing, Art Tagged: The Silver Swan Charlotte Brontë Charlotte Brontë described the alienation that colored my childhood, and the childhood of so many girls, then and now. |
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Dirt, October 2nd, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Donald Trump Sarah Blakeslee We all need to get dirty more often, for our health and possibly for our souls, which may need to root in something more substantial, and messier, than words. |
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At Last, September 27th, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Hillary Clinton Donald Trump We are debaters; we are leaders; we are women who have learned a lot of the lessons of the past... we now know how to defend ourselves, both literally and legally. |
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Parting the Red Sea, September 27th, 2016 Categories: Politics, New Mexico, Art Tagged: William Faulkner Donald Trump I expect Moses will be with me for a long time, urging me on toward improbable destinations with his wide-flung arms. |
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Divine Insecurity, September 18th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: The Silver Swan Apache Mesa Black Pip Pip and I were on to adventure, on the edge of danger, full of life and energy—the way I want to live. |
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The Beauty Way, September 14th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: Canyon de Chelly Earthwalks 16 Favorites of 2016 Since I first moved to Santa Fe twenty-five years ago, I've longed to gain an authentic and appropriate understanding of the people among whom we live and who were here long before us, and will remain. |
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Resisting the Annunciation, September 8th, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics, Religion Tagged: Mary abortion Donald Trump Domenico Veneziano Virgin Mary As we head, again, into the season of attacks on reproductive rights... I wonder how many of them stem, unconsciously, from the familiar version of the Annunciation. |
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Renewed, September 1st, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Hiking Perhaps even the natural cycles we have abused to such a great degree have an innate strength and will to survive not only human depredations but the disorders of our disordered climate. |
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As I Am Now So Will You Be, August 30th, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: Ernest Hemingway Nantucket Lucretia Mott Maria Mitchell Herman Melville Frederick Douglass Grace Hall-Hemingway Like Ernest Hemingway’s mother, gifted women are all around us in Nantucket. |
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Growing Pains, August 28th, 2016 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Sir Walter Raleigh Nantucket Anne Morrow Lindbergh Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s shells are long gone but the lessons she draws from them are as fresh as the sunrise this morning. |
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Aboard the Arabella: Last Day, August 17, August 26th, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: Martha's Vineyard Title 9 I find waves of sentiment washing across my mood; this experience, with this boat and this crew, won’t be repeated. And it is precious. |
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Aboard the Arabella: Tied up to a Buoy off Martha’s Vineyard, August 16, August 25th, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: Wordsworth Oscar Wilde William Maxwell Martha's Vineyard All our plans changed, again, when a very stiff wind made it impractical to motor to Nantucket. |
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Aboard the Arabella: Setting Sail, August 15, August 23rd, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: Five or six hours of rolling on the Arabella laid several passengers low, knocked out by nausea and Dramamine on the boat’s benches, covered with blankets, solicitous husbands bringing wet washrags to put across their foreheads. |
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Aboard the Arabella: Newport Harbor, August 15, August 21st, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: Young and curly-headed, Captain Mike seems to have some of the fishy nature (so-called) of the captains who manned the whaling ships out of Nantucket in the last century. |
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Every Three Seconds, August 16th, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: friends Virginia Woolf Cape Cod I don’t know if any woman is allowed to have two best friends—there may be a rule prohibiting it written in the stars—but I will boldly claim my two. |
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Endangered, August 14th, 2016 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: The New York Times The New York Review of Books Cape Cod Joy Williams I’m wondering if, as I have suspected, we women writers are endangered...in a novel way. |
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Small Is…, August 11th, 2016 Categories: My Family, Travel Tagged: Virginia Woolf Cape Cod The little house is the cocoon for my escape, as smallness is and has been for so many others. |
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Mule Day in Santa Fe, August 9th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Apache Mesa I’ve always been fascinated by mules, perhaps because Kentucky and Tennessee were said to breed the best mules in the country because they were part thoroughbred. |
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Hillary, and Torrential Rain, August 7th, 2016 Categories: My Family, Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Hillary Clinton Torrential rains are pouring across our political landscape these days, and sometimes seem about to erode all vision. |
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Touch, August 2nd, 2016 Categories: New Mexico, Religion Tagged: Virginia Woolf It has always been clear to me that words, on which I’ve built my creative life, can’t heal. They can illuminate and inspire... but those same words would be powerless to heal in the face of tragedy. |
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My Wild – Number 2: July, July 26th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Apache Mesa What is priceless about the enclave on Apache Mesa is that it is not only us newcomers who have found little pockets of paradise there; the people who have lived there for decades are still in place. |
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Mabel’s House, July 22nd, 2016 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan Taos Harwood Museum of Art Mabel Dodge Luhan House It seems we are still confined, in our appreciation of women, to admiring our roles as facilitators of other people’s lives. |
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It’s Over Folks!, July 19th, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: 16 Favorites of 2016 The “angry white men” we hear so much about have every reason to be angry. Their reign, centuries long, is over. |
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And Sparklers, Too!, July 14th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Since I have plenty of reservations about July 4th... it seemed wise to give a party to celebrate. |
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What Happened to Austin Brown?, July 7th, 2016 Categories: My Family Tagged: Mary Caperton Bingham Austin Brown Why is it interesting or worthwhile to continue to wonder about the fate of my first cousin? |
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Girls of Summer, July 3rd, 2016 Categories: Women, Travel Tagged: Doris Duke California If she can move like this playing paddle ball, surely she can act with equal skill, grace, and assurance in a board room, a corporate office, or an artist’s studio. |
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My Writing Group: The Little Engine That Could, July 1st, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing Taos 16 Favorites of 2016 For any of you who think, or have thought, about starting a writing group, here is a model that works. |
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The Little House on the Prairie, June 28th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Apache Mesa Laura Ingalls Wilder At last I’ve found a house that fits me perfectly. I call it (with a bow to Laura Ingalls Wilder) The Little House on the Prairie. |
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You May Find Showering Easier While Seated, June 19th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: Southwest Chief Amtrak 16 Favorites of 2016 We are an odd bunch, we people who ride the cross country trains. |
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Radical Feminists, Angry Indians and Illegal Mexicans, June 17th, 2016 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico John D. Rockefeller Henry Flagler These days we are hearing language that is the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded movie theater, language that whether the speaker is aware of it or not, incites to violence. |
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Cache, June 16th, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Santa Fe There is still goodness in this world, and often it seems to be the goodness of strangers, as Blanche DuBois proclaimed at the end of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” |
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Mother’s Sons, June 14th, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Part of our deep emotional and spiritual connection to the babies we bore means that we sense, wordlessly, their injury and violation. |
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Behind the Dumpster, June 12th, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: 16 Favorites of 2016 We have spent several decades trying to undo the pernicious syndrome that blamed the victim for these attacks... but our attempts falter when common sense is thrown to the wind. |
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Champs, June 5th, 2016 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Iona Expertise is always thrilling... the crucial ingredients are the same: talent, persistence. And heart. |
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I’ll Sing One Song, June 2nd, 2016 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Willie Snow Etheridge Courier-Journal I didn’t know many men who had fun. I didn’t know any women. It seemed scandalous to me that Willie Snow could enjoy herself. |
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Commemorating What?, May 30th, 2016 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Memorial Day Louisville The Silver Swan Memorial Day, commenced in 1866 as Decoration Day, was at first specifically meant to honor the Confederate dead; when it became a national holiday in 1921, it was renamed to honor the dead in all our wars, another effort to erase differences and commodify mourning. |
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Wolf Pen at Twilight, May 29th, 2016 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Kentucky Foundation for Women Hopscotch House A community limited to those who look like us will never be a community, which can only be formed through an amalgamation of differences and the necessary level of trust. |
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Chaco, May 24th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: New Mexico Chaco Canyon I loved the baldness of my visit last weekend to Chaco: sleeping on the ground, during two nights in May when the temperature dropped into the thirties, was an ordeal of amazing benefits. |
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Spring, Not Trump, May 22nd, 2016 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: River Fields Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm BioLet I dig a hole and add my load, closing it over with a prayer, as well as more dirt: that I, too, my be more happy, considering my extraordinary good luck in just about all areas of my life: work, love, family, friends, health… |
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Digging in the Dirt, May 17th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: gardening Tesuque Pueblo Earthwalks Emigdio introduced us to the day by reminding us of what we may hear often but seldom observe: the sacred and essential nature of Mother Earth, and the need to play, not work, at restoring her native plants to her while loving her with all our hearts. |
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My Wild, May 15th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Erica Jong Rosemary Daniell Apache Mesa SARK We must find a way—we women who must claim our wild. |
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Sugar Nymphs, May 13th, 2016 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Sugar Nymphs The New York Review of Books The bistro is always full with what I’ve come to call Refugee Tourists: men and women of a certain age who look to be fleeing from highways, motels, retirement homes, fast food, and who knows, maybe even from Donald Trump. |
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Saved, May 10th, 2016 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Has this box come to me as a necessary interruption, a reminder, as a Zen teacher said, that our plans are never as tasty as reality? |
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Finding Readers in Other Countries, May 3rd, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: If I have been able to touch one of them with stories that mean so much to me, I will feel my long years of work as a writer are worthwhile. |
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Greatauthoritis, May 1st, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: John Edwards Williams Karl Ove Knausgaard A novel about the struggles the individual always faces in an engaged life... and a novel based on a lived life but moving beyond autobiography into art. |
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What It Takes to Be a Writer, April 28th, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan Taos Bonnie Lee Black Abandon professionalism. Hard work, always, is essential, but the notion that there is such a thing as “success”—a large audience, critical acclaim, and money—is, for nearly all of us, a delusion. |
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The Rogue Factor, April 26th, 2016 Categories: Women, Kentucky Tagged: Jonathan Swift Fort Harrod Moira Weigel Margaret Erskine Elizabeth Cady Stanton A week ago, I had the distinct honor and privilege of speaking to 300 students and faculty at Morehead State University in the far eastern corner of Kentucky. The experience will stay with me for a long while. |
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Wild West Women, April 12th, 2016 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe women writers Mary Wheelwright D.H. Lawrence Pam Houston John Edwards Williams The ur-stories of the West are still ours to tell, not the stories of whores or missionaries, but of buffalo-killers who gut and skin their prey. |
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Genius, April 7th, 2016 Categories: Art Tagged: dancing David Saliamonas Music There are so many obligations, so many treats and distractions, that I have failed—until now—to change my life to accommodate the books I still want and need to write. |
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Egg Day, March 29th, 2016 Categories: Religion Tagged: friends Easter Ash Wednesday This past Lent I thought I made an agreement with myself to enter into all the ceremonies of that six-weeks season of suffering... and then to reward myself with the glorious resurrection of Easter. |
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New Car, March 27th, 2016 Categories: Travel Tagged: The Wind In The Willows children's stories Over the weeks, my anger grew at the thought that such an inconvenience—a turn signal that wouldn’t stop—was somehow considered an improvement. |
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Mister Jackson, March 24th, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: children's stories Is there any reason to hope that we humans can also “abandon our usual strategies and learn something new and unexpected?” |
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Black Pip In Springtime, March 20th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Our spring comes with a roar of wind and startling blasts of cold air, but it is spring, nonetheless, and Pip and I rejoice. |
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How to Write, March 18th, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing writing workshops As my biography of Doris Duke continues to simmer in the editing vats at Farrar, Straus, I must for my salvation begin to write—again. |
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The Queen, March 13th, 2016 Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art, Religion Tagged: abortion Chartres Cathedral Virgin Mary Women have always thronged to churches, finding solace in this image of holy suffering. Is it possible that someday we will throng to the images of the Queen? |
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Witch Hunt, March 10th, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: abortion Planned Parenthood 16 Favorites of 2016 Even in writing this piece, I am affected by the anxiety that grips all of us who write about contentious matters. |
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Don’t Be Afraid of the F-Word, March 6th, 2016 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: flamenco feminism Museum of International Folk Art If so many of us feel we don’t belong... it is not surprising that we are terrified of exhibiting the political will that might conjure up images of rageful, extreme and radical women. |
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Bitch, March 1st, 2016 Categories: Women Tagged: Bitch magazine These once-forbidden words are now as meaningless for most people as the words used to describe a rainy day: grey, overcast, chilly… by what magic has the violence been drained out of them? |
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Spring Is like a Perhaps Hand in the Window, February 28th, 2016 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: e e cummings Bonnie Jo Campbell Healing, for me, comes in the spectacle of nature shifting into another key... and, always, in books. |
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The Great I Am, February 25th, 2016 Categories: Art Tagged: Music There remains for me always an uneasiness about those large egos that can so easily trample smaller ones, even when the owner of the ego does not choose to exercise that power. |
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Mr. Trump, February 21st, 2016 Categories: Politics Tagged: Hillary Clinton Donald Trump We need to be alert, this strange campaign season, to the way language is being distorted, subtly, to convey certain points of view. |
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When We Fight We Win, February 16th, 2016 Categories: Politics, New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe Navajo Claude Monet The presence, the faces, and the words of the Navajo were themselves living images, engraving on my mind the urgency of a cause I've known about for years but never felt personally. |
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Astride: Women, Girls, Horses—and Wolves, February 14th, 2016 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Horses Sallie Montague Lefroy Wilderness can be healing. So, too, can the company of horses... they give a woman perched bareback sustenance, reassurance, even love. |
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Valentines and Red Velvet Boots, February 12th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: dancing So where will I wear my red velvet boots? Certainly on Saturday night to my beloved dance studio here... |
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Horrors, February 10th, 2016 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: Hillary Clinton Bernie Sanders 16 Favorites of 2016 It is not too late for us women to wake up and realize what a woman president could do for all of us. |
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Sleeping in the Middle of the Bed, February 9th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe single blessedness “Single blessedness,” this state was called a hundred years ago, and enjoying it means rejoicing in my own skin. |
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Groundhog Day, February 7th, 2016 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: Lucy Cummings Groundhog Day I don’t adore the day because of the early arrival of spring but because it is the birthday of Lucy Cummings, the blessed woman who raised me from birth to age thirteen. |
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The Return of the Prodigal, February 2nd, 2016 Categories: Religion Tagged: The return of the prodigal recreates my faith in returns, generally—that the lost are never truly lost, or at least rarely. |
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Spring, and the Gift of a Teacher, January 31st, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe Ezra Pound Natalie Goldberg Mary McCarthy T.S. Eliot What a long way we have come, all of us who have been writing now for decades, published and unpublished, read and unread. |
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Lunch with Teri / Dinner with Alice / Weekends with Sarah, January 28th, 2016 Categories: Women Tagged: Sarabande Books friends Macdowell Colony These are the women I know I can call on in times of need...who will understand what I want, oversee my progress toward some form of wisdom with courage, humor and compassion—and, above all, tell me the truth. |
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The Old House on the Acequia Madre Finds Its New Mission, January 21st, 2016 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Acequia Madre Women's International Study Center Let the women of the Acequia Madre House serve as our examples. They led comfortable lives, but their privilege did not prevent them from extending hope and help to those in need. |
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Upcoming Workshop: “When Words Really Matter”, January 19th, 2016 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe writing workshops For words really to matter, they must illuminate a larger reality than the inevitably small perimeters of our daily lives. |
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Skiing, Again, January 17th, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe This winter we have the best snow in the West outside of Wolf Creek in southern Colorado which benefits from its high pass. We also have the nicest people, the warmest sun, the stiffest winds, and the most amazing views over the Rio Grande Valley, all the way up to the Colorado border. |
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Sitting, January 14th, 2016 Categories: Religion Tagged: Santa Fe Natalie Goldberg For a restless woman, sitting is always a challenge... yet I believe the ten minutes I sit every morning literally save my life. |
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Thirty Years Ago…, January 10th, 2016 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: Courier-Journal Barry Bingham Sr. Barry Bingham Jr. 16 Favorites of 2016 Those of us who are still alive must try to thrive outside of the tight circuit of the myth, which might be summed up in the Biblical phrase, “How are the mighty fallen!” |
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Snow, January 10th, 2016 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Roxanne Swentzell Conrad Aiken James Joyce Emily Dickenson John Keats I think we women writers sometimes scant the snow, and the weather in general, in favor of the human characters that obsess us. |
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New Year’s Day, January 3rd, 2016 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Doris Duke Mabel Dodge Luhan Taos New Year's I am wishing all of you, friends, acquaintances and strangers, who are kind enough to read these thoughts, the most beneficial, peaceful and fruitful new year—a cold winter with lots of snow, a spring full of bloom. |
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Christmas Eve: My Mother’s 111th Birthday, December 24th, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: Christmas Mary Caperton Bingham I understand her decision although it causes me a spasm of regret, as all the dreams abandoned by women do: the great heap of the unrealistic and the unrealizable that lies alongside nearly every woman’s life. |
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A Memore of Christmas Past, December 22nd, 2015 Categories: My Family, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Christmas Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol Nostalgia is not my strong suit. Most family rituals, in my experience, long outlive their usefulness... Fortunately, there are exceptions. |
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Peggy Guggenheim: Life as Art, Art as Life, December 17th, 2015 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Doris Duke Peggy Guggenheim All those big artist's names, and never a woman’s, although she did have a show in the gallery she owned earlier, first in London and then in New York, of thirty-one women artists. |
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Closing in on Doris Duke, December 10th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Joey Castro Music What a hegira this has been, from the first day I called for a box of research materials at the Duke University Library to the pile of manuscript pages lying beside my computer. |
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Colorado Springs: Black Friday, November 28th, 2015 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: abortion Planned Parenthood When deranged individuals receive permission for their deranged acts from irresponsible political groups and irresponsible demagogues, why are we unable or unwilling to make the connection? |
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Thanksgiving for Friends, November 24th, 2015 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: friends Thanksgiving All of us who live alone although close to family and at times sharing seasonal celebrations know that we have a core of friends who are not just an alternative to relatives. They may know us better and even love us more! |
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Doris Duke in Pictures and the Deconstruction of the Past, November 19th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Tex McCrary George Patton My chapters about Doris’ war-time service are some of the most revealing, and most controversial, in my upcoming biography. |
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A Day of National Humiliation, November 15th, 2015 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Abraham Lincoln Perhaps a national day of humility might disembarrass us of some of the pernicious would-be leaders we are now threatened with anointing to the position once held by Abraham Lincoln. |
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When Words Really Matter, November 12th, 2015 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Western Kentucky University I have never really understood the importance of words until I taught ten undergraduates at Western Kentucky University four days ago. |
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Them, November 10th, 2015 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: As football teams at all our universities, which are the major force in alumni giving, realize their power, we will begin to see changes on campuses that previously seemed oblivious to the demands of student civil rights activists. |
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Pip Goes to Taos, November 1st, 2015 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: Mabel Dodge Luhan Bonnie Lee Black SOMOS Pip watches intently as though monitoring our progress through the sixty miles from overpopulated Santa Fe to the little mountain town of Taos. |
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Black Pip in the First Snowfall, October 25th, 2015 Categories: Women, Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip Susanna Moore David Gessner Marc Reisner Pam Houston The snowfall heralds real winter, even though our aspens are still golden, leading me to plan the season’s reading in the hope of more evenings spent quietly by the fire. |
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Wolf Pen Mill Grinds Again, October 22nd, 2015 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm After decades of neglect, the great wheel and all the internal parts have been repaired and replaced by our talented millwright, Ben Hassett, and last Sunday, October 18th, water was released from the millpond through the sluice and the great wheel, creaking and groaning, began to turn again. |
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The Mother of All Questions, October 15th, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: If our basic belief about the role of women is that we must have children—despite a world groaning under overpopulation—women will never be able to crawl out from under the definition to achieve what calls for single-minded devotion. |
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Black Pip in the Autumn Woods, October 11th, 2015 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Black Pip I call him “The ambassador for Pit Bulls” since he is so gentle, and even walkers who have a prejudice against his kind sometimes let him approach. |
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Doris Duke Takes Another Step, October 6th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan I wonder what Doris would think if she could sit at the breakfast table with my editor and me and talk about who the book’s readers will be. |
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Women Writing Women’s Lives, October 4th, 2015 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Women Writing Women's Lives To speak to my peers, who know exactly where I am coming from as a writer and a feminist, is such a rare and compelling treat. |
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Learning to Be Afraid, September 29th, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: Boston Review Right around me, signs sprout, against the backdrop of the beautiful mountains, signs that signal fear, possessiveness, and an almost obsessive need for protection. |
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Black Pip and Quan Yin, September 27th, 2015 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: my garden Black Pip It has taken me all these years to begin to spare myself from battling reality, to begin to admit that certain human beings whom I love cannot love me, and that the leash around my neck is made out of links forged every time I battle this fact. |
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Spurring Us Forward, September 24th, 2015 Categories: Women, Philanthropy Tagged: Santa Fe Stages Kentucky Foundation for Women feminism I believe there are young women, as well as older women and certainly some men, who are beginning to claim this noble, long-rooted word—feminism—that connects us to a heroic tradition as well as spurring us forward into the future. |
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Smiles, September 20th, 2015 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: gardening We grimace, we grin, but how often during daily life does anyone give, or receive a smile? |
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Irrepressible Crank, September 17th, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: Ellen Willis Bitch magazine Sometimes I think we are all too nice. |
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Hopscotch House, September 10th, 2015 Categories: Women, Philanthropy Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Thirty years ago, it was a big plain farmhouse on a high rise of pasture when I first saw what would become Hopscotch House. |
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Cleaning Out My Outhouse, September 6th, 2015 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Henrietta Bingham Amy Stewart Stephen Dunn Steve Inskeep addiction BioLet I enjoy my outhouse because it is in my view transgressive. I enjoy transgressions and I miss the energy of evil... the shaking of the roots of our assumptions... in most of the contemporary fiction I read and even in a lot of the fiction I write. |
