Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate student Alethea Franklin and St. Louis writer Marie Wenya Burns are the second annual recipients of the Heartland Journalism Fellowships.
Do not underestimate the humble No. 2 pencil.
Though Bob Putnam was old enough to be my father and he nurtured and supported me, as he did for hundreds of other young creative artists, I would not say he was a father figure. I would expect a father to be an authority figure. Bob was an anti-authority figure.
On January of this year Neko Case posted to Instagram an unglamour shot of herself with the note, “This is me all hagged-out drained of life essence.” Even the red had bled out of her hair.
Often we think that the paths we choose are straight—northerly from Florida to Maryland, in the case of the transit of my friend’s boat, Castaway—but in reality our lives are made of arcs, loops, and retracings.
Fred could not pilot his own boat during the inspection. Fred had never done vital maintenance; the generator alone was a rusted hulk with rotting hoses. Fred was an aging guy who owned a chain of carpet stores, or some such, and was dowdy. A real Rotarian.
As the mechanics got back to tackling an electrical problem they had identified and draining water and crud from a diesel tank, B asked me, “Have you heard the stories about me? Do you know who I am?”
I had never heard of an American warship blowing away an American yacht in a heavily-used American waterway, but I felt relieved there had not been an incident.
Chris continued to worry about why the boat would not come up on plane. He was willing to have her pulled from the water for inspection, but that could not happen before Monday, and we could not know how long she would need service. He had begun to suspect the fuel—either contaminated fuel at the last slow fill-up, or that the dregs at the bottoms of the tanks were stirred up in the grounding or the prop strike and had clogged the filters.
In the spectrum between the Dude too cool for the Eagles and the cabbie riding to Bill Szymczyk’s final mixes from Studio C, Lij Shaw was riding shotgun and saying: Turn it up!