This week on StoryWeb: Chad Everett’s TV show, Medical Center . If only I could start with the theme song to Medical Center ! If I were telling you this story in person, I’d risk humming a few bars, complete with an ambulance-like scream of notes. But alas, I’m left with mere words to conjure up for you the magic that was Medical Center, an hour-long weekly hospital drama starring Chad Everett as the hip, young Dr. Joe Gannon. Chad Everett and Medical Center were literally my claims to fame when...
Mar 25, 2018•15 min
This week on StoryWeb: Cynthia Morris’s novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach . What do you get when you combine time travel, intriguing literary history, Paris, and romance? Why, Cynthia Morris’s novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach, of course! I know Cynthia from participating regularly in what she previously called Free Write Flