Dispatches from Solitude

It’s here. Edited by Bradford Morrow, the 75th Issue of Conjunctions titled, Dispatches from Solitude.

While plagues have historically fostered every kind of loss—of freedom, of livelihood, of hope, of life itself—the isolation of grim eras such as the one we are now experiencing can also provoke introspection, fresh curiosity, and, with luck and mettle, singular creativity. If necessity is the mother of invention, so can deprivation generate art that might not otherwise have come into being, the constraints of sequestration thus giving rise to many voices and visions.

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Three Approaches To Reading

Despite my apparent predilection for more hoary classics, big fat books, quirky metafiction, and overlooked international texts, I find great relief in traditional narratives with calm, easy narratives involving real people challenged by real experiences and real events .. even if real is assuredly fiction. I suspect that reading-for-pleasure is still a significant element in my psyche, periodically contending with my curiosity for more challenging forms of literature which admittedly may be fulfilling an academic rather than a personal need.

Here are three books I have recently read, each of which suggests a different approach to reading.

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I Liked Silas Marner

What was the first serious novel you read (or were forced to read) as a young person?

Although I read Shakespeare’s MacBeth when I was in the third grade, I was sent home from show-and-tell with a note suggesting that my parents limit my reading to approved third grade texts. My father was a teacher so I suspect he understood the wisdom of this advice but my mother was a book-a-day reader and I imagine she was less enthusiastic about reining in my literary investigations.

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