Memoirous

Palm Sunday signals in the liturgical calendar the tumultuous week called Holy. I say tumultuous because nothing says crazy more than a triumphal entry followed by a crucifixion. Holy Week reveals the cracks in humanity, man’s capability of othering. It is a time of turning inward and outward with terrible results. Which leads me into a review for the documentary The Overnighters . Jesse Moss and his film crew followed a local pastor around as he searched for ways to accommodate the overwhelming tide of workers flooding a small North Dakotan town during the onslaught of the oil and gas boom. One minute you are hailed as a hero for showing compassion and the next you are the sacrificial goat left out to draw flies. The congregation knows all about the Golden Rule to do unto others, but certainly not for this long or not when the sanctuary carpet is getting ruined. My favorite line was when the pastor’s wife casually comments: I can’t wait for things to go back to how they we...

Very few writers can write strong female characters. Of course Willa Cather gave us Ántonia and Alexandra from O! Pioneers . From reading The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout) you get a sense of how much she loved and appreciated women, especially the girls she surrounded herself with growing up. Willa Cather and Edith Lewis shared an address, first at 5 Bank street (1913 – 1927) and then at 570 Park Ave. in New York City. Edith Lewis was a gifted editor. Surely their’s was a partnership. Many have tried to suss out the exact nature of their relationship. A tomboy growing up and at times a cross-dresser in high school and university, Cather is thought to have been a lesbian. The editors of Cather’s letters looked at the two women’s correspondence. “There aren’t, you know, explicit kind of descriptions of the nature of their relationship in here,” Jewell said. “Instead, what you get is Edith Lewis’ perpetual presence in Cather’s life in m...

In a recent post I wrote about My Ántonia , an early century—last one—novel by Willa Cather about life on the Nebraska plains—before they became the Nebraska wheatfields and then the Nebraska cornfields. A major theme of this blog is memoir or to be specific memoir-ish. My Ántonia pulled heavily from Cather’s own memories of growing up in Nebraska. Like Jim Burden she immigrated from Virginia to Nebraska and grew up on her grandparent’s farm before moving into town, Red Cloud (Black Hawk in the book). There are many parallels between Cather’s own life that in fact the novel reads like a reminiscence. A sort of sentimentality settles on the characters as if rendered through the telescope of memory.   Since getting a Kindle last fall I’ve been experimenting with getting eBooks from the library. Amazon doesn’t make it easy but after a list of steps determined to take me back to Amazon and leave a digital footprint I’ve successfully downloaded a number of books. One rec...

Who knows how the mind works, but this past weekend I suddenly remembered that funky movie Go Ask Alice . Reading a Wiki summary of the story it is impossible to believe the impact this movie/book once had. Its message scared me to death. In the early 70s I was in middle school—a time fraught with great unhappiness. It wasn’t hard to imagine the main character’s insecurity, fear of failing, having to navigate the troubled waters of friendship. Looking back now, Go Ask Alice is laughable, full of about every fear-mongering cliché one can think of concerning drugs, the bad guys who do drugs, and how easily one is sucked down, held in the vise-like grip of addiction. It was seemingly written as an object lesson. The diary format gave the book an authority it didn’t deserve. It seemed so real. Of course I didn’t know any better. Almost immediately the book’s authenticity was questioned. It was written by Anonymous. Now it tops the list of faked memoirs. http:/...

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William Carlos Williams’s “The Descent” is a poem worth remembering. Below is an excerpt: Memory is a kind of accomplishment a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized of new kinds— since their movements are toward new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned). Next week, March 17 th , my book 365 Affirmations for the Writer will be on a 1-day ONLY special at Amazon. Download the book for only .99 cents—76% off the regular price. Passaic Falls that fed the industries of Paterson, NJ

A piece called "Fourth of July Anarchy (Foster Beach" has been included in After Hours , a journal of Chicago writing and art. They had a booth at Chicago Book Expo where I picked up a card about how to submit. Attending book and publishing fairs is a great way to find out what journals are looking for and a chance to thumb through the journal to see if your work is a good fit. What's so exciting about this particular submission is that it is my first published "poem." Actually it is a prose poem or it could even be described as a lyrical flash memoir. Composed after hiking up to Foster Beach for the 4th of July fireworks. We went for the show that goes off above the Saddle & Cycle Club and encountered something radically different. All around us revelers were setting off their own fireworks, creating chaos and anarchy. I think the situation would have brought on PDS for a wartime vet. There were no safeguards in effect. Generally everyone and anyone was ...

“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” My Ántonia A book I seem to come back to again and again is My Ántonia by Willa Cather. Often I don’t have time to read all the books I want to—so why do I continue to re-read ones from the past? Always I am seeing something new, or traveling back over worn roads that in their familiarity call me home. Some reduce My Ántonia to an immigrant’s story. It is Jim’s the narrator’s memoir as well as the story of a Czech (Bohemian) neighbor girl. Or cast in another light—we are all newcomer’s to a place we have to conquer and eventually tame, we all strangers here. I love Cather’s work. It is her descriptions of place that transport me. In Death Comes for the Archbishop we read about New MexicoppLand of Enchantment, of pastel pink clouds, golden sunsets, of sagebrush mesas and waterless arroyos, of Kit Carson and horse thieves. It also contains many racial stereotypes and a...

Change Changes, and that will never change There used to be an Old Man in New Hampshire, Now it’s just the tree-covered side of a mountain. There used to be a Wall in Arches, Now it is two points without a middle. There used to be a shallow cove, warm as bathwater Where I once swam in Door County, now with lake levels down it’s a marshy backwater. Natural Bridge in Virginia used to be a cavern before it collapsed. Crater Lake used to be a volcano caldera which used to be the peak of a mountain until Cataclysmic catastrophe. Just like how marriage can become divorce Just like how friends move apart Just like how a river cuts into rock We are, until everything changes.

The last month has been taken up with blogs on bicycling. Sorry. It's just that with all the cold weather and snow falling down the collar of my coat and fill the tops of my shoes that I've needed an escape. My bike trip to Florida was just that. Now that I'm back, reading and writing about bicycling has also been a form of escape. It helps me recall sunnier, warmer days. The recent issue of PMS=Poem, Memoir, Story =contains heartbreak. Actually my story, Heartbreak Wall. I got the idea for this story while cycling in Wisconsin. I used to take vanloads of women up to Door County for a retreat. We'd camp at Newport State Park where the campsites are all primitive, meaning you have to get yourself and all your gear out to them. We'd strap stuff to our bikes and ride through the forest to our own private beach and set up camp. One day we'd ride to the ferry and go over to Washington Island with our bikes. It was maybe 10 miles around the island. I had schedu...