Brother Al has Died When I first moved to Telluride in 1988, Brother Al was still shovelling walks on Main Street. He was an old man, wearing raggedy clothes, with wild hair and a beard to match. He looked like an Old Testament hippie, and I was, frankly a little afraid of him. Plus, I was young and mostly interested in skiing, finding a boyfriend, and taking care of the kids for whom I was a nanny. I didn’t really pay much attention to the slighly scary old man who shovelled walks. But then, like most things of importance, Brother…
-
-
Rest in Peace James Welch has died. I only met him once, years ago, at the very first Art of the Wild conference. He led a workshop with a participant we’d been really worried about — he was this older man from Alaska who had, to our enormous alarm, sent us the entire manuscript of his novel, and it was typed. During the months we were planning the conference, we worried about losing the thing, since it was clear it was probably his only copy. So this gentleman appeared, and we scheduled his workshop for the end of the week…
-
… what Steinbeck is arguing in his writing is that we have to be responsible for what he terms the whole thing, known and unknowable, in a very deep way: that if you step into a tide pool, you have to realize that that step has changed the entire universe, and that will fit neatly into what Silko’s arguing in Ceremony, the whole sense of having to be careful, to walk in balance, to be responsible for knowing that every single act of humanity changes the world. Steinbeck was arguing that sixty years ago, before anybody in white America really…
-
Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism: There have been a number of articles on the web lately about Kate Moses new book Wintering, a fictional account of Sylvia Plath’s last months when she was writing Ariel. The piece that got me thinking was the essay Kate Moses wrote for the Guardian called “Baking with Sylvia”. In this essay, Moses talks about how for both herself and for Sylvia Plath, baking was a way of creating order out of chaos, and how as she found herself up against her deadline for the book, Moses also found herself baking on a near-daily basis,…