By Jacqui Banaszynski As I read Celeste Ng’s most recent novel, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s “1984” or Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale.” Nor could I avoid echoes to discordant times in real life in recent … Read more
More decades ago than I care to count, I was assigned to read “The Canterbury Tales” for a high school English class. That was before email and texting reduced the English language to rubble, and yet I still found … Read more
Earlier this month, we posted a short “One Great Moment” piece on a dazzling line of dialog from the new-this-season Netflix movie “A Boy Called Christmas.” Dame Maggie Smith is telling three fidgety children a story. Read more
Bayfield, Wisconsin, is a charming little village, population 500 or so, that sits on the northernmost peninsula of the state, along the southern shore of Lake Superior. It looks out onto a ice-clear body of water called the Chequamegon … Read more
It was while listening to a Tamil story on Spotify that the thought occurred to me: Listening to stories in vernacular Indian languages had changed my writing. Some of the influence came from the cadences of speech. Some came … Read more
I learned much of what I value about writing from a man who lost his voice. A slender, black-eyed Panamanian, José Quintero was a legend in the American theater and a guest artist at Florida State University, where … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts today analyzing the power of the presidential inaugural poem delivered Jan. 20, 2020, by Amanda Gorman, and reflecting on its place in history. The one below, by Roy Peter Clark, is cross-posted … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts today analyzing the power of the presidential inaugural poem delivered Jan. 20, 2020, by Amanda Gorman, and reflecting on its place in history. The other, by writing teacher Roy Peter Clark of … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Gerald P. Costanzo moved his poetry class online March 10 because of coronavirus. As the semester ended, he wanted to leave his students with “something more substantial than goodbye.” We share his farewell with permission, and with our … Read more
Why is it great? You know how it seems like spring will never arrive, you wait and you wait, and it’s dreary and cold, and then suddenly, in one day, it seems to arrive? In New England they call it … Read more
