o, I finally made it out to the Great Plains Art Museum at the Center for Great Plains last week.  If you’re a lit connoisseur, then you’re probably an art one as well.  Somehow the two seem to intersect in so many ways– take Richard Eckersley, for instance.  There’s an excellent tribute to none other than our famed Richard Eckersley, who passed recently.  If you think you haven’t seen his work, believe me, you have.  Take a look at the UN Press title you’ve got in your hands right now and check the inside cover.  Mr. Eckersley, himself, probably designed that handsome cover.  It took some time, but I’ve decided that my favorite is the White Spirit cover—the clean lines, piercing eyes, chiaroscuro-like contrast of the book jacket photo colors.  And what’s not to love about a monkey?  Let’s cross our fingers and hope the tribute is still on, so you can check out his work.  But if not, hey, don’t worry. You can buy one of the UN Press titles and take his work home with you!

Continue reading “Art in All Forms”

By Eli Hastings, author of Falling Room

hen the news of the triple suicide at Guantanamo Prison came through my earphones, I stopped in the middle of crossing the street.  I live in Barcelona—in Barcelona, this is a bad idea.  I’m from Seattle (where it’s ok to stop in the middle of the street), and there was a part of me that wished I were home, so I would have a crowd of similarly upset Americans to pick this apart with.  But there was the other part of me that was glad I was nine thousand miles away from the Orwellian fever dream that America is tilting toward. 

Continue reading “Hanging Ourselves at Guantánamo”

earests, Sorry for my absence… two back-to-back family emergencies for moi, and it’s been a hectic couple of weeks.  I promise a substantive and compelling journal entry within the next couple days.  You’ll laugh… you’ll cry…. Sara Continue reading Apologies and excuses

ince Leigh Anna picked up Beresford’s The Wonder, I thought I’d go back and read it myself. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of an intellectually gifted child as a threat, but was not expecting to see it play out as it does here.

I envied Victor his facility with logic and synthesis, even his
ability to read at inhuman speeds, but I know all too well how it feels
to be held behind one’s potential for the sake of age, or, gaining
ground, to be considered incapable of emotional maturity.

Continue reading “Of Intellect and Isolation”

have decided in my book reviews of old science fiction not to harp on the blatent lack of equality because, first of all, most of it was written before the women’s movement and secondly because it would get boring.  However, there is the teeth grinding line in every book that has to be mentioned.  In The Wonder it was this: The supreme ambition of all great women–and have not all women the potentialities of greatness?–is to give birth to a god.  That ambition it is which is marred by the disappointing birth of a female child–when the man-child is born, … Continue reading a little random

‘m wild about summer. Baseball–watching the Yankees in particular–catching up
with the stack of bedside books and reading The New Yorker at the pool.  Can life get any better?  I also get to watch my sixteen- year- old daughter play summer league basketball which seems  sweeter after reading Karra Porter’s terrific book Mad Seasons:  The Story of the First Women’s Professional Basketball League, 1978-1981.
It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that sports were offered for women and Porter’s book is a good reminder of how fast and far women’s basketball has come in a few short decades.
Still baseball reigns supreme in summer and the Press has great baseball books both old and new. 

Continue reading “The Boys and Girls of Summer”

ohn Schulian’s Twilight of the Long Ball Gods is about two kinds of baseball. There’s the baseball of legends and statistics and leagues and divisions, and then there’s the baseball of the memory and the senses, the baseball that reveals our humanity, our resiliency and frailty, our heart and soul.

Schulian’s “dispatches from the disappearing heart of baseball” are perfect summertime reading. Thirty-seven articles that range from a visit to Babe Ruth’s birthplace (a ramshackle museum in Baltimore) to bittersweet memories of American Legion baseball represent some of the most honest writing on America’s Pastime that I’ve ever encountered.

Continue reading “Two Kinds of Baseball”

hat is a prairie schooner? 

A prairie schooner, in its first incarnation, was the covered wagon European settlers used to transport their families and belongings to the West. The wagons’ canvas coverings appeared as white sails in the sea of tall grass, hence, "schooner.”

A prairie schooner is a vehicle of colonization/ it is a vehicle for discovery of the unknown. It destroys/ it inspires.

Vehicle: a tool for carrying, as in a covered wagon. Vehicle: the set of words that carries the meaning of a metaphor. Metaphor: derived from the Greek word for transfer or transport.

Prairie schooner: a vehicle that transports us beyond the mapped, the experienced, the known—to a place where we challenge and re-make our own meaning.

Continue reading “What’s in a name…”

‘m back!  So glad Maureen came along and posted, both in general and specifically this week, since I was immersed in other things.  June is a pretty quiet month for sf releases.  The
only one close to speculative is The Nobbie Stories for Children and Adults, a book of the letters of C.L.R. James to his son Nobbie.  Childrens’ stories always have some magic to them and these are no exception with their fun characters named things like Boo-boo-loo and presidents choosing special
words that people have to guess to win prizes.  But this is fine with me since I am still working my way through what came out last month.  And instead I got caught up in something else.

Continue reading “The Wonder by J.D. Beresford”

y name is Kathleen Flenniken and I am delighted that my first collection of poems, Famous, will be published by University of Nebraska Press in the late summer. I begin with two enthusiastic book recommendations: Cortney Davis’ Leopold’s Maneuvers, (Bison, 2004) and Rynn Williams’s Adonis Garage, (Bison, 2005). Both are previous winners of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. I’m proud to be

following in their footsteps.

 

I’m interested that all three books—Famous, Adonis Garage, and Leopold’s Maneuvers, ostensibly

cover similar terrain—women at the midpoint in their lives, considering their marriages, their parents and children, and their places in the world around them.

Continue reading “Two Poetry Winners”