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Wolf Pen Mill Farm: A Love Story, September 1st, 2015 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm We women are creators, and when we have the means, we are creators of historic proportions. |
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The Happy Miner, August 30th, 2015 Categories: My Family, Kentucky, Travel Tagged: Courier-Journal Frontier Nursing University Shirley Jackson mining Harry Caudill Ida Tarbell Upton Sinclair Harriette Arnow D.H. Lawrence When I worked as a courier for the Frontier Nursing Service, we were told to sing as we rode in the mountains so the moonshiners would know we were girls and hold their fire. |
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Dog Love, August 23rd, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: Black Pip He let me know he feels leashes are an indignity by chewing up two of them and making good progress on the third. |
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Tear ‘Em Down, Slats and All, August 20th, 2015 Categories: New Mexico, Kentucky Tagged: Santa Fe Pleasant Hill It was a revelation to me when I was lured back to Kentucky and saw the reverence people there felt for old houses—and how hard they would work to preserve them. |
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“As Writers We Never Know the Way We Impact Others…”, August 18th, 2015 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Joan Didion Lillian Hellman The world as we know it would grind to a halt if all the talented women—millions of us—insisted on their primacy and the primacy of the conditions they need in order to create. |
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Still Rattling Cages, August 16th, 2015 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: Guerrilla Girls Agnes Martin Harwood Museum of Art In the end, the cage the Guerrilla Girls are rattling are the cages that confine all of us, tighter and tighter as we devise more categories that define us narrowly and separate us more completely. |
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Broken Hearts and Puppy Dogs, August 11th, 2015 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Acequia Madre Mabel Dodge Luhan Black Pip Lois Rudnick Leslie Dillen Dillen ends with her arms raised high above her head, exhorting her audience, and particularly the women in her audience, to be shining stars, rising to shed our light on the parched and desolate landscape that surrounds us. |
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You Are Not Alone, August 4th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing Isak Dinesen Dani Shapiro Shirley Jackson Whether in total isolation or in the compromised solitude most of us suffer, writers create characters whom our readers recognize, care about, and remember; this is the strand that connects us all. |
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Doris Duke Moves into the Limelight, July 30th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke The Silver Swan dancing I am now reading, and occasionally wrestling with, what might be call the collision—or the creative cooperation—of two minds, essentially different: the mind of the writer and the mind of the editor. |
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Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, July 26th, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: I think my wild bunny wildness—which clearly is not very wild at all, and is vulnerable to all sorts of harm, outside her cage—does represent something so important for women: the attempt, at least, to imagine freedom. |
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Mother’s Meatloaf Starter, July 19th, 2015 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Cochiti Pueblo I’ve been to a lot of pueblo ceremonials over the years, and this one was as impressive as all of them: huge crowds of dancers, including small children, the women in black mantas, wooden tablitas shaped like mountain tops, or clouds, the men bare chested, painted, with shell bandoliers across their chests, and kilts with swaying fox or coyote tails down the back. |
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Where Are We Now? Women in 2015 and a Half…, July 14th, 2015 Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art Tagged: International Folk Art Market Monroe Gallery I have daughters-in-law, granddaughters and many friends who see no use in the women’s movement; this is partly due to privilege, lack of information, and our discomfort with ideas that are presented as being controversial. |
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Sweet Honey In The Rock: The Other Side of Victimization, July 7th, 2015 Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe Lexington Ferguson Monroe Gallery Music These women were so large... so encompassing in their warmth and passion, even for their audience of white women, that I was stunned—this is the way we can all go, I thought, if we have the courage, we who are all hurt to some greater or lesser degree by the cruelties and injustices of this society. |
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Black Pip Comes Home, July 5th, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: Black Pip He’s proving to be a great trail dog, too. Meeting something about his size but old and timid this morning, he greeted her politely; her owner congratulated me on adopting a black male pit bull. |
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Black Pip, July 2nd, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: Santa Fe Animal Shelter Charleston Black Pip I have never understood prejudice although I grew up encased in its most virulent form, in the pre-integration south. Hatefulness always seems to me put on, curiously beside the point, as though an evil wind passed through and deposited nasty expressions and ugly words randomly as it passed. |
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The Gospel According to Nance, June 30th, 2015 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe marriage Nance, and her garden in the barren border of the trailhead parking lot, is another uplifting example of our ability to both create, and to hold on, to see possibilities in the sand... |
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A Vindication…, June 18th, 2015 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Mary Wollstonecraft Percy Shelley Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument is familiar, these days, and unheeded; we are still nursing, helping, filling in as we have been trained to do, sometimes paid, often not, and I reflect with discouragement that if we have not been formed genetically to perform these roles, centuries of training have stored these expectations in our bones. |
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Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham: The Truth Will Out, June 2nd, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: Lizzie Baker Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham Henrietta Bingham Robert Bingham 16 Favorites of 2016 Mother is long dead, and so the revelation of the second autopsy, in this book, has meaning only for me. But it has a great deal of meaning, reminding me, forcibly, to rely on my intuition, not matter what the cost. |
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The Manless World: Show Jumping, May 28th, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: Sallie Montague Lefroy Somewhere along the way, women took over this sport, although there are still men at the highest levels. |
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The Bingham Estate: The Big House Reborn, May 24th, 2015 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: Lizzie Baker Cecil Beaton Passion and Prejudice Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham As William Faulkner wrote in “Requiem For A Nun”, “The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.” But perhaps the past can, with will, imagination and love, be at least partly transformed. |
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Sometimes It Takes a While…, May 21st, 2015 Categories: Women, Theater Tagged: Joan Vail Thorne Julie Crosby Lisa McNulty Gayle Austen Wynn Handman The number of produced plays written by women (although not necessarily directed by women) has inched up; we are still far from being represented as we should be on the stage but our efforts, over time, are bearing fruit. |
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Pussy Riot and the Threat to Women in the U.S. Today, May 10th, 2015 Categories: Women, Politics Tagged: "Winter Term" Greer Garson Theatre Pussy Riot Grace Rebecca Mann Title 9 We are perhaps naïve if we believe that women in the U. S. are free of danger, especially young women who are expected to belong to young men. |
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Scandal, Rumor and Innuendo: Doris Duke and Popular Imagination, May 5th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Jimmy Cromwell Almost the only question people asked me about her is, “Did Doris Duke marry her butler?” No, she did not. But does that question really matter, in a long, complex and accomplished life? |
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A Passion for Houses, May 3rd, 2015 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Doris Duke This house has reigned on a leafy corner of a beautiful street, a few blocks from the Santa Fe Plaza, for 150 years, inhabited by a distinguished family. |
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Doris Duke and Me: Dancing, April 28th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Martha Graham Katherine Dunham dancing Music Doris Duke practiced with Martha Graham’s company in New York and proudly wore their black satin jacket with her name and the company’s name on the back. |
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Sitting Pretty: Doris Duke and Lizzie Baker, April 23rd, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: The Bingham Estate Lizzie Baker Cecil Beaton It is no surprise that Cecil Beaton, fashion photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920’s and 1930’s, portraitist of Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of Windsor, should have taken several shots of Doris Duke; but it is surprising that in 1953 when he visited my parents in Kentucky, photographed Lizzie Baker. |
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Glamour-Puss, April 14th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Rubenstein Library I sometimes think that love never touched her, although she knew many lovers. Always she seemed to be asking as she did of one of them, “Are you doing what you’re doing to please ME?” |
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Breeding, April 7th, 2015 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke abortion The variety is endless, but the end result is the same: enormous fledglings crowding the adult bird out of the messy nest. |
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My Apprenticeships, April 5th, 2015 Categories: Women, My Family, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Colette Apprenticeships of any kind—even that sort involved in learning to sew on a button—depend on a bitter and prolonged deprivation of pleasure, a narrow and deep focus that will never allow for what we call a balanced life. |
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Loving Dogs, March 31st, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: Dogs Doris Duke Rubenstein Library Joey Castro Duke Farms Today I find myself in complete sympathy with Doris Duke’s passion, even with the uncomfortable assumption that dogs are sometimes better companions than complicated, changeable humans. |
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Birth: The Kentucky Foundation for Women, March 17th, 2015 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Kentucky, Art Tagged: Kentucky Foundation for Women Women artists are always in danger of extinction; already low on the pay scale, often with too many children and no support, they can hardly be expected to devote their limited time and energy to becoming proficient professional poets, painters, sculptors… |
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Doris Duke In Love, March 10th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Erica Jong Bernard Lafferty Joey Castro Duke Ellington Clare Boothe Luce Jimmy Cromwell Music Was Doris Duke in love with, or—more cogently—did she love any of these men, or the six or seven others who took up portions of her life? Hard to say. |
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Doris Duke: Getting Dirty, March 5th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Free Range Kids Getting dirty as a child allowed Doris Duke to develop into the daring woman she became. I wonder how many eight year old girls today would be allowed to wander on the beach in a dirty shift, with mud up to their knees? |
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Doris Duke, Pop Music, and Me, February 24th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Music Doris, high-diving, surfing in Hawaii, battling the waves on a stormy day off Newport as she had ever since childhood, might have resisted pop music’s anthem of female submission. |
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Wolf Pen Farm: Not A Bingham Estate!, February 22nd, 2015 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Wolf Pen is the way many people in this country lived, when we were still agrarian and made do with much less, in the material sense, than we consider essential now. We lived in a few small rooms, we farmed, milled, carpentered, built, ran cattle or horses—managed to survive. |
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Waking Up Singing, February 15th, 2015 Categories: Religion Tagged: David Whyte The Bingham Estate Ash Wednesday Lent Afflicted with black humors these black, cold winter mornings, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to wake up singing. |
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The Best Present, February 5th, 2015 Categories: My Family Tagged: Charles Dickens George Barry Bingham Barry Bingham Sr. My father's appetite for what he was reading, and, doubtless, for the sound of his own mellifluous, slightly Southern voice, created in me the appetite for words that has provided the meaning of my life. |
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Vanderbilt and the Invisible Eve, February 1st, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: Vanderbilt University Invisible Eve Yousef Khanfar Is it true that our culture, in general, supports this form of entitlement, as it supports or at least allows the depredations of the entitled, whether they are the super-rich, the socially connected, the politically powerful—or simply possessors of the marks of male virility: height, handsomeness, self-assurance, athletic ability? |
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Kafka and The Littlest Rebel, January 29th, 2015 Categories: Writing Tagged: friends Shirley Temple Franz Kafka Pantaloons and golden curls do not limit her temerity. It fascinates me to see that this long-forgotten children’s book seems in a strange way more modern than The Trial. |
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Best Friends, January 25th, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: friends What do we offer each other? Shared habits, shared likes and dislikes, an astonishing ability to chose the best possible presents for each other; and the frankness that never seems barbed by ulterior motives—to instruct, to reprove, to create distance. Frankness that is a bridge to closeness rather than a bulwark against it. |
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Rude Awakening, January 20th, 2015 Categories: Women, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Frontier Nursing University midwifery Appalachia Doris Ulmann John Jacob Niles I... felt the midwives, and Mrs. Breckinridge, were just as foreign to me, possessed of some vision, some energy I’d never encountered before. I felt very small and very ignorant among them. |
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Patricide, January 18th, 2015 Categories: Women Tagged: A world in which women, defined as mothers and wives and daughters—not inheritors—have no power and no role to play in the lives of their adult sons. |
