In the short story “Artificial Nigger,” O’Connor shows how racism is inculcated in a child. Toni Morrison’s sees the story as paradigmatic.
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Monthly Archives: May 2026
O’Connor Illustrates White Identity Formation
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Artificial Nigger, Flannery O'Connor, racism, Toni Morrison, white identity Leave a comment
She My Lodestar While I Go and Come
Four poems for Mother’s Day.
At 75, She Accessed Her Inner Amazon
Entering her mid-seventies, my wife imagines herself as an Amazon warrior girding herself with velcro greaves and cuirasses.
It Was the Worst of Times: Gilded Age Redux
As the U.S. engineers a second Gilded Age and Trump fantasizes about ballrooms and monuments, it’s time to revisit Tale of Two Cities.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Charles Dickens, Donald Trump, Gilded Age, Tale of Two Cities, wealth inequality Comments closed
Hope in Blooming Lilacs (Whitman)
For all the damage Trump & Co. are doing, Whitman, writing after the death of Lincoln, reminds us of American resilience.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged “When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom’d", Abraham Lincoln, cycle of life, Rebecca Solnit, Walt Whitman Comments closed
Using Poetry to Stand Up to Tyranny
The poem that uses myth and literature to imagine the possibilities for action in the face of oppression.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Chanson d'automne", “Sleepless Nights", Antigone, Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, Kimm Addonizio, Nelson Mandel, Oedipus, Paul Verlaine, Sophocles Comments closed
Stand Here Awhile and Drink the Silence In
A Malcolm Guite meditation upon a quiet, rural church. “Stand here awhile and drink the silence in.”
Horizons Broadened
In this latest life installment, I share stories of the life-transforming impact that I’ve seen literature have upon my Slovenian students.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged “Mending Fences", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Birches, Ceremony, Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, Leslie Marmon Silko, Robert Frost, Slovenia, study abroad, Toni Morrison, Ulysses Comments closed