James Welch refers to himself as an Indian — not a Native American, not an American Indian — and he is often amused that, while the simple ethnic designation is used as a matter of course on reservations, it causes a furor on university campuses. Part Blackfeet, part Gros Ventre, with some Irish mixed in,…
Because I immigrated to the States from Croatia at the age of twenty, people often ask me why I write in English rather than in Croatian. I give a silly answer that it’s owing to my Achilles’ heel that I do. The less silly-but not tragic-answer takes longer, even though it might start just as…
Women, Animals, and Vegetables, essays and stories by Maxine Kumin (W.W. Norton)
Continental Drift, Russell Banks’s fifth novel, begins with an invocation: “It’s not memory you need for telling this story … it’s clear-eyed pity and hot, old-time anger and a Northern man’s love of the sun, it’s a white Christian man’s entwined obsession with race and sex and a proper middle-class American’s shame for his nation’s…
O Lord my God, in thee do I put my trust. Save me from them that pursue me and deliver me, Lest they tear my soul like a lion. i. The torment of voices: When are you going to get . . . When are you going to be . . . Who will you…
Jerusalem, September 1993 for Raphi Amram How long my hands have been well-worn thoughts of an automatic rifle. Ajar, my wrought-iron gate. A mulberry tree, in leaf, is shadowing the courtyard tiles; the back of my hand pouring wine’s caught in a dark pattern. The walled Old City stares across the valley, all luminous stone…
Chase Twichell grew up in two geographies: One was New Haven, Connecticut, which she says had little effect on her, except perhaps to put the second in relief. The other was Keene, New York, in the heart of the high hills of the Adirondacks, “a rocky, rough, mountains-and-valleys, fast cold water, lakes-in-the-middle-of-nowhere place” her family…
To every morning reach for the wire whisk, the yellow bag of sugar above her head on the top shelf next to dried beans. And the eggs of Rhode Island Reds that maybe were how she felt mornings before putting on her face. She was someone else making pancakes blank and plain who could crack…
Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. —Paul Valéry The hatred goes back for centuries, everyone says, a tradition as old as making wine, weaving rugs, playing flutes. My father remarks he would have expected it from the Croats who colluded with Hitler, but…
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