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She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, January 13th, 2015 Categories: Women, Art Tagged: women's movement documentary feminism This is the documentary we have all been waiting for—for decades: a restoration through rediscovered news footage and interviews of that great time in the late sixties and early seventies when the contemporary women’s movement stormed the two coasts and took possession of our imaginations… |
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The Three Goddesses in One by Paz Winshtein, December 30th, 2014 Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art Tagged: Eye on the Mountain Art Gallery Paz Winshtein Virgin of Guadalupe Virgin Mary The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is especially prized here because of her Mexican antecedents, and yet, even though she represents a beleaguered minority, she must still be seen only in the terms set by the church, terms that have constricted the image, and confused women followers, for hundreds of years. |
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Christmas Is A-Coming…, December 23rd, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Christmas Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol The five of us children were persuaded, or if necessary, dragooned, into producing a truncated version of “A Christmas Carol” which I, as the writer in the family, was charged with shortening. |
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Gratitude, December 18th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Christmas holidays gratitude Although I loved presents, even hankered for them, the ones I received—mainly books—never mattered as much as the presents I gave, and for that I will always be grateful. |
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The Bingham Estate: My Wedding Dress Comes Home, November 27th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Melcombe Estate Bingham Estate How extraordinary it seems that this artifact has survived while marriages, wives, husband, aunts, uncles and parents have all withered and passed into oblivion. It seems to me as much a monument to the past as the Lincoln Memorial or the Eiffel Tower, also great erections that long outlasted their makers, their funders and generations of their viewers. |
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Bingham Estate: The Return of the Wedding Dress, November 16th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Melcombe Estate Bingham Estate How will I feel when I lift that dusty lid, and rustle through layers of tarnished tissue paper? |
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Doris Duke: First White Woman Surfer In Hawaii, November 11th, 2014 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Hawaii Sam Kahanamoku Nothing could prevent Doris from seizing that moment in the surf at Hawaii when she reared high in the air, arms thrown back and chin lifted, exulting in her power to do what she wanted. |
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The Bingham Estate: Its Marriages, October 30th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Melcombe Estate Bingham Estate Now, before too long, another generation of young women will need to decide whether they want to compete with the Big House on a day that we all need to believe is one of the most important of our lives. No proof to the contrary seems to matter. |
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The Bingham Estate: Leaving The Past Behind, October 23rd, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: The Blue Box Melcombe Estate Bingham Estate What she will do with that enormous house, which seems to me mired in the past, will surely be different from what my parents did with it in the 1940’s and 50’s, when its prime function was to serve as a weekend roost for drunken Derby guests, who terrified me with their antics. |
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Writers, French Women and French Bookstores, October 16th, 2014 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: The Blue Box Moby Dickens Lydie Salvayre We have an obligation to be fearless, never leaving out “the good parts,” those hidden parts of lives that are of most interest to all of us: it is in “the good parts” that the essence of a human life is often revealed. |
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Show Business, October 12th, 2014 Categories: Theater Tagged: Couvade theatre Every few years, for reasons no has explored, women playwrights find a less chilly reception than we have usually encountered in the theatre. Such a blissful period, in the eighties, ushered in my first plays, and now another blessed moment gives me a chance to submit one of those first plays to a short play festival in New York. |
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Women, Land and Missed Opportunities, October 8th, 2014 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Women in the United Sates now control 11.2 trillion dollars in investible wealth, 39 percent of the total. But are we wielding the decisions? |
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The Blue Box Debuts: First Public Reading!, September 9th, 2014 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Blue Box my garden The Touching Hand There are moments in life that are so precious, so sweet, that years later they still ring like a set of silver chimes. |
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Kicking Against The Pricks, September 4th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Helena Lefroy Caperton Sallie Montague Lefroy Mary Caperton Bingham My mother wisely warned me many times against “kicking against the pricks,” by which she meant the inevitable barriers we face in life, not the male appendage. She would have been horrified by that association. |
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My Mother’s Hat — The Blue Box, September 2nd, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: The Blue Box World War Two I have the historian’s skeptical view of the past and of the vestal virgins who attend it so assiduously. Their reverence seems to depend on a net of lies and denials. But when I touch the soft feathers of my mother’s hat, preserved for seventy years, I understand a little of what the other women in the family feel. |
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Hagiography: The Copied Pot, The Repeated Story, August 26th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: New Mexico Santa Fe Indian Market Navajo The Long Walk Fort Sumpter In choosing invention, I chose my own view, my own voice, as I chose the woven forms of the marble statue I bought at Indian Market from a young Navajo sculptor. |
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Ferguson On My Mind, August 22nd, 2014 Categories: Politics, Kentucky Tagged: Milk of Paradise William Faulkner Ferguson St. Louis It’s awkward, to say the least, for a privileged white woman like me to even attempt to touch the subject of racism; yet we are sometimes the women who knows its effects most intimately. Many of us were raised by a black woman and realized the limits put on their love for us when our mothers told them to stop kissing us and to add “Miss” to our first names. For me, that strange change marked my entrance into adolescence. |
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Bingham Estate, Louisville KY, August 19th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: The Blue Box Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Filson Historical Society Melcombe Estate Bingham Estate I don't usually call it the Bingham Estate but just the big house, which gives it the same moniker as SingSing; but when big news breaks, the big name seems appropriate. |
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Twin These Houses — The Blue Box, August 7th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Kentucky Eleanor Carrigglas Manor Tom Lefroy Jane Austen Melcombe Estate Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Franklin Roosevelt Both houses, uninhabitable due to size in both cases and dereliction in one, will continue as housing for myths, the myths that always throng around fortunes and obscure most of the facts about the fortune-makers lives. |
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Digging Up The Bones 2 — The Blue Box, August 5th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Richmond Virginia Mary Clifford Caperton Mary Caperton Bingham Warren Buckler George Barry Bingham This morning I found a faded copy of a newspaper photo, certainly from the old Society Page of a Richmond Virginia daily, showing a group of three young people, two men and a woman, marching down Monument Avenue in that city, the broad magisterial artery where the greats of the Confederacy are memorialized in huge marble statues. |
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On The Blue Box, August 3rd, 2014 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books Helena Lefroy Caperton Sallie Montague Lefroy Mary Clifford Caperton Mary Caperton Bingham The Blue Box does not share the soft glow that softens the details of so many family histories; its light approaches a glare. |
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Digging Up The Bones – The Blue Box, July 31st, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky Tagged: The Blue Box Duke University Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Sallie Montague Lefroy Richmond Women's Club Sarah Gorham Filson Historical Society As I prepare for publication next month, I face the daunting task of listing all the material I’ve used in The Blue Box, many letters, speeches, bills of sale, wills and genealogies that were stored in the blue box itself. |
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The Women’s Project Theater: Good News At Last, July 29th, 2014 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Theater Tagged: The Women's Project The Women's Project Theater Lisa McNulty The Women's Project Lab Over time, the survival of the Women’s Project, the largest and oldest theatre in this country supporting the work of women, will depend on our ability as past and present and future supporters to believe in a restored vision. Good luck, Lisa! |
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Update on The Womens Project, July 27th, 2014 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Theater Tagged: The Women's Project The Women's Project Theater The petition protesting the termination of Julie Crosby as Artistic Director of the Women's Project gained the signatures of over seven hundred people. The signers included this country's most accomplished theatre artists, leaders, managers, and supporters. |
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The Croup Kettle, July 27th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Croup Croup Kettle Lucy Cummings Waking up sick reminded me of the way I learned to take care of myself from watching what my earliest mentor, Lucy Cummings, did when one of her five charges was taken ill. |
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Mother Mary — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters, July 22nd, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Boston Paris Richmond Virginia Mary Clifford Caperton Mary Caperton Bingham Having drawn all she could from that source, desperate to go to college, for which she would have to have a scholarship (none of the women in her family had ever dreamed of college), she “dropped out” in the most literal sense, leaving not only school but her mother’s crowded household to go as a sort of nonpaying border to an exceptionally gifted playwright and producer from New York, whose influence would be supreme. |
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Naming Names — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters, July 17th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Richmond Woman’s Club Sallie W. Montague Sallie Montague Lefroy I realized today...that I never heard anyone in my family or outside of it mention my material grandmother, Sallie Montague Lefroy. This seems particularly strange since it seems I was named for her—seems because no one ever mentioned that either, but since we are both called Sallie Montague, it seems likely that I was named for her—and I am the only one of five siblings given a name from my mother’s family rather than my father’s. |
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Helena’s Story — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters, July 15th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Helena Lefroy Caperton Macdowell Colony Ireland As I prepare to let go of the previous trove of letters that make up the body of my next book, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, and that detail the lives of my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, from 1850 to 1931, I realize that I am most fond of my grandmother, Helena Caperton Lefroy, or at least of her memory. |
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Judy Chicago, Again and Not Again, July 13th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe Judy Chicago New Mexico Museum of Art Donald Woodman Belen Brooklyn Museum of Art David Richard Gallery Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art One of the many things I’ve always admired about Judy Chicago is that she constantly reinvents herself. |
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Sallie’s Two Fans — The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters, July 11th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books Civil War Richmond Anne Hollander Now that my next book, my thirteenth or fourteenth—I’ve lost track—is only a month away from publication by Sarabande Books, I’m thinking of the three women whose lives my book attempts to encompass: my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother. |
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The Self-Realization Fellowship and Doris Duke, July 8th, 2014 Categories: Writing Tagged: Doris Duke James Duke Civil Rights Movement Falcon’s Lair James Buchanan Duke A Dangerous Personality Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Fellowship of Reconciliation Self-Realization Fellowship American Civil Liberties Union American Tobacco Company Yogananda Ghandi Theosophy If there is a chance, and I think there is one, that Doris was touched and perhaps even changed by her connection, whatever it may prove to have been, with the Self-Realization Fellowship, her miseries would have been if not reduced, placed in a realistic context, uniting her with her fellows. |
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Latest News from the Women’s Project, July 6th, 2014 Categories: Philanthropy, Theater Tagged: Julia Miles The Women's Project Theater Julie Crosby Ludlow Massacre John D. Rockefeller The Rockefeller Foundation Kentucky Foundation for Women Commitment to this kind of work, edgy, daunting, representing visions seldom seen on our stages, demands a commitment over the course of two generations that may be simply too hard to come by. |
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The WOW Factor, July 3rd, 2014 Categories: Writing Tagged: friends Bonnie Lee Black How to Cook a Crocodile M.F.K. Fisher Isak Dinesen Peace Corps I’ve always drawn a firm line between my writing and my cooking. Bonnie Lee Black has managed to meld them both. |
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The Women’s Project: Memory, Sadness and Celebration, June 30th, 2014 Categories: Philanthropy, Theater Tagged: Julia Miles The Women's Project Theater Paducah Marya Cohen Santa Fe Stages Martin Platt Greer Garson Theatre Treason Ezra Pound A Dangerous Personality Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Somewhere among us there is another inspired woman producer, another inspired women director, and surely more than one inspired woman playwright who will bring on the next transformation. |
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Goodbye to the Women’s Project, June 27th, 2014 Categories: Philanthropy, Theater Tagged: Julia Miles The Women's Project Theater Julie Crosby Howard Sherman Claire Booth Luce The Women I tended my resignation from the Advisory Board of the Women’s Project, as have most of its other members. |
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Doris Duke’s Death, June 26th, 2014 Categories: Writing Tagged: Hawaii Falcon’s Lair Bernard Lafferty Bernard and Doris Susan Sarandon Michael Fiennes Duke Endowment Duke University Chapel Washington Duke James Buchanan Duke I’m sometimes surprised that the death of the woman whose vivid, exciting and controversial life I’m recreating in her first serious biography should seem more interesting to more people than her life. |
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Just Walk, June 24th, 2014 Categories: Travel Tagged: Santa Fe yoga walking meditation As the level of anxiety rises around us, for reasons that are palpable and known to all, our efforts to retain even a modicum of calm become more urgent, and more difficult. |
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Harvest of Genius, June 19th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Santa Fe Judy Chicago New Mexico Museum of Art John Gaw Meem In The Shadow of the Handgun Donald Woodman Judaism Israel Belen Through the Flower Brooklyn Museum of Art The Dinner Party Powerplay Project The rage expressed by some of the female faces, tongues extended, foreheads contorted, is still unacceptable by many who may unconsciously expect or hope to be soothed or lulled by art. One of the notes left for the artist by a visitor expresses dismay at the rage and calls it “preachy” rather than the visceral scream we all know, even if it is a deeply submerged knowledge, as we make our way through a violent, sexist culture. |
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And The Good News Is…, June 15th, 2014 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Henry James Willa Cather Richmond Virginia Kirkus Reviews The Civil War Reconstruction Prohibition World War Two women's education suffrage emancipation Women Writing Women's Lives Morgan Library Carter Burden Tony Morrison Sylvia Plath Zora Neal Hurston J. D. Salinger Norman Mailer Edith Wharton The first review of my next book, “The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters”, is just in from the prestigious Kirkus Reviews from which many libraries order. |
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New Ventures, June 13th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico, Art Tagged: Sangre de Cristo Mountains Ellsworth Gallery Barry Ellsworth Metropolitan Museum Carlos Motta Apache Mesa Right now I am privileged to be at the birth of two new ventures: a gallery in Santa Fe, designed, stocked and overseen by my son Barry, and Apache Mesa Ranch, a wild mesa top and deep valley near Las Vegas, New Mexico. |
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Here Comes The Future, June 1st, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: The White Company The Woman's Comfort Book Jennifer Louden Pleasure Program Todas Santos Ivanhoe All of us who are actively engaged in life feel ambivalent about the generations that are rushing to take our place on this earth, even those that are made up of our most beloved relatives. |
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A Different Kind of Memorial Day, May 29th, 2014 Categories: Politics Tagged: Memorial Day Bangladesh Shirtwaist Fire Made in USA As a way to celebrate next Memorial Day, why not spend an hour asking at your favorite store whether they carry anything made in the U.S.A.? |
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Coming Soon: The Blue Box, Three Lives in Letters, May 27th, 2014 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books The Silver Swan Richmond Virginia Farrar Straus and Giroux The long waits publishing entrails always make me wonder why writers sometimes refer to their new books as their children; surely no pregnancy lasts two years or more, and few professional writers wait to see their next book launched before laboring mightily to begin the next one. |
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A Terrible Admission, May 23rd, 2014 Categories: Theater Tagged: Harvard Stephen Sondheim Arthur Kopit Music I must make a terrible admission: I believe Stephen Sondheim is the most talented composer of this century or any other. Yes—not Bach, Mozart or any of the other so-called on greats we are called on to worship from grade school on, but dear, beautiful, ironic, soulful Sondheim. |
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Just A Girl From Kentucky, May 20th, 2014 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Jill Abramson The New York Times Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Jena Marie Cooper University of Nebraska Courier-Journal There is a thread connecting Jill Abramson to the girl buried in my woods: both confident, outspoken, strong women, they faced an opposition they perhaps could not have imagined because it is almost never mentioned: the opposition of the male establishment, in the person of a famous publisher or in the person of a nameless drunk, who made them examples of the price we must still be prepared to pay. |
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Moving Around…, May 15th, 2014 Categories: Travel Tagged: Louisville Southwest Chief Dallas-Fort Worth Barnes & Noble Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm I find it easier to take the temperature of the world (or my version of the world) when I’m moving around than when I’m at home, which at this point means moving through the air. |
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The Blessing Of Rain, May 13th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe A brief dash of rain last Thursday, hardly more than a few drops, reminds me of how badly we need the moisture here in the southwest, described by some as being likely the most hard-hit by climate change. |
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Old Love, May 7th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Horses Now and then, due to luck or grace or the peculiar workings of that agency those of us who have any sense call A Higher Power (drawing the line at The, though), people come back into my life, vastly changed but still recognizable, at least after a while, as newer versions—reincarnations—of people I lost or sloughed off years ago. |
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And Now It’s Running!, May 4th, 2014 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Benjamin Hassett River Fields Eva Lee Smith Cooper L&N Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm The Wolf Pen Mill millstone is turning for the first time in three decades! |
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My Garden In Drought, April 26th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: drought my garden This spring, for the first time in my twenty-three years in Santa Fe, I will not be planting a flower garden. |
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He Is Risen, April 20th, 2014 Categories: Religion Tagged: Christmas Easter I would always find, outside my bedroom door, a basket with a child-sized rake, shovel, hoe and trowel as well as five or six bright colored packets of seeds: squash, tomatoes, radishes, lettuce. Mother was a passionate gardener and hoped that her five children would develop her love for getting her hands in the dirt. |
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The High Cost of High Fashion, April 17th, 2014 Categories: Politics Tagged: Bangladesh Rana Plaza Civil Rights Movement Rich's Department Store We are not powerless. One of the great moments in the history of The Civil Rights Movement―April 11th, 1970―occurred when African-Americans in Atlanta boycotted Rich’s Department Store where traditionally they spent a lot of money buying Easter suits and hats. |
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Thank You, Roald Dahl, April 15th, 2014 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: Charles Dickens Matilda Great Expectations Pickwick Papers Bleak House Thank God for Roald Dahl. Thank God for parents who read aloud to their children. In spite of all the signs to the contrary, we may not have lost books and readers—or the writers that grow out of this blessed combination. |
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My Privy, April 13th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe my garden BioLet Yes, indeed, I have a privy. |
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Dancing, Again, April 10th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: La Fonda Bill Hearne Lawrence Black dancing I will dance—we will dance—as long as we have feet and legs under us, and that is all that matters. |
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What The West Wind Blows…, April 3rd, 2014 Categories: Art Tagged: North Carolina Winston-Salem North Carolina School of the Arts Two of my sons have been or are in the independent film business where I thought it only grew - New York and Los Angeles. The cost there is prohibitive and finding money is nearly impossible; the star system makes casting a low budget film impossible. But here, in this small southern town and doubtless in small and larger towns all over the country, creativity reigns. |
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A Tale of Two Pincushins, April 1st, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Curtie County Down Eleanor Miller Helena Lefroy Caperton Jeffrey Arthur Lefroy Curtie would never have imagined that her handiwork, perhaps not appropriately valued during her life time, could inspire such awe and pleasure in a group that knows their textiles and their important role in interpreting our history. |
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After Twenty-Five Years: Reflecting on the Origins of the Sallie Bingham Archive for Women’s Papers, March 27th, 2014 Categories: Women, Philanthropy Tagged: Duke University Mary Oliver Civil War The American Voice Anne Firor Scott The Southern Lady Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture Jean o"barr Bob Byrd It is not only the personal that our papers record but the way the personal becomes political, even for women who may never recognize the connection. |
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Going Home, March 25th, 2014 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: The New York Times Louisville David Brooks Sting TED How do we teach girls the daring they need to leave home? Perhaps it depends on dismissing some of the sentimental clouds that obscure the reality of home, and remembering that Sting’s north of England was a place of grime and hard work. But he clearly was born with the need and the drive to get out. Is this something that comes naturally, without encouragement, to boys? What are our girls missing? |
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Sweet Tarts For My Sweethearts, March 23rd, 2014 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: New York City Taos Society of the Muse of the Southwest Bonnie Lee Black Paris Tarte Tatin It has been difficult, all these years, for me to say, “My teacher,” to accept with gratitude and a degree of humility that I have more to learn, and that when I’m ready to learn, the teacher will appear. Now it has happened. |
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That Old Baby of Mine…, March 18th, 2014 Categories: Women, Writing, Theater Tagged: Milk of Paradise The American Place Theatre Julia Miles Joan Vail Thorne The Women's Project The Women's Project Theater Julie Crosby We were fearless back then, as we have continued to be—the three of us founders and the hundreds of more recent supporters—fired by knowing that women playwrights represented only something like 17 percent of the playwrights produced in New York, on and off-Broadway. |
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Staying at The H Club, March 13th, 2014 Categories: Travel Tagged: New York City Harvard Club H Club Saml Farrar So the place breathes—if it breathes at all—an air of masculinity and propriety that seems to have disappeared but of course has not really. When I go into the dining room to eat, I am nearly always asked, “Are you meeting your husband?” (“No, I’m meeting myself”) or “Just one?” (“Isn’t one enough?”). |
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Distinction, March 11th, 2014 Categories: Politics, New Mexico, Travel Tagged: Santa Fe 9/11 It doesn’t matter where the airports are in the U.S.-other countries are different-or how large or how small because since nine eleven (I spell it out to make its strangeness visible), we are all under the rule of fear. |
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More About Auntie Mame, March 6th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: New York City Samuel Richardson Clarissa Boston Maine Now, all these years later, I wonder if the fact that these boys were all scions of well-known families contributed to their noteworthy mildness. Was there then—certainly not now—an emphasis on right behavior and staying out of trouble that actually corralled their adolescent male desire? |
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Lullaby of Broadway, March 4th, 2014 Categories: Travel Tagged: Louisville Sleepless Nights Elizabeth Hardwick Robert Lowell Harvard Club New York is no longer my city of dreams, and has not been for many years, but it will be fascinating as the plane descends through dense layers of fog to remember that girl who thought that New York, alone, could supply her with the satisfaction of her desires. |
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Iona and Sallie; Sallie and Munda: Granddaughters and Grandmothers, March 2nd, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Louisville Iona Munda Yesterday my granddaughter Iona Ellsworth invited me to tea and we chatted for a while with the particular warm intimacy and understanding that seems to exist, often, between grandmothers and their blessed grandchildren—blessed by our love as well as by their many gifts. |
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Cell Phones and All That, February 27th, 2014 Categories: Writing, Art Tagged: Jitterbug community Community in the end is not what it’s all about—at least for artists. What we see, hear and smell is the core of our work, and the core of our survival. |
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Fighting Inertia, February 25th, 2014 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: WIPP Carlsbad Caverns self-publishing Authors Guild I’m fighting a sense of angry uselessness brought on by a couple of recent setbacks, both here and in the nation at large. |
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Dog Day – And Night, February 23rd, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Dogs British Staffordshire Bull Terrier Rose My dear little dog Rose, a British Staffordshire Bull Terrier who has been my constant companion for twelve years since the times I carried her on walks as a tiny puppy in a baby sling has just endured her first physical pain. |
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Valentine’s Day After The Fact, February 18th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: The New York Times Las Vegas Optic Carnegie Library Catholic Daughters of Immaculate Conception Parish Catholic Daughters Courts The Family Circus Art Trujillo My newspaper of choice is the Las Vegas Optic, a thrice a week little dandy that manages somehow to keep up the brio we used to expect from all newspapers. |
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The Jeweled Piano, February 11th, 2014 Categories: Women Tagged: O'Henry Some conversations are so brief they seem not to leave a mark, yet in the case of the unnamed woman sitting at the card table, whose words I only heard as I was already turning away, the words left a trail. |
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Books That Changed My Life, February 4th, 2014 Categories: Writing Tagged: Santa Fe St. Johns College Adrienne Rich Tecolote Jonathan Swift William Faulkner Flannery O’Connor Sherman Alexie Willa Cather I have special respect for teachers because I finally had to admit, a few years ago, that I can’t do it… at least not directly. |
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“Doc”, January 31st, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Little Tesuque Creek Homelessness groundwater addiction I’ve lived in the mountains outside of Santa Fe for a couple of decades now, and for nearly that entire time, I’ve been picking up Doc when I see him hitching a ride along the road to town. Doc is not your typical homeless man, if there is such a thing. |
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Something Has Gone Wrong, January 27th, 2014 Categories: Politics Tagged: New Mexico Doris Duke St. Johns College Robert McChesney The Invisible Woman Charles Dickens Tecolote program Something has gone wrong with this country, and I don’t know how or exactly when. |
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They Can Do It — Lamy, N.M., January 20th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico Lamy NM Pacer Oil The Legal Tender Brian Egolf The meeting in Lamy this afternoon was not about losing our train—although I hope in the future that will be addressed—but about the plan, discovered by accident a week ago when workmen began to lay a concrete pad near the train station (there was no state, county or federal oversight, no permits required because of the special status the railroads hold here) where Pacer Oil Company of Farmington, New Mexico is planning to built a depot for the deposit of twenty-five to fifty double-tanker-trailer loads of crude oil weekly, to wait for shipment on tanker cars that somehow can travel on tracks that are unsafe for passenger trains. |
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After Waiting A Long Time, January 7th, 2014 Categories: New Mexico, Theater Tagged: Robert Mirabal El Farol Episcopal Church Sangre de Cristo Mountains After waiting a long time, years in fact, I was finally able to buy two tickets to Robert Mirabal’s performance here in Santa Fe, at the old Canyon Road restaurant and bar, El Farol. |
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I Stand Corrected…, January 5th, 2014 Categories: My Family Tagged: Doris Duke Sex and the City Desperate Housewives My granddaughter told me last evening that she in fact DID NOT WATCH “Sex in the City” as I had assumed, but “Desperate Housewives.” |
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Keeping Up With Granddaughers, December 31st, 2013 Categories: Women, My Family Tagged: Sex and the City Since from the beginning of my career as a writer, I’ve written about women and sex, I bought this series... and watched about twenty minutes of the first episode. |
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Getting Through The Season, December 26th, 2013 Categories: Women Tagged: Christmas Facebook friends Season's Greetings Now that Christmas has fallen half way out of the day-I imagine it on its edge, sliding off all those cards that wish, so blandly, “Season’s Greetings” (and what are they?-I am coming to terms with the usefulness of Facebook. |
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Speech for New Mexico Women in the Arts, December 13th, 2013 Categories: Women, New Mexico, Art Tagged: New Mexico Women in the Arts Nelson Mandela As I look around this big room, I see many people, friends, acquaintances and strangers who all have something to say that I would like to hear… But since I am honored by the New Mexico Women in the Arts with the responsibility of speaking to you tonight, I want to draw our attention to the two young women, seniors at our high schools this winter, who will receive the scholarships to which all of you have contributed. |
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Dreaming The Dream of Modern Life, December 3rd, 2013 Categories: New Mexico, Travel Tagged: Southwest Chief Lamy Christmas climate change Amtrak They are taking our train away, eliminating Colorado and New Mexico from the line that has stopped at Lamy, New Mexico since 1887; there is some problem with the tracks in Kansas, no one wants to pay for their repair, and so in two years my beloved Southwestern Chief may be southwestern no more, routed down through Texas, leaving us stranded. |
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Now, Wait…, May 14th, 2013 Categories: Writing Tagged: bookstores Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher Timothy Egan All writers complain at one time or another about the time we spend waiting: for the proposal to be read, and accepted or rejected; for the manuscript to be edited; for the final longed-for publishing date to arrive. |
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Neighbors…, April 23rd, 2013 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Indiana bridge fluoride racism progress The truth is that progressive ideas, whether about equality or water quality, have never taken root here; those are the seeds that fall on rocky ground, sprout and rapidly wither. |
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Hopper Light, March 4th, 2013 Categories: Art Tagged: New Mexico Albuquerque David Hopper Flagstaff Hopper light doesn’t protect, but neither does it isolate; in his mysterious paintings, it sometimes seems to me that the slightest movement—getting up off a bed, going out a door—would change not only the composition and the meanings we gladly ascribe to it, but the light, itself. |
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On Making Lists, February 28th, 2013 Categories: My Family Tagged: Radcliffe Harvard Posture Photos It seems that the pros and cons of relationships, or individuals, have in the end little influence on my decisions, which spring usually from a hidden pocket of my intuition—hidden, even from me, as well as from the lovers or would-be lovers or husbands who encounter my will. |
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Or Hear Old Triton Blow His Wreathed Horn, February 25th, 2013 Categories: Travel Tagged: California Faulkner Wordsworth ... what has been lost is valuable, too, since it includes a shared heritage of literature, especially poetry, even though it was entirely the poetry of nineteenth century men. |
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Are We Wimps?, February 8th, 2013 Categories: Travel Tagged: Yellowstone National Park Dragon’s Mouth Old Faithful Montana A part of my delight in my recent trip to Yellowstone National Park in north-western Montana, was to experience real cold. |
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Water and a Shell: The Almost Forgotten Work of Elizabeth Eaton Burton, February 6th, 2013 Categories: Art, Travel Tagged: The New York Times Elizabeth Eaton Burton Yellowstone National Park fountain Mammoth Hotel Montana Wandering the lobby of the Mammoth Hotel in Yellowstone National Park last week, I came on a little fountain buried in an obscure corner. |
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Icebox to Refrigerator, January 16th, 2013 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky icebox refrigerator Cordie When I was growing up in Kentucky, an enormous wooden box with chrome handles on its many doors crouched in the back pantry, a dark room that I felt was not really safe. Why? Probably just the darkness, the many closed cupboards, and the icebox, which I didn't know how to name. |
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Our Mother’s Douche Bag, January 10th, 2013 Categories: My Family Tagged: Eleanor Worth ...its threat lingers, as we know today when girls starve or bloat themselves, cut their arms, or sacrifice their skins to tattoos: the old horror of the natural female body, reappearing like some monster from the deep, in every generation. |
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Ten Favorites: On To The Next, January 2nd, 2013 Categories: My Family Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books Doris Duke Rubenstein Library Duke University Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reaching its readers, I find myself in a rather delightful quandary. |
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Ten Favorites: Yoga, January 1st, 2013 Categories: Women Tagged: New York City yoga abortion My little practice restored my faith in one crucial phrase, one crucial possibility, which I feel to this day, and that is the possibility of achieving through my body the peace that passes understanding. |
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Ten Favorites: Hats and Pearls…, December 31st, 2012 Categories: Women Tagged: Doris Duke Duke University League of Women Voters Women in the Arts National Museum of Women in the Arts Millicent Rogers Museum Sweet Honey In The Rock Neela Magidoff Willie Snow Etheridge “Doing good” has always been associated with that look which is why Doris Duke, mysterious, unpredictable, may turn out to be an interesting subject for my next book. Already I gather that she “did good” without caring much about it or dreaming of wearing “do good” clothes. |
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Ten Favorites: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, December 30th, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: New Mexico Kentucky Kentucky Women Writers Conference Adrienne Rich Lexington Women Writers’ Conference Bingham Military School Asheville North Carolina The Norton Anthology of Poetry Gwendolyn Brooks Audre Lord Mabel Dodge Luhan Colette Taos So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class. |
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Ten Favorites: The Fire Next Time, December 29th, 2012 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Wildfires fireworks Los Alamos Las Conchas Cochiti Pueblo Cerro Grande Pacheco Santa Clara Pueblo Meanwhile, Santa Fe is not directly threatened; both the Pacheco and the Las Conchas fires are several miles away, but the smoke is so thick this morning that mountains a mile and a half to the west and east are invisible. |
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Ten Favorites: A Town Made For Women, December 28th, 2012 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Staffordshire Bull Terrier El Delirio School for American Research Native American art Navajo Museum Mary Wheelwright Acequia Madre Indian Market Spanish Market International Folk Art Market When people ask me why I moved to Santa Fe twenty years ago, I answer according to my mood: the mountains, the sky, the light—all familiar answers that most of us offer, particularly if we are artists for whom such attributes are especially important. |
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Ten Favorites: She’s the Woman Wearing a Red Hat, December 27th, 2012 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Amtrak Our books are expensive and employ language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are sold in bookstores, which are themselves, special, separate, threatened, and rare. These books are written slowly, sometimes painfully, and edited slowly, and also sometimes with pain, all to conform to a standard: what serious literature ought to be. But to uphold a standard that no longer means anything to most people seems an exercise in futility. |
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Ten Favorites: Starting Something — The Women’s Project, New York, December 26th, 2012 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Writing, Theater Tagged: Women's Project Milk of Paradise women's movement The American Place Theatre Julia Miles Joan Vail Thorne It was the 1980's and the three of us-Julia, Joan and I-were possessed by the spirit of the times-that energizing, reckless, laughing spirit that was born of the modern women’s movement. We could do anything. Even stir up trouble. |
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Ten Favorites: Can We Still Grind Corn?, December 24th, 2012 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Ben Hassett Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago. |
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It Takes Years, October 31st, 2012 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe It take years, decades, even, for me to begin to know a place, and usually that's just when I'm packing to leave. It's easy to confuse the blindness that can come with familiarity with boredom; it's easy to confuse the geographical solution—moving somewhere new, to escape old problems—as the true solution it never is. My eye, grown blind to one set of trees and shadows, soon grows blind to the next set. |
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The Last Rose of Summer, October 19th, 2012 Categories: My Family, Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books The Last Rose of Summer Palgrave's Golden Treasury Maxfield Parrish These sisters, my father remembered, always sang and accompanied themselves on the piano at this time of year in a duet to the dying of summer, called “The Last Rose of Summer” |
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A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: Adrienne Rich and Colette, October 16th, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: New Mexico Kentucky Kentucky Women Writers Conference Adrienne Rich Lexington Women Writers’ Conference Bingham Military School Asheville North Carolina The Norton Anthology of Poetry Gwendolyn Brooks Audre Lord Mabel Dodge Luhan Colette Taos So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class. |
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The Caravan for Peace, August 27th, 2012 Categories: Politics Tagged: Santa Fe Caravan of Peace Arturo Caravanas Para la Paz Washington Sometimes it takes a green man to wake up comfortable people in the United States. The green man, Arturo, came to Santa Fe this past weekend as one of 110 citizens of the latin states, mainly from Mexico who are traveling across the country in two large buses labeled "Caravanas Para la Paz." |
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My Week in Pictures, August 14th, 2012 Categories: Art Tagged: Santa Fe Photographic Workshops Sony Nex-7 Rick Allred In June, I finally decided to learn how to use my new digital camera. It’s a small Sony Nex-7, which seems easy to use but was causing me a lot of frustration. I decided to sign up for a beginning digital photography workshop at Santa Fe Photographic Workshops a few blocks from where I live. |
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Finding What We Lost… Or Nearly., July 12th, 2012 Categories: Art, Travel Tagged: Alhambra Gaudi's Cathedral Washington Irving Tales of the Alhambra Elizabeth Bishop One Art This forgetting nearly happened to two of the cultural monuments in Spain that now seem central to the country and its history: Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona, and the Alhambra in Grenada. |
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Water… Cool, Clear Water, July 10th, 2012 Categories: Art, Travel Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Spain Barcelona Gaudi Alhambra Grenada Samuel Coleridge Gene Autry We seem particularly unable, here in the desert Southwest, to learn from these earlier techniques; there are no light-proof shades over the windows here in the middle of the day, no habit of closing early and opening late (which used to be the rule in the U.S. South), no planting of trees to provide crucial shade. |
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Queens, Kings… and Visionaries, July 4th, 2012 Categories: Art, Travel Tagged: Spanish Civil War Barcelona Cordoba Columbus King Ferdinand Queen Isabella Gaudi Catholic cathedral Someone-a queen, a king, or a so-called Captain of Industry, our version-finds inspiration bursting out in bright colors in an unexpected corner: a peasant, an explorer, an architectural genius, and brings the essential power of money, wealth and prestige to force the bloom. |
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Homage To…, July 2nd, 2012 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Barcelona Homage to Catalonia George Orwell Cordoba As I try to understand something about Barcelona, this anthill on the coast that seems closer to Miami than to Sevilla, I am reading George Orwell’s half-forgotten “Homage to Catalonia.” |
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Remembering Nora Ephron, June 27th, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: Nora Ephron Silkwood I Hate My Neck Julia and Julia When Harry Met Sally A lot of us are feeling a sense of loss on hearing that Nora Ephron is dead at 71-not because we knew her, saw her movies or read all her writing-but because she came to represent something hard to define about an era that began with the first issue of Ms. in 1973 when Ephron was what was called a “mail girl” at Esquire. |
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Bulls and Flamenco, June 26th, 2012 Categories: Travel Tagged: Spain flamenco bullfighting Ernest Hemingway Seville This shocks us, as we are shocked by Flamenco and the bullring. At least since the enlightenment, we of the New World have believed in our perfectibility, if not in our perfection, in our concurrent right to protection and ease. The essential tragedy of life is not for us; we will circumvent it, somehow, as when I was a small child I believed death would have been “cured” by the time I was old. |
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Bailouts in the Land of Duende, June 22nd, 2012 Categories: Politics, Travel Tagged: bailouts Sevilla flamenco dancing Music Today’s Spanish newspaper announces that the bailout from the European Union, a sum of money too large for me to imagine, is going to happen, although a woman I spoke with yesterday says no one knows where the money is really going-probably to the banks, as in the U.S. |
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Spain: The Country of Civil Dissent, June 20th, 2012 Categories: Politics, Travel Tagged: Spain Spanish Civil War Franco This may be the road to compromise we must all follow: the ancient privilege of a small class and the endless cheerful protest of the mass of those who have less-at least in our eyes,the disadvantaged. |
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Hearing The News, June 18th, 2012 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Doris Duke Duke University Press The Silver Swan Hawaii For my “Doris,” a home at the university her father founded...you will understand my delight and appreciation as well as my humility in the face of the many challenges I will encounter as I being to write. |
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A Town Made For Women, June 11th, 2012 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Staffordshire Bull Terrier El Delirio School for American Research Native American art Navajo Museum Mary Wheelwright Acequia Madre Indian Market Spanish Market International Folk Art Market When people ask me why I moved to Santa Fe twenty years ago, I answer according to my mood: the mountains, the sky, the light—all familiar answers that most of us offer, particularly if we are artists for whom such attributes are especially important. |
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Can We Still Grind Corn? Wolf Pen Mill, Kentucky, June 5th, 2012 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Ben Hassett Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago. |
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Starting Something: The Women’s Project, New York, June 1st, 2012 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Writing, Theater Tagged: Women's Project Milk of Paradise women's movement The American Place Theatre Julia Miles Joan Vail Thorne It was the 1980's and the three of us-Julia, Joan and I-were possessed by the spirit of the times-that energizing, reckless, laughing spirit that was born of the modern women’s movement. We could do anything. Even stir up trouble. |
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Lexington’s Literary Feasts: When Good People Go All Out For Writers, May 28th, 2012 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Lexington Literary Feast Lexington Public Library A few days ago I spent time in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever visited, in order to be a featured writer at the annual Literary Feasts, which supports the Lexington Public Library. |
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The Times They Are a-Changing, May 24th, 2012 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Kentucky Louisville Collegiate School Sometimes, not too many times, I find myself complaining that things have stopped moving forward and even begun moving backwards after the heady transformations of customs and attitudes that changed my life in the 1970’s. |
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Seduction Alert, May 21st, 2012 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Lexington Fayette Park President Lincoln Abraham Lincoln Steven Foster Old Sweet Song Literary Feast When I visit Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of the part of the state that would have sided with the Confederacy if President Lincoln hadn’t prevented it, I remember Stephen Foster’s “Old Sweet Song.” Is there anywhere else in the world that has such lush enormous maples, magnificent Tulip Poplars, hedges of spun sugar white flowers I can’t identify? Or such blocks of handsome turn of the century houses, as in Fayette Park, each with its distinctive Richardsonian bay window or Victorian white trim, each set at a comfortable distance from its neighbors in a broad pad of Bluegrass lawn and flower borders? |
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Women, Power and Money, May 15th, 2012 Categories: Women, Philanthropy Tagged: speech "Winter Term" Judy Chicago Kentucky Foundation for Women Lady Mary Wortley Montagu When you have learned to use your money, and your power, you will arrive at an appreciation of your womanhood unlike anything you have ever imagined. |
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Tax Time: Inherited Money, April 10th, 2012 Categories: Politics Tagged: inheritance inheritance tax dynasty trust baby boomers In the next decade, as the so-called Baby Boomers retire and-is it possible?-die, an enormous transfer of wealth, the largest in our history, will take place-largely secretly and in silence. |
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And Again, Adrienne, April 3rd, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: The New York Times Adrienne Rich David Orr Harry Crews How reassuring it is to find a second appraisal, to my mind more sensitive and compelling than the first, in The New York Times (March 31). |
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Adrienne Rich Is Dead, March 30th, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: The New York Times Adrienne Rich Radcliffe W.W. Norton In my heart, she has a special place because of some curious connections: she was at Radcliffe a few years before me, in the wretched fifties, and came out of that experience with formal training, an early marriage, and three sons. |
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What They Really Want Isn’t Fame or Fortune But Permission to Articulate Their Feelings, March 29th, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: The New York Times writing workshops This essay, by Steve Almond, from the March 25th edition of The New York Times, comes like a bombshell, dispelling not only my notions about why people take the writing workshops I teach, but why I often find teaching them frustrating. |
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Do You Wear Shorts?, March 27th, 2012 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: shorts American Eagle American Airlines Five days ago I had an astonishing experience as I was waiting in line to get on an American Eagle regional jet in Louisville, Kentucky, flying to Chicago. |
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Hats and Pearls…, March 15th, 2012 Categories: Women Tagged: Doris Duke Duke University League of Women Voters Women in the Arts National Museum of Women in the Arts Millicent Rogers Museum Sweet Honey In The Rock Neela Magidoff Willie Snow Etheridge “Doing good” has always been associated with that look which is why Doris Duke, mysterious, unpredictable, may turn out to be an interesting subject for my next book. Already I gather that she “did good” without caring much about it or dreaming of wearing “do good” clothes. |
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The Uses of Scandal, March 2nd, 2012 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Doris Duke Duke University biography James Duke Duke Tobacco Company Next week, as I begin to unravel the many strands of Doris Duke’s life, I must work hard to clear away my prejudices. |
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Barney Rosset, February 28th, 2012 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: The New York Times Barney Rosset Erica Jong Rosemary Daniell "Winter Term" BARNEY ROSSET died a few days ago and the New York Times ran a long obituary on February 23, celebrating his role in freeing the U.S. reading public from censorship. |
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A Perhaps Hand, February 23rd, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: New Mexico e e cummings spring “Spring is like a perhaps hand in the window,” e e cummings wrote, and while I can never literally explain what he meant—what line of poetry can be literally explained?—the line always comes to mind when I see the first hints that spring will eventually be here, even in the mountains of northern New Mexico: a bud encrusted with snow, a nest that will soon be used, the first leaves of the daffodil bulbs I planted last fall. |
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Chicken Picking and Flag Flying, February 21st, 2012 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: New Mexico descansos immigration veterans Mexico As the snows begin to recede here in the southern Rockies, the descansos by the sides of our roads come back into view. These are shrines created by families who have lost someone in a car wreck at that spot. |
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Grandmother, Mother, Daughter, February 15th, 2012 Categories: Women Tagged: Witney Houston Valentine's Day grandmother mother daughter Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday alerted me to a part of her story: the roles played in her rise to fame by her mother, Cissy Houston, a gospel and pop singer who sang back up to Aretha Franklin, whose triumphant hymns to women’s independence heralded my political coming of age. Aretha was Whitney’s godmother. This matriarchy, source of strength and grace, is rarely recognized as such. |
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Mr. Toad, February 9th, 2012 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Wind In The Willows Aristotle children's stories Sitting long hours in the classroom arouses in me the restlessness that was the bane, or perhaps the blessing of my childhood: when will I be let out? Eventually the discussion catches my attention, but first there is the longing for the open road that I first encountered, in fiction, in Kenneth Grahame’s delicious The Wind in the Willows. |
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The Floating World, February 4th, 2012 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: February contest I’ve lived in the mountains for a long time, gotten the knack of it. Every morning down the hill by eight to catch a ride, if I’m lucky, with some guy going to work in Santa Fe. Always a young guy alone in a beat-up car, maybe driving in for breakfast from the campground. |
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Reading The Greeks, Plato Continued, February 3rd, 2012 Categories: Women, Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Plato abortion Fifteen years ago, when I first encountered Plato's teachings at St. John's College here, I railed against them. My mother used to call this, "Kicking against the pricks," no pun intended. Today I'm beginning to realize that this curriculum, based on the Great Books, a system devised in the 1940's to encompass the whole of a gentleman's essential library, reveals the base-the stones-on which we all stand. |
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The Stones We Stand On: Reading The Greeks, January 28th, 2012 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Plato Timaeus St. Johns College Greek philosophy I’m trying, with a good deal of anxiety, to put together what I know and believe with the suppositions and proofs of the ancient Greek philosophers. They use a language and a way of thinking, totally abstract—almost—that is as foreign to me as the abstruse calculations each member of my class must write, from memory, on the blackboard. |
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The Dear Old-Or Not So Old-Atlantic Magazine, January 12th, 2012 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: VIDA The Atlantic The Atlantic Monthly women writers What a pleasure it is to see, in the midst of disheartening news about the low number of women writers whose writing appears in major national periodicals, that the Atlantic is at least at the top of the list. |
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Name It / Change It: Just In Time For The New Year, December 29th, 2011 Categories: Women Tagged: Name It. Change It. misogyny Our heartfelt attempts at cheer and goodwill this holiday season bark their knees-if they had knees-on reports like Name It/Change It. Just when we wanted to forget all about misogyny comes this portent reminder that it is always with us, especially in the various forms of media I attempt to ignore but which bathe our country in a bath of vitriol. |
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On To The Next, December 20th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books Doris Duke Rubenstein Library Duke University Too Rich Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reaching its readers, I find myself in a rather delightful quandary. |
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Pepper Spray, November 26th, 2011 Categories: Politics Tagged: Wal-Mart Xbox papper Spray Occupy Wall Street In an economy of high unemployment, dependent on five percent annual growth, the woman spraying her fellow shoppers joins the ranks of the immigrant shattering the peace of a neighborhood with a leaf blower and the bulldozer beeping as it destroys a hillside for another expensive development. |
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The Blue and White Bandana, November 23rd, 2011 Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Chinese embroidery “Look at the embroidery,” she said, spreading out the bandana. Dense, tiny silk flowers in red, gold, purple and blue covered every inch. “On the other side, too.” She turned it over; miraculously, it seemed to me, the wrong side of the bandana was also completely covered with tiny flowers. I’d been sewing letters on a sampler, much against my will, and I knew how messy the back side of anything embroidered usually looked. |
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She’s the Woman Wearing a Red Hat, November 22nd, 2011 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Amtrak Our books are expensive and employ language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are sold in bookstores, which are themselves, special, separate, threatened, and rare. |
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My Mother’s Eyes, November 17th, 2011 Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky Tagged: The Blue Box Eleanor Mary Barry When I became aware of her as my mother (I was her third child), she was a tiny blond woman, almost doll-like, formed by the conventions of upper class marriage. I almost never saw her without make-up, her hair set in careful blond curls, wearing a powerful girdle, a suit and carrying a purse; she seemed always to be armed for a distant battle. |
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Knife, Dagger, Poignard, November 15th, 2011 Categories: My Family, Writing, Kentucky Tagged: The Blue Box Knife Dagger Poignard It glittered obscurely in the back of the curio cabinet my grandmother kept in her dark little house in Richmond, Virginia, the house where she’d raised six daughters and a son. On the walls there were snapshots of all those golden-haired girls, and the one dark-haired boy, as well as their equally fair children and grandchildren, but I don’t remember them. Familiar icons, alike in all houses, they were not interesting; but the curio cabinet, and its contents-which only my grandmother touched-alerted me instantly to the electric presence of stories. |
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Growing Up Without Africa, November 11th, 2011 Categories: My Family, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky slavery slaves It has taken me a long time to realize how little I knew about the women who raised me. |
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Yoga, November 8th, 2011 Categories: Women Tagged: New York City yoga abortion My little practice restored my faith in one crucial phrase, one crucial possibility, which I feel to this day, and that is the possibility of achieving through my body the peace that passes understanding. |
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Moulded By New York City?, November 1st, 2011 Categories: Travel Tagged: New York City Georgia O'Keeffe City Night St. Patrick's Cathedral Walter Issacson Steve Jobs The city has a way of enforcing its rules on the unwary that even the Wall Street protesters might find oppressive: a way of dressing that implies a way of being, a way of talking that depends on a certain kind of conformity—the reason, in addition to the expense of living here, that writers and artists get out. |
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Dorothy Parker, the Volney Hotel, New York in the 1960’s, and Me, October 28th, 2011 Categories: Writing, Travel Tagged: Dorothy Parker the Volney When I started out as a writer in the 1960’s, I had to go to New York. There was no alternative. Even Boston, where I lived for a few years after college, and which had an old literary tradition, wouldn’t do; the real publishers, agents, bookstores and readers were—they had to be!—in New York. I had no idea, really, what New York was like; I’d never lived there; and I couldn’t have predicted how hostile the environment would be to me. |
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Bashing Women: Why Women Playwrights Get Slaughtered, October 25th, 2011 Categories: Women, Writing, Theater Tagged: Rebecca Taichman Milk Like Sugar Zoe Kazin We Live Here Terrance Rattigan Man and Boy Frank Langella Eugene O’Neil Long Day’s Journey into Night Jon Robin Baitz Other Desert Cities When a play by a woman is reviewed, I notice, certain attitudes prevail. Of course there are exceptions, but the rule is that the play is treated with condescension if not outright hostility. Women authors face the same barrage but it is much more intense, and more universal, for playwrights. |
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After A While In Cities…, October 22nd, 2011 Categories: Travel Tagged: New York City roses There is nothing wrong with cities. They are occasionally beautiful, always stimulating, and as my beloved daughter-in-law, Camila, said as we were walking back last night, everyone feels at home in them—or at least in New York. |
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The Passion That Drives The Green Shoot Through The Flower: The Reason Many Women Take Writing Workshops, October 17th, 2011 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Women Mending: New and Selected Stories writing workshops violence against women A while back, or perhaps it was more than a few years ago, we all became aware of the epidemic of violence against women in this country, and memoirs began to be written as the survivors felt empowered to describe what they had gone though, battling through shame and the fear of family repercussions. We all have our lists of these titles, some of them bitingly effective, others less so, and perhaps I was not alone in imagining that writing about the problem would make the problem go away, or at least diminish it. |
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How Is It That a Place Becomes Home, If Only Briefly?, October 12th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: teaching New York Society Library Yiyun Lee Katherine Mansfield Anton Chekhov Years ago when I was living in Manhattan with three small sons, desperately trying to continue the writing to which I’ve devoted my life, I stumbled on a hidden jewel: The New York Society Library, on 79th Street just off Madison. |
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In The Heart of the Heart of the Country, September 26th, 2011 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Mending: New and Selected Stories Selling the Farm Prospect Kentucky New York City My last reading—this month—in Kentucky was for another of what I call a dear audience, at the second floor library above the police station in the little outlying town of Prospect. Years ago this was a farming community; now, it has sprouted prosperous subdivisions, green with trees and grass, strip malls, gas stations—but also a small wildlife sanctuary, in easements, and residents who still remember the value of the land. |
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The Dearest Audience, September 23rd, 2011 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Kentucky Mending: New and Selected Stories Selling the Farm Jeffersonville Now and then I have the privilege of reading to an audience I can only describe as dear. That was the case with the group at the Jeffersonville Public Library this evening: twenty or so people who hung on every word of my story, “Selling The Farm,” as though the two sisters in the story were their own friends, or even their own sisters. |
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Hometown Reading: Carmichael’s Bookstore, September 21st, 2011 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Louisville Mending: New and Selected Stories Carmichael's Bookstore I always find that a reading in my hometown is both warmer and more disconcerting than reading in other cities, warmer, because so many old friends and relatives are sitting on the chairs at the back of the bookstore, disconcerting because they are old friends and relatives who do not view me first of all as a writer. Either they know too much about me, or not enough. They have come out of that mixture of kindness and curiosity—what we call support—that leaves me a little breathless, like a hearty slap on the back. |
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After the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, September 20th, 2011 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: The New York Times Kentucky Women Writers Conference University of Kentucky Kim Dana Kupperman Twenty-five years ago, a group of women from all over the state started to put together what would be, for the area, the first gathering of women writers. I remember the first meeting I attended, in a tall office building set in the middle of the green University of Kentucky campus. Women writers came together who would become well known: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bamberra, and many others. We were all at the beginning of something big—we knew it, rejoiced in it, and wondered how time would define, or change, our original dream. |
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Getting Ready to Teach and Read at the KY Women Writers Conference, September 14th, 2011 Categories: Writing, Kentucky Tagged: Mending: New and Selected Stories Kentucky Women Writers Conference teaching Like all authors, I face an interesting paradox when I travel to teach and read in my hometown—or, in this case, my home state. I am grateful that the hometown aura will bring in listeners, both to my class and to the reading I will give next Saturday. We are all curious about people who grew up near us, or are our age, or nearly, with the expectation of a shared point of view (and prejudices)—or at least shared experiences. |
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After reading at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, NM, September 13th, 2011 Categories: Writing, New Mexico Tagged: Mending: New and Selected Stories Alamosa Books Reading Found I’m always a little nervous before my first reading from a new book, so far untried by readers although with two wonderful reviews, some of my best (Library Journal, Publishers’ Weekly) but without the surge of comments that gathers slowly, in the media and in the form of email from strangers and friends, over a period of months. |
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Getting Ready to Read: 48 Hours Ahead of Time, September 8th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: New Mexico Mending: New and Selected Stories Alamosa Books Albuquerque Preparing to read from my new collection Mending: New and Selected Stories, at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, goes beyond wondering who will be there, which is always impossible to predict. |
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Bringing The Book Home, September 6th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: The Blue Box Sarabande Books For the past three years, I’ve had the deep pleasure and privilege of working on a collection of papers found in the top of my mother’s closet after she died, letters from long forgotten relatives, mainly women, in Virginia, West Virginia and Georgia, covering more than 150 years. |
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The Business of Being a Writer, August 24th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: Cape Cod Writers Center Conference Writing Short Stories After teaching last week at the Cape Cod Writers’ Conference, with, for and among an amiable group, I came home with a few thoughts: what students are seeking in workshops such as this one (I imagine academic classes may be different) is contact. |
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Cape Cod Writing Workshop, August 18th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: Cape Cod Writers Center Conference Short Stories It's important to avoid overusing your own point of view. |
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Teaching The Short Story, August 16th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: Cape Cod Writers Center Conference Short Stories Poetry My poetry leads me to focus on word choice, the rhythm and sound of language, the flow of sentences—all of which are essential to the success and the intensity of the short story. |
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First Words, August 15th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: Writing Cape Cod Writers Conference Short Stories These five days are about your expansion. This doesn’t mean belittling who you are right now as you sit here. It reflects what I’ve learned from my own writing and from teaching workshops: that we all have more possibilities and potentials than we realize. |
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Spellbinding Short Stories, August 14th, 2011 Categories: Writing Tagged: Cape Cod Writers Center Conference Writing Short Stories From the series: On Teaching Writing A series of essays on writing short stories, timed to coincide with my class “Spellbinding Short Stories” at the 2011 Cape Cod Writer’s Center |
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The Fire Next Time?, July 7th, 2011 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Staphanie Hiller Las Conchas fire “The Las Conchas fire, started on June 26 by a downed power line, has been near-apocalyptic in its dimensions and its danger." |
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Something Changes in Me… Music and Revolution, July 6th, 2011 Categories: Art Tagged: Music Perhaps we no longer believe we can roar. |
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The Fire Next Time, June 28th, 2011 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Wildfires fireworks Los Alamos Las Conchas Cochiti Pueblo Cerro Grande Pacheco Santa Clara Pueblo For us here in Santa Fe, the worst has passed, since we are directly across the valley from Los Alamos and therefore most disturbed by heavy smoke and the terrifying vision of huge plumes rising thousand of feet into the air. |
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Extra This Just In, June 17th, 2011 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Lannan Foundation John Pilger The War You Don't See The Screen Santa Fe New Mexican An Open Letter to the Santa Fe New Mexican in response to their June 16 editorial “Lannan credibility suffers self-injury“ BRAVO TO THE NEW MEXICAN FOR RUNNING A STRONG EDITORIAL |
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Where is your Cynefin?, June 15th, 2011 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe New Mexico Wildfires Page Lambert Louisville Kentucky cynefin On the New Mexico Wildfires Here in the mountains north-east of Santa Fe, the winds are carrying more smoke up from the Wallow Fire, down on the Arizona border; the |
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WARNING: CENSORSHIP AT WORK, June 10th, 2011 Categories: Politics, New Mexico Tagged: Lannan Foundation Sante Fe John Pilger The War You Don't See The interlacing of public and private, as Gloria Steinem famously explained, is choking individuals who attempt to speak out and crippling this country. |
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Why Are So Few Women Writers…, June 10th, 2011 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: VIDA Women in Literary Arts You can easily finish this sentence: why are so few women writers reviewed in The New York Times? Included in literary quarterlies? Republished in anthologies? Given major prizes? Well… VIDA’s |
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Jill Abramson Appointed Executive Director of The New York Times, June 3rd, 2011 Categories: Women, Writing Tagged: Jill Abramson The New York Times Maureen Dowd Having lived through the bad old days of journalism... I was elated to hear that Jill Abramson has been appointed the first women executive director of The New York Times. |
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Memorial Day, June 2nd, 2011 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Memorial Day Does anyone visit cemeteries anymore? Here in Santa Fe, the huge Rosario Cemetery, dedicated to the war dead, is ablaze with small American flags planted in front of each identical |
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High School Reunion, May 23rd, 2011 Categories: Kentucky Tagged: Louisville friends SO HERE WE ARE after all these years—more than fifty—gathered together for the second time since we graduated from the private all-girls school in Louisville, Kentucky—before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Women’s Movement, before Vietnam and all the wars that have followed it. |
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The Poor Are Always With You, May 9th, 2011 Categories: Women, Philanthropy, Politics Tagged: Charity Poverty A report released in 1997 reveals that sixty-six percent of the country’s poor adults are women. |
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Are Boxcars Beautiful?, May 4th, 2011 Categories: Art Tagged: Claude Monet I wonder at times about the narrow definition I hold to for what is beautiful—or “beautiful,” to give it is usual ironic twist. This question becomes more pressing as we |
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Women, Dogs and Mountains, March 9th, 2011 Categories: Women, New Mexico Tagged: Santa Fe Women Dogs Mountains Mabel Dodge Luhan Rose Most of the lone hikers I meet, often accompanied by one or two dogs, are women, young, old and in between. |
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Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, March 5th, 2011 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Farmers Market Santa Fe We don’t plant, or spin, or weave, we buyers, but at least we are able to appreciate the labor of those who do. |
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Girls, Ponies and Horses, February 27th, 2011 Categories: New Mexico Tagged: Horses Mabel Dodge Luhan Hiking Galloping across a dusty plain may be the best possible preparation for dealing with the complexities of negotiating a woman’s life in the twenty-first century. |
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The Southwest Chief, Chicago to Lamy, NM November 15, 2010, December 25th, 2010 Categories: Travel Tagged: Lamy Amtrak The sun has set, leaving a rapidly fading orange sky in the west when we pull into Mendota, Illinois on our way west... |
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Lake Shore Limited, Penn Station to Union Station, Chicago, November 14, 2010, December 22nd, 2010 Categories: Travel Tagged: New York City Amtrak John Cheever On the train, I reclaim my original identity, to discover, visually, at least, a part of the U.S. I have never known. |
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The Wise Hook, December 22nd, 2010 Categories: Women Tagged: relationships In old seaside cabins I have found the wise hook nailed to the splinter-board bathroom wall, opposite the small sink and the plain toilet that has no special adaptors for |
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What It Means to Save the Land, December 22nd, 2010 Categories: Philanthropy, Kentucky Tagged: Environment Louisville Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm When I was a woods-running girl, years ago in Kentucky, I explored every inch of the old overgrown farms I could get into. |