In the winter of 1993, travel writer and essayist Edward Hoagland was travelling in Eastern Africa on assignment for Harper’s Magazine. He had visited the region twice before, in the years 1976 and 1977. This time, however, a civil war was raging in Sudan and a crippling famine gripped the region. Political, ethnic and religious conflict had created a web of alliances that divided the country, making travel outside the cities a dangerous and complicated ordeal. As he ventured into famine zones alongside NGO
(non-governmental organizations)
aid groups, Mr.
When Diane Wolkstein’s book, The Magic Orange Tree and other Haitian Folktales was published in 1978, it became a favorite among American storytellers in the early years of a storytelling renaissance in which I have been privileged to participate. Sitting with Diane at a story event in Appalachia in 1981, she insisted I learn the song the way she’d heard it in Haiti, and gave me permission to tell and record the title story.
Diane, folklorist and mythologist and one of the foremost scholars of the contemporary storytelling movement in America, died Jan.
SQuire Rushnell’s latest book, Divine Alignment (2012, Simon & Schuster Inc.), is the fifth book in his Godwink series, the term he coined to describe how life’s un-coincidental coincidences all come together to create a purpose in our lives. Once again he rejects the idea that we are all “twigs floating down a river to destinations unknown.” Instead, he believes these coincidences, or godwinks, have divine underpinnings.
Poetry Reading
The last literary event of the summer at the West Tisbury Library is a joint poetry reading with part-time resident Fanny Howe and visiting writer Katie Peterson. Ms. Peterson’s debut poetry collection, This One Tree (2006), was awarded the New Issues Poetry Prize by William Olson. She teaches in the English Department at Tufts University.
Fanny Howe has written over 20 books of poetry and prose. She lives in West Tisbury and will be teaching at University of Massachusetts Boston in the fall.
Daily newspapers shuttered. Radio and TV networks swimming in red ink. Reporters and editors enduring widespread buyouts and layoffs.
This was the landscape of the news business that Boston University professor Christopher B. Daly confronted as he began researching the history of American journalism about eight years ago. It occurred to him that he just might end up having to write the obituary of American journalism.
p> Summer Is. By M. Lesnikowski, 21 pages, Southern Lion Books, $20. Vineyard-born artist Molly Lesnikowski, who has written two earlier children's books, has turned her pen and paintbrush to the Island, at last.