WWII in the American South: Ruth Francisco’s Camp Sunshine
Ruth Francisco’s WWII novel, Camp Sunshine, entertains and informs with clear, specific storytelling. Already a fan of WWII history and fiction, I greatly enjoyed this novel. Francisco animates a rather unattended war detail, an amphibious…
Mystery, History and Love: You’ll Find Them in the Details
My grandmother, Laura, died in 1997 and yet, she remains clear in my mind. From decades earlier, I feel her cool hands on my feverish forehead. When I was four years old and abruptly relieved…
History, Courage & Learning to Remember
In college, I was no history buff. Dr. Lynwood Oyos’ legendary Western Civilization class at Augustana College nearly sank me in terms of my grade point average. He was a brilliant and personable professor who…
Coffee, Red Wine and Poetry
Although I usually write and read longer, paragraphed forms of writing, a good poem remains for me better than that first coffee in the morning, surpassing even that rich red warm glass of wine in…
Tragedy on the Great Plains: The 1888 Children’s Blizzard
Weather humbles us and we’ve bowed to it frequently during the last several years. Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, wind-whipped wildfires, blizzards and floods demolish our attempts to humanize our landscapes and keep ourselves safe. We can’t…
A Skunk, Google Earth and an Anvil Salesman
Scene One: Goodhusband is making toast in the kitchen. “What’s that smell?” “A smell?” I concentrate and sniff. Nothing but toast. Gilda the white WunderSchnauzer paces at our glass patio door, sliding her nose along…
More on Flannery O’Connor
As mentioned in the previous post, Flannery O’Connor didn’t coddle her readers. She emphasized the origin of fiction and identified a potential risk for writers who wish to press the reader toward spiritual mysteries. I…
At Home in the Wild, Wild West
One of my all-time favorite novels is Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I’ve watched this author with great interest since I trekked to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to attend the Western Literature Association Conference in 1989. Having grown…
She Says it Well…
Today I will be uncharacteristically brief. On Beyond the Margins’ web site, Sarah McCoy eloquently testifies to “The Significance of Settings”in writing. (Not place settings, of course, but this is cheesecake, after all.)I hope you…
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