I hate pencils. That scritch on the paper grates on my nerves, and I loathe the forced humility of using one to do a crossword puzzle. A futile rebel, I do mine in ink and make a mess crossing out bad guesses, just to prove…something. No doubt this traces back to the trauma […]
When I prepared my reading for the farewell poetry performance at the Way Out Club in July of 2021, I pulled only from my chapbook Shape of a Man because it occurred to me that Bob Putnam, co-owner of the club, was perhaps the first man I ever knew. I was old enough […]
Bored at a wedding reception, I started chatting with an old friend of my husband’s. Somehow one of us mentioned loving, back in grade school, diagramming sentences. Soon we were scribbling complicated challenges on cocktail napkins, oblivious to the tipsy fun that swirled around us. How nerdy can you get? Still, we were […]
Enheduanna, a Sumerian princess, is believed by many to be the earliest named writer in world history. But others say the scribes who learned by scribbling her poems and hymns centuries later actually composed them. Or some other man did. And then gave the credit to a woman? “Why would the scribes look […]
In Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, Ramie Targoff points out that when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, “she knew almost nothing about the powerful literary works a small group of women had written—and in many cases, published—around the time of Shakespeare.” Not her fault; those works “had been […]
“Maybe use a more common word?” My friend’s query is gentle. I asked for his take on an essay, and he marked a few words that might seem obscure, archaic, high-falutin’. A decade ago, I would have complied instantly, searching out smaller, easier substitutes. Instead, I flash back, “Let ’em look it up. […]
“Wow! A Mont Blanc!” I pulled the shiny black pen from the box, smiling at the little white mountain on the tip, the luxe gold rim. Then I realized: it was a regular old pen. My mom had splurged for my birthday on this famous writing instrument and gotten one with a plastic […]
Years ago, I snagged a job as an associate editor of Saint Louis University’s alumni magazine because my predecessor had suffered a fatal aneurysm crossing Grand Avenue. A thin, sharp-witted Brit, her last words were, “Something untoward has happened in my head.” When I was told, I was speechless, humbled from the start. […]
Yesterday I felt a great disturbance in the metro area, as if a million books had cried out at not being read. Then I remembered it was the afternoon of the preview for the annual Greater St. Louis Book Fair, now in its 74th year, billed as the Midwest’s largest charity […]
Hours of my life have been wasted dithering over which compound phrases should be hyphenated, which separate, which mushed together. When Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, braved scandal by yanking the hyphens out of 16,000 words, I yelled “Woohoo” at my desk. The act honored aesthetics (hyphens annoy […]
