The poet W.S. Merwin died last month on the Ides of March. According to the Roman calendar, the Ides fall on the 15th. When Rome dominated Western civilization, the Ides of March was believed to have been a day to settle debts. Who knows what debt Merwin owed on this celestial plane. What many of us know is what he gave. His publishing house issued a...
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As I approached my apartment building in Sofia, Bulgaria, a few days ago, I saw a necrolog, the Bulgarian version of an obituary, pasted onto a window beside the front door. In the States we read obituaries in newspapers or on websites, but the Bulgarian way to announce a death is to make simple, letter-sized notices and distribute them into public life....
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It was Christmas Day 2007. My sister Julia, my friend Audria and I motored on I-40 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff through a light snow that blew sideways like confetti shot from a winter cannon. We had spent a few days in Santa Fe, reveling in the New Mexico slant on La Navidad—ambling down Canyon Road singing Christmas carols on streets lined by luminaria,...
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“There is no there there.” ~ Gertrude Stein “There is.” ~ Laura Kelly I am one of the nearly six million Americans in the past week who zipped a suitcase, lumbered through security, double checked my boarding pass and wedged my posterior into an airplane seat so I could fly somewhere. The end of every year means this annual marquee holiday with...
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Last Tuesday, 23 of us sat around a sturdy conference table in the middle of our university classroom. It was my biweekly Advanced Writing for Media class, and the upcoming assignment: food memoir. Each student was to write a 1,000-word personal story about eating or cooking or something about food. Glorious food. Before the story writing was the...
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