I’m not a Game of Thrones fan, but the show came to mind the other day when I was talking about my memoir, Young Widower, with a friend who had just read it. We ran into each other in the baby aisle at the grocery store. I was comparing mashable fruits. He was picking up diapers and formula. We nearly missed each other. As I like to do when I’m running errands, I was plugged into my iPhone, catching up on old podcasts. I looked up to say hello just as a talking head summarized the immense appeal of the HBO series: “Come for the nudity. Stay for the dragons.”

It’s a particular challenge to describe Young Widower without at least touching on a whole range of difficult contexts and explanations. I’ve run into this problem at book readings, in email exchanges with editors and agents, and even while following Facebook posts about the book by well-intentioned in-laws. Someone who knows me as a husband and father replies to a link to an excerpt from the book. They are so sorry, by god, they had no idea. A brown bear. Rural Romania. What the hell were we thinking, hiking in the middle of the night? (We got stuck on the mountaintop with a lost hostel reservation.) How does a person ever get over seeing such a thing? (He doesn’t.) Wait—you were married before? (Yes.) Did your wife now know your wife then? (Yes.) Man, that must be strange being married again. I’ll bet you never expected that to happen. (Well, yes. And, no.)

Young Widower is a quiet and thoughtful memoir of grief, but it has at its heart a sensational fact. My first wife, Katie, died under those heartbreaking and graphic circumstances, which continue to resonate in my own life, but to nowhere near the scale or pitch they did during the year following her death. Beyond the attack itself, Young Widower spends far more time with the events of our ambitious life together—Peace Corps volunteers in Bangladesh, teachers in Chicago, graduate students in Miami, public-health work in Romania—my own fragile sense of a recovery, and the year of living with Katie’s family in Indiana after her death. And yet, for all of the reflection that Young Widower undertakes, from its intimate portrait of affection and marriage, to my guilt and self-incriminations at not having saved her, to the affections and frustrations of trying to grieve with other people, readers seem drawn to the book first because of that violent occasion. “Come for the bear attack,” I might mimic the talking head. “But, please, —stay for the honesty, heartbreak, candor, messiness, love, sorrow, and absence, as well as the arbitrariness of a natural world that, for us at least, seemed to lacked all reason.”

Continue reading “From the desk of John W. Evans: Stay for the Dragons”

Jared Carter has received the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Poets’ Prize, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His newest book, Darkened Rooms of Summer, is a collection of poems that conjures the landscape of the Midwest and the lives of everyday Midwesterners.

I have no prior experience with National Poetry Month, but I did do a bit of promotion for poetry back in the 1980s. In those days I had an old tan-colored Volvo station wagon that I drove around the Midwest, occasionally giving poetry readings to just about anyone who would listen.

This in itself is not remarkable. But on the Volvo’s rear bumper I had affixed a sticker I had found in some flea market that read, in bold capital letters, I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ. The 1980s was an age of catchy bumper stickers but still, I was convinced that I had one of the most mysterious and at the same time one of the most appropriate bumper stickers an aspiring poet could ever wish for.

Looking back on those days, I realize that my only other attempt to promote poetry in general may have been the choice of location for my various book launches, all of which, curiously enough, took place during the month of April.

In April of 1981 my first book was launched at a cocktail party in Greenwich Village, hosted by my agent. The book was published by Macmillan and my agent got me an advance of a hundred dollars, which wasn’t bad in those days. It was a nice party, too. Courtesy of the publisher, all of my East-Coast friends attending were given free copies of the new book, which I was told was an old New York publishing custom. I can assure you that no freebies are passed out at book launches today.

Continue reading “From the desk of Jared Carter: Braking for Poetry”

Al Clark was a professional umpire for thirty years, working more than three thousand games, including two All-Star Games, seven playoff series, and two World Series. Called Out But Safe (May 1, 2014) is his autobiography written with former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg. Below, Clark writes about the new “instant reply.” 

One of the great powers baseball holds for all its fans—from the little leaguers to the major leaguers—is continuity and consistency. From year to year and even decade to decade, the fans know not many changes will occur. Sure, some changes come in order to enhance fan interest, like holding more playoff games, or holding night games at Wrigley Field, or even league realignments to create regional rivalries, like the change made by the Houston Astros when they joined the American League to create a natural rivalry with the Texas Rangers of Arlington.

But seldom do the Lords of Baseball—the commissioner and the owners—change the rules of the game and parameters as they have done this year. The last time a baseball rule was changed was in the 1970s, when the American League adopted the Designated Hitter (DH) rule. This year “Instant Replay” has been adopted to ensure against certain plays being decided incorrectly by the umpires, and it has altered how a runner trying to score can “attack” home plate when the catcher has possession of the ball or how a catcher can position himself when waiting to receive a throw from another fielder.

Continue reading “From the desk of Al Clark: Instant Replay in MLB”

Orlando Ricardo Menes is an associate professor of English and Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Below he writes about his latest book, Fetish, winner the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.  I have been … Continue reading From the desk of Orlando Ricardo Menes

Emily Levine is an independent scholar and the editor of Witness: A Húŋkpapȟa Historian’s Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas.

I am privileged and honored to be the editor of Josephine Waggoner’s monumental life’s work. What historian would say no to editing one of the few new Native manuscripts to come to light in recent decades? What historian would say no to bringing to publication the voluminous work of a Hunkpapa historian long unrecognized? What historian would say no to taking on this work when asked to do so by members of the woman’s family? Looking back, I am chagrined to say, this one. While I was pleased with my work on Waggoner’s collaboration with Susan Bettelyoun, published as With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People’s History (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), I was not ready to undertake another long-term project and had work of my own that I was interested in pursuing. I think I actually said no twice before I gave in and agreed to compile and edit this new manuscript material.

Would I have agreed if I’d known it would be a thirteen-year-long labor of love, consuming time and resources I often didn’t have? That it would take over my life and become a single-minded pursuit? I believe there is truth in what members of Josephine’s family have told me: that I was the one meant to do this work and that I cared enough to do it justice. Perhaps it helped that I am not an academic, that I could work without deadlines, that no promotion or tenure considerations were involved, and that I did not suffer the scrutiny of colleagues. My loyalty lay only with Josephine Waggoner, her family, and the Lakota people.

Continue reading “From the desk of Emily Levine”