Literacy Narrative

Image Credit: Camile Corot, A Woman Reading   It’s May 10, 2019, and it’s a sweltering evening in middle Georgia—specifically Milledgeville, Georgia—home of Flannery O’Connor (a Georgia College and State…

As a teacher, I read a lot about teaching, and that’s why I know that much of the best writing about teaching begins, “I have made a terrible mistake.” For…

On the radio last week, I heard Frank Sinatra sing “It Was a Very Good Year.” Sinatra made this Ervin Drake song his own and made it famous, winning with…

Image Credit: Albert Anker   It was the rhythms of words that I loved most as a child. Undeniably delighted at the prospect of having someone else read to me,…

if i told you this story, how culturally illiterate would you think i am?   *   panic had come spurting out and i was looking for a plug to…

There are so many ways to tell a story about desperation, and I have considered them all. I keep coming back to the same dark room in an eighth-floor Chicago…

Markham and I were in the hot tub the other day talking about spirituality, nature and art, how these things are what people in the twenty-first century want more than…

There was nothing to do but climb. The turquoise sky was immeasurable above the yuyuga tree, slim branches swaying and bending with heavy fruit. At ten years old, waking life…

Although you have never been to Iceland and have no immediate plans to visit, you’ve recently decided that it is in your best interest to learn to speak Icelandic. The…

My grandmother, my mother, myself—we are a daisy chain of readers, a coil of translators, a broken chain of writers. My grandmother, Margherita, would pounce on the romances published serially…

On Cicadas, Silence, and Japanese Poetry   Home   My childhood memories of summer are also accompanied by the drone of a cicada, my Southern Maryland home shared with roughly…

 I had no alternative; I was trapped by language. – Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land   In early 2009, carrying nine school semesters of French instruction, I landed in…

In Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude—one of the great memory-epics, along with Proust’s—there is a section describing the process of recollection that speaks to me with particular relevance right now.…

Jean Rhys, 1975 by Bill Brandt   When I was younger and more carefree, I really admired the flâneurs of Paris. Baudelaire, Baldwin, Sontag, Rilke. What I loved about these…