Driving down the road many years ago, I heard a song on the radio so arresting, I pulled over to give it my full attention. It was Roberta Flack, performing her composition, “The First Time Ever,” a paean to...
Recycling has been on my mind since last time my cousin (pictured above with her mother, now deceased) visited from Germany. She commented on what seemed to her an appalling American wastefulness, an obliviousness to the need to conserve resources, as if unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—that resources are finite. Even human-made resources like plastics won’t be with us forever, since plastics are made from petroleum, and there’s only so much recoverable petroleum left in the earth....
All the more surprising that coal is still king in this part of the country. One of th...
I rarely permit myself to wax nostalgic or to indulge in a glance backward. Life is what it is, no sense bemoaning what's lost; besides, come to think of it, the "good old days" weren't all that good to begin with. Today, however, I'll go back to the time when I owned the horse Star Jasmine, pictured above, when my family celebrated gift-giving, as in the snapshot below, when a continuum of life with Darold seemed yet a possibility.
Two years after my his death, having completed coursework for master’s degree at University of California at Davi...
Dear Professor Burke,
Your Letter-to-the-Editor comments on my recent WTE column are both interesting and welcomed. What follows may serve as clarification of my professional stance.
I am not a journalist. In my most recent career, from which I have since retired, I trained as English professor and taught a variety of literature and writing courses. For fifteen years before that, I helped my late husband establish and maintain his Calif. law office. Prior to immigrating to the U.S., I w...
Children today, research shows, are less diligent in their schoolwork, less resilient when facing a setback or a failure, and less able to defer gratification than what is needed to thrive. Fewer personal interactions and more electronic distractions make for a more harried existence. I recognize the trend readily enough in my grandchildren: they watch television, play computer games. When I take them on an outing I must ask their parents to impound that iPod, X-Box, PSP, Game Boy or Nintendo...
Saturday Sept. 3, 2011, marks the final sit-in rally after two weeks of civil disobedience, which has been happening in Lafayette Square Park across from the White House. Participants staged protests against TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL tar-sands oil pipeline, which President Obama is set to green-light. The current tally of arrests stands at 1,009 and it includes NASA’s top scientist, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Before he was detained ...
Texas is in the midst of an unprecedented drought: nearly 94% of the state is under “extreme” weather conditions that, climatologists predict, will continue into the next ten months if not longer. At this point, to speak of “drought” may be misleading: what’s happening looks like a shift in rainfall patterns that’s part of climate change and global warming. Most Texans, including the state’s governor, deride the possibility and ignore the warning signs, turning to prayer m...
To the newcomer, Wyoming is the location of a mindless if relentless “Drill, Baby, Drill”(gas and oil) and ”Dig, Baby, Dig” (coal). “Plans in works for 4,200 new gas wells in Wyoming,” proclaims an August 2011 newspaper headline. Yes, that’s four thousand two hundred deep-gas wells. The Nirobrara shale-oil exploration, the upstart from the previous year. is proceeding at a pace. Like deep-well gas extraction, it, too relies on hydraulic fracturing. “1.2 million gallons: App...
“Confess your own story, not someone else’s,” has been my writing motto of late. Since the motto has served me well, I sometimes endeavor to pass on my insights, as I did recently, when an overnight guest of a woman who delighted me with show-and-tell details of certain events that shaped her life.
"I'm so happy you selected my home, Edith," she greeted me at the door. "So glad to get to know you. I'm in the midst of taking a writing workshop." Clearly my host, a musician by vocation, ...
From my own childhood, two such people stand out in my memory. One was a teacher who never reprimanded me for arriving late—he seemed to sense that my home life was chaotic and that it was a feat just to get to sc...
In the fall of 2009, Leif Swanson offered a creative-nonfiction writing class in the Cheyenne college known by its acronym, LCCC, that used Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories. I was then part of a writers’ group that showed signs of falling apart; hence, when a participant mentioned signing up--she’d heard good things about Swanson’s teaching--I followed my friend and took the class. Swanson’s assignments revolved around Roorbach’s directives.
Roorbach urges the would-be memoiri...
The picture above, circa 1960, shows a youthful group of German mandolinists and guitarists. (I am playing mandolin.) The group, previously all-male, had agreed to admit women into their circle. Three of us passed muster.
Malcolm Gladwell’s “Listening with Your Eyes,” his concluding essay in Blink, documents the struggle for fairness in symphony orchestras. Not long ago, he writes, the world of classical music was the exclusive preserve of white males. Musicians’ ranks ...Edith Cook |
South Of Wheatland In Wyoming |
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