Jan 21
“We are able to believe that our government is weak, stupid, overbearing, dishonest, and inefficient, and at the same time we are deeply convinced that it is the best government in the world, and we would like to impose it upon everyone else.”
– John Steinbeck, from “Paradox and Dream” (1966)
Convicts and compost, felons and frogs, tattoos and tiny wildflowers. What happens when you connect prisons with nature? Read more
Dec 6
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
– Upton Sinclair
Nov 10
“Tell me to save the world and I will panic. Some jobs are simply too big, too daunting. Too much for one individual. But tell me to save a chunk of that world, a river say, and I might just become engaged. Give me something to work at, to work with, outside myself, and I will.”
– David Gessner, from My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism (2011)
“To be a member of the American middle class today is to live between fear and hate. It is to suspect that we belong to an endangered species, whose privileges are being taken away by forces beyond our comprehension. It is, all to often, to resent the people who have less than we do, and to blame them for the waning of our way of life. Read more
“Where’s Jeff been lately?” you may have asked while visiting Hoosiermuse. Out and about, I’d say happily, especially in the Upper Mississippi backwaters. Read more
“Become a person of letters,” said David Groff, a New York City editor who spoke during my MFA residency last summer. It was Saturday morning, midway through our two-week gathering at Ashland University, and the room possessed, shall we say, a post-pub atmosphere. Mellow, very mellow. Read more
Though I’m a river guy at heart, I’ve always had a soft spot for ponds, the kind with cattails and lily pads and a tiny stream feeding one end and departing from another. The songbirds, the turtles, the plopping frogs, they all fascinate me in a wilderness-on-the-doorstep way. Read more
Deer tiptoed along a muddy trail. Squirrels plodded through a melted yard. A red-tailed hawk sat on a fencepost, soaked and brooding, her eyes on a roadside ditch where mice hid in the still-brown grass. I saw these and more in today’s cold, soggy stubbornness along the Upper Mississippi, each of us waiting for the season to turn, waiting and waiting but out there nonetheless, as if anticipation were strength enough to raise the sun, to warm the soil awake, to yank the blanket of the equinox north to the Great Lakes and beyond. Read more
When the plastic replica of a bald eagle’s foot landed in my curious lap, I set it upright on my notebook and traced its four outspread talons. “It’s as big as my hand,” I whispered to my wife, who sat beside me in the back of the classroom. The distance between its middle and rear claws was nearly as wide as this page. Read more
Theme: Linen by The Theme Foundry
