… Read the rest” … Then the weekdays would come again and the parties were over and Japhy and I would sweep out the shack, wee dried bums dusting small temples. I still had a little left of my grant from last fall, in traveler’s checks, and I took one and went to
For a long time I thought her name was Beverly Clearly. That’s because she wrote so clearly. For real: as a kid I would look at the covers of these wonderfully readable books, and “Beverly Clearly” was the author name I saw.
It’s rare that I have a chance to … Read the rest
A favorite novelist of mine, Sam Savage, is entering hospice. According to the Numero Cinq article revealing the sad news of his medical condition, he has suffered for decades with a blood disease called “alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency”. It never harmed his ability to write.
Savage was born in 1940 … Read the rest
It’s a new year and a new universe (because, let’s face it, the universe is always changing, and always new) … and I’m now writing with a new name. So I thought I’d reach for something familiar and easy and tell you briefly about what I’ve been reading and … Read the rest
What does “Beat Generation” mean today, 60 years after Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg rocked a San Francisco crowd with a world-changing poetry reading, and 46 years after Jack Kerouac’s wan and befuddled death in St. Petersburg, Florida? And what, I wonder, does it mean personally to … Read the rest
David Shields is a puckish literary critic and Litkicks favorite whose epic 2010 book Reality Hunger proposed that creative writers may as well skip the pretense of fiction and simply write the truth, since that’s what readers value most in either fiction or non-fiction anyway. His latest book examines a … Read the rest
Henry David Thoreau and Walden came early into my life, thanks to my mother, a boldly independent career woman who must have felt oppressed by her era’s strictures of feminine married domesticity. She had a favorite quote from Walden that she would paraphrase liberally whenever the topic of housework came … Read the rest
I’ve been trying for a while now to come to terms with the emergence of Ta-Nehisi Coates as the clearest voice of black defiance and determination during the police violence outrages of the past couple years. The appeal of Coates’s basic message of empowerment through self-awareness is obvious, but I … Read the rest
(Please enjoy this delightful photo essay by Sherri Hoffman Hoye, who has been a friend of Litkicks for many years but has never felt inspired to contribute an article until she made a recent journey to a town called Red Cloud, Nebraska … — Levi)
I grew up in rural … Read the rest
