Blue
My daughter has her father’s white skin, her grandfather’s dark curls, but nobody is sure how she got her blue eyes.
Arts & Culture
The Freshmen Writing Phobia
All eighteen students in my College Writing course this fall showed up prepared and on-time for their 15-minute, one-on-one meetings with me during week three of the semester.
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Asparagus for Frank O’Hara
by Monique Daviau
Last summer, I convinced my friend Chris that he and I should drive from Brooklyn to East Hampton, Long Island, to place a bundle of asparagus on the grave of a poet he had never heard of. I hoped to be very convincing when explaining that Frank O’Hara was my favorite poet, meant the world to me, and that I needed to make the pilgrimage. Fortunately, Chris is always open to using his Zipcar membership to drive down to the tippy-tip of Long Island for a day of cemetery-going, and on the day we’d planned to take the trip, the sun was shining and it was almost as if the city were throwing us out. Go see Frank! As a bonus: perfect beach weather!
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What To Do With A National Book Award?
by A.L. Major
In November, I watched the National Book Awards ceremony via an online broadcast. A U of Michigan alum of 05′, Jesmyn Ward, was nominated for her novel Salvage The Bones , and if she won, I wanted to witness it. Of course, my impulse to watch the awards was a self-involved, highly illogical one: that if I am a U of Michigan MFA Fiction student and she is an alum of this same program, then I might be able to produce a work of similar notability and talent. When she won, I was surprisingly elated. As if I had won too. I bought her books, the hour after, not yet critical of why it hadn’t occurred to me to buy them before. Later, I realized I’ve become a complacent reader.
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Marks The Spot
If you believe the Times, and why not believe them, Google is developing everything from robot drones and driverless cars to a space elevator, which, so far as I can deduce, is a kind of hybrid, Wonkafied rocket-cum-slingshot.
In Malaysia
I am writing from the country of my childhood and adolescence, the place that inspires everything I write, the place that invigorates and exhausts and devastates me like no other place on earth.
Plans for Work
In 1937, when Agee posted his list to the folks at Guggenheim, he was awe-struck, still a Southern boy in NYC , a writer entering maturity.
Festival of Lights
Before I became a mother, I thought I’d take my child(ren) back to Malaysia for Deepavali every year. For various reasons, I haven’t made that particular trip with my daughter since she was born in 2009, although we’ve been to Malaysia three times as a family.
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Where My Stuff Is
October’s the thick, sticky middle of my stuff season. I long to see the leaves flaming and falling on the Leelanau Peninsula; In the mornings I want sour cherry preserves on my toast and in the evening, after dinner and a walk in the brisk, fragrant airs, I want donuts from the Franklin Mill.
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That Foreign Country
For the past two weeks, I’ve been immersed in the commemorative supplements of a Malaysian newspaper celebrating its fortieth anniversary this month.
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