“On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there.” An opening sentence like that sets up high expectations for a […]
Joy Harjo wants to reclaim America. That’s what I imagine as I read through the wide variety of poems in her most recent book. An American Sunrise plays with form and time, pulling together strands to weave a picture of the land, particularly the land traced by the journey of Harjo’s ancestors, the Muscogee (Mvskoke), […]
The more I think about David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI the more I realize what a brilliant work of journalism it is. Grann doesn’t call attention to himself and never reaches too far into the ether to get at a larger point. He simply tells […]
Up on the Street Light blog today is my latest travelogue – a thumbnail sketch of Quanah Parker’s Star House and an old Oklahoma amusement park: https://streetlightmag.com/2017/10/16/texture-of-a-passing-world/ For more on Street Light and its editor, Trudy Hale, check out my earlier interview with her here.
Two-thirds of the way through this book [Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI] and I was fixing to get very disappointed. Sure, David Grann had done what his title said that he was going to do. He had thrown us into the strange wave of murders […]
Heartlands 