The other day I interviewed a woman who had been evicted—after being laid off from work in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and receiving a cancer diagnosis two days later, newly uninsured. She lost all her savings because not even McDonalds would hire her (too skilled, might leave soon). She said many […]
The first little piggy to leave for market is the big toe. It is the first toe stubbed, the first stepped on by your first, inevitably clumsy dance partner. And it was the first feature that distinguished us from the rest of the hairy apes. Yet poets rhapsodize about elegant hands, […]
Nothing sorts extraordinary drives from ordinary ones quite like the selection of music to accompany the journey. That is especially true when the drive is long. A vacation drive has its own curious logistics of pre-planning. Water bottles must be cleaned out, snacks must be chosen for purchase, the endless worry of a […]
I feel chastened. For years I have been gnashing, fretting, and scolding about What We Are Doing to Mother Earth. My proud, smug recycling and various slight sacrifices were tiny Band-Aids of apology. I regret none of them and will continue until I die. It was the attitude, the phrasing, that went amiss. […]
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. Established by WashU and the River City Journalism Fund, the Heartland Journalism Fellowships support development of aspiring minority and underrepresented writers. During their yearlong residency, which […]
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 […]
The second meeting of the Poverty Council at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, titled “The Fierce Urgency of Now: How Democrats Can Win the Fight Against Poverty,” revealed another tension within the DNC. Susie Shannon, a California Health Commissioner and founder of the DNC Poverty Council opened the meeting […]
Remember when we fantasized about where we would go to college or who we would marry? Now my sixtysomething cohort fantasizes about where they will retire. And Lord, but my friends are practical. A ranch house, they say, all one floor. Or a “villa”—if ever a word was inflated, it is this one; […]
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 […]
One of the more interesting parts of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week was the tensions that developed in the unacknowledged spaces between the show as an international marketing abstraction and the specific idealisms of various Americans. One example was in the second meeting of the Rural Council on Thursday, […]
