Musing in Montenegro’s Capital City

Musing in Montenegro’s Capital City

I began this essay in Montenegro where people speak a local Serbian dialect they defiantly call Montenegrin, and finished writing it in Wales, where Welsh is defiantly visible on every signpost, yet English is undeniably dominant.  Such is the language of empire. And...
Look at the Trees!

Look at the Trees!

A memory that came back to me as David and I rode from southern Virginia to Northern Georgia on this book tour.  I am eight-years old .It is June,1966. We are in a blue station wagon, filled with plants and cats and little brothers. The infant is in a basket in the...
“I DON’T READ.”

“I DON’T READ.”

Peddling my book, I keep hearing this confession:  I don’t read. I can’t read.  I am not a reader. At a table on Lake Street in Minneapolis a man said, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I haven’t told anyone.” He intimated the problem was his eyes. He wanted to...

Calling up the Nineteenth Century to Understand our Own Times.  Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered and Tony Horowitz’s Spying on the South

Annette Gordon-Reed, and Barbara Kingsolver are writers grounded in history, science, and Tony Horowitz was a writer steeped in evidence, yet reading On Juneteenth, Unsheltered, and Spying on the South together, felt like a mystical retreat with three mediums,...