There is a saying that if you don’t know what you’re doing, ask your neighbors. Once upon a time when I first moved to Nelson County, Virginia, and knew no one, I experienced an untethered queasy feeling of not being entirely in my world. This unconnected-ness with my new surroundings produced an awful feeling of dis-location with self and was something I had not expected from my move to Virginia. This unease persisted for weeks, months. The first hint of relief occurred when I had to call on one of the farmer families in … Continue reading Gossip→
Whenever I run into Lisa Russ Spaar she seems scarcely to have aged since I first met her, eons ago, in Gregory Orr’s graduate poetry workshop at the University of Virginia. Tall and lithe, with long blonde hair she pushes back from her face and a vibrant, lovely smile, Lisa could easily be taken for a grad student. But as we all know, looks can be deceptive, and Lisa Russ Spaar has come a long way in the years since our first acquaintance. She is a much loved professor of English and Creative Writing at … Continue reading The Poetry of Desire→
When I learned that one of the two main characters in Sue Monk Kidd’s latest novel, The Invention of Wings, is Sarah Grimke, of course I had to read it. I was not disappointed. In an “author’s note” Kidd describes her intention as being not to render a thinly fictionalized account of Sarah Grimke’s life but rather to offer a thickly imagined story inspired by Sarah Grimke. Thickly imagined though she may be, the Sarah Grimke I meet in Kidd’s book is resonant with the image of her I have been carrying with me … Continue reading Historical Inspiration For Novelist→
The miracle is that we have integrity at all. O, not fidelity to a moral code. That’s a pale shadow of the integrity I mean. Stable identity. Some semblance of unity. Or, to put it in the word that has haunted me for some months – coherence. What is the thread that draws us through time and change? When faced with the diminishments of cognition that seem to loom with age, and especially when we confront the specter of Alzheimer’s and the like, how do we hold it together? How did we ever? … Continue reading Here-To-For→
The premier poetry event of this year’s Festival of the Book in Charlottesville was “Shrines to Longing,” the March 20 reading by Charles Wright, America’s current (20th) poet laureate, and Mary Szybist, who was a student in the University of Virginia’s MFA program when Wright was on its faculty. Both poets attended the Iowa Writers Workshop. Both have a distinctly Judeo-Christian flavor to their work. The 79-year-old Wright read from his 24th book of poems, Caribou, Szybist from her prize-winning second volume, Incarnadine. Although the full house at UVA’s Culbreth Theater was clearly entranced by … Continue reading Of Darkness and Angels →
In 1995 Kay Redfield Jamison published her ground-breaking memoir, An Unquiet Mind, A Memoir of Moods and Madness. For my husband who was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 1987, and myself living through his manic breakdown, Redfield’s memoir was the revelatory longed-for message in a bottle of bi-polar disorder. Jamision’s personal narrative changed my perspective on manic behavior and her insights altered forever the way I understand and react to those diagnosed as bi-polar. I pick up my copy of Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind heavily underlined and re-read a passage: “People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. … Continue reading Kay Redfield Jamison Festival of the Book→
“Nothing stays long enough to know. How long since we’ve been inside anything together the way these birds are inside this tree together, shifting, making it into a shivering thing” —Mary Szybist, “Too Many Pigeons and One Dove,” Incarnadine [Graywolf Press, 2013] The cedar tree on the corner of the lot must remain. So says Margaret, 96, and refusing to let poor sight and hearing keep her from knowing. This was the deal made back then: The place where we now live, a parsonage, could be built and the land would be given … Continue reading Nothing Stays Long Enough to Know→
As I begin to write, it is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent for many Christians. I should explain that I am a retired minister and the rhythms of the liturgical calendar still shape many of the things I think about and the ways I think about them. So I beg the indulgence of readers who are not Christian. I mean to write, however, not merely for Christians. Though the language is, at least in part, Christian, my concerns are broader. I trust that will become clear. The beginning of Lent brings … Continue reading Intentional Uselessness→
December is always a good time to add to my already long list of books to read. There are awards nominations, various reviewers’ choices for best books of the year, random recommendations for books people are giving or would like to receive as presents. One of the books that appeared frequently as I scanned these sources was Citizen by Claudia Rankine. I was already asking for Marilynne Robinison’s Lila and Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You for Christmas, so I bought Citizen for myself. I’m glad I did—sort of. Citizen was among … Continue reading Interactions→
January is upon us and with it the start of several weeks of bone-rattling cold and snow-cancelled classes erroneously dubbed “Spring Semester.” For me, it heralds the beginning of a poetry class I teach at the University of Virginia, whose goal, to paraphrase the title of Edward Hirsch’s wonderful book, is to teach students how to read a poem and hope they’ll fall in love with poetry. This is a required course, so I can’t count on any initial enthusiasm on the students’ part. Instead, I expect to encounter resistance, suspicion, indifference, and even downright … Continue reading What Does a Poem Mean?→
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