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Shame on the Bayou – a Review of Strangers in Their Own Land
Shame, when its uncovered, can get you somewhere in therapy but it’s useless in healing a country. That was my thought as I read through the later chapters of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 pre-election book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild, a Berkley-based sociologist and self-indentified liberal, took her →
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“Pessimism, Hopelessness & Doom” – Traveling the Virginia Extremes with August Wallmeyer
August Wallmeyer paints a distressing picture of rural Virginia in the 21st century. His little book, The Extremes of Virginia, which highlights the realities and common challenges of three regions of the Commonwealth—Southwest, Southside, and the Eastern Shore—gets your attention quickly. You start to see why he calls the regions “the Extremes,” and it isn’t just because →
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You are the one and only threshold
“If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known →
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“My Pleasure” – New story by Alix Hawley
Recent interviewee, Alix Hawley, has a great new story out in The Walrus. Wistful and wonderful. →
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Ghosts and Land – My interview with Alix Hawley continues – part 2 of 2
In the first part of my interview with author Alix Hawley, we talked Daniel Boone, pop culture, and the challenges of writing your way into the mind of a legend. In this post, my interview with the author of All True Not a Lie in It concludes… You handle the Shawnee culture with a great deal →
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How to write with words you use all the dang time – a review of Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir
“At the nadir of my confidence as a writer, I despaired of ever finishing Lit. I considered selling my apartment to give the advance money back. Then a Jesuit pal asked me, quite simply, What would you write if you weren’t afraid? I honestly didn’t know at first. But I knew finding the answer would →
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Alex talks to Alix – an interview with author Alix Hawley – part 1 of 2
Alix Hawley is the author of All True Not a Lie in It (recently reviewed here), a creative re-visiting of the pioneer and American cultural touchstone Daniel Boone. Hawley teaches at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia and this debut novel has won her the Amazon.ca First Novel Award along with a lot of acclaim. Always →
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Re-wilding the Land – a Review of Alix Hawley’s All True Not a Lie in It
All True Not a Lie in It. Ha! Daniel Boone is one of the most picked-over commodities in pioneer pop culture, (though admittedly he hasn’t had a major spike in interest since Fess Parker’s TV Boone had ‘60s kids sporting coon-skin caps). If there’s a truth left below the varnish of 250 years of →
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Keeping the Midwest Weird: My interview with Mark Athitakis continues – part 2
In my last interview blog post with the writer Mark Athitakis, “Why we we’ve got to get Willa out of the cornfield”, we talked about the plural landscape of the Midwest, something he covered in his new book, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt. Today we →
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Heartlands 