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Between 1854 and 1929, around 200,000 homeless, abandoned, and orphaned American children were sent by train, mostly from New York City, to new homes, mostly in the Midwestern U.S. Later in the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first, in our contemporary versions of the Orphan Trains, planes from Vietnam and Korea brought escorted children…
The fiction writing workshop I’m teaching for Spalding University is winding down the day I discover that, behind Oyster Lodge, where our classes meet, at the end of Galway Bay, there’s a small castle. I’m satisfyingly tired after exploring Dublin and Galway through the lenses of their literature and art: a walking tour of James…
My China-born daughter is thirteen the summer day we take a cruise down the Lijiang River from Guilin to Yangshao. This stretch is said to be the inspiration for much Chinese poetry and art: “Guilin’s unique topography. and beautiful scenery of the Karst Mountains and the unsurpassed beauty of the Li River has attracted public figures…
I’m drawn to tiny things. In the Matchstick Marvels museum in Gladbrook, IA, I was captivated by a model of Hogwarts, an elaborate many-towered and turreted castle made of more than 600,000 matchsticks. At Dinky’s Diner in Reeds Spring, MO, my family used to stop for miniature hot dogs, tacos, and chicken legs. In Cavendish,…
In 1922, writer and spiritualism convert Upton Sinclair wrote, “You may go to Lily Dale … and in row after row of tents, you may hear and even see, every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may see poor farmer’s wives, with tears…
In a ballroom in Mankato, MN one June evening, a murder mystery unfolds called “Betsy and Tacy Go Downton.” Each table is supposed to cast our votes for whodunit: a character from Maud Hart Lovelace’s charming Betsy-Tacy books, which take place at the turn of the twentieth century? Or one of the “visiting cousins” from…
“Architecture is a study in theft,” says Gary DeVore. We’re standing in an echoing room in Port Allegheny, PA’s Lynn Hall, a building constructed in 1935 by Walter Hall, who later became the chief builder for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. For the last couple of years, Devore and his wife Sue have undertaken the restoration of…
My own ancestors are interred in austere Midwestern cemeteries with small flat stones or rounded markers decorated with the occasional “Beloved Mother” or laser-etched photo. But Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, I discover on a field trip with Spalding MFA students to write about art and place, makes much more elaborate use of art, narrative,…
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe Lori Jakiela August 4, 2015 Atticus Books 290 pages Preorder Halfway through her new memoir, Belief is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, Lori Jakiela comes across a mall kiosk selling Russian nesting dolls. “The doll in the woman’s hand looks a little like my daughter—blonde, rosy-cheeked,…
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