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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February 21, 2012
Chicken Picking and Flag Flying
February 15, 2012
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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February 9, 2012
Mr. Toad
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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February 4, 2012
The Floating World
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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February 3, 2012
Reading The Greeks, Plato Continued
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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January 28, 2012
The Stones We Stand On: Reading The Greeks
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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January 12, 2012
The Dear Old-Or Not So Old-Atlantic Magazine
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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December 29, 2011
Name It / Change It: Just In Time For The New Year
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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December 20, 2011
On To The Next
Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reaching its readers, I find myself in a rather delightful quandary: Sarabande Books will publish my next book, The Blue Box, a family narrative based on the letters and papers of three of my foremothers, in August, 2014—which seems a lifetime away. As I debate turning my energies in another direction (The Blue Box is virtually finished), I am intrigued by the life of Doris Duke, whose papers have just been opened to the public as part of the Rubenstein Library at Duke University. … →
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November 29, 2011
Old
They were old, they had entered those years when nothing ever happens except falls, illness, approaching disability, and neither of them had planned on that when they married, when the children were born, and then the grandchildren. … →
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