Memoirous

Dawn Burns a great writer and someone I’d hoped to meet up with when I moved to Michigan—a person with similar sensibilities about art, literature, God!—is having a book launch in a few weeks in Lansing. It’s funny how the necklace of feminist writers all link together. One person brings another one into your life, and on and on. Anyway, I read Dawn’s short story collection, Evangelina Everyday , feeling as if she were writing about me when describing Evangelina’s small victories, how she walked through a mundane Indiana housewife life while still finding things to celebrate, such as a plastic bag caught in straw grass in a forgotten field. Her newest collection is also linked stories based upon visiting what amounts to “tourist traps.” As we all know, there is something very human and basic in the curiosity we show to outsiders, the different, the just plain odd. We are attracted and yet repelled; we want to know more—perhaps because we secretly harbor the knowledge that it is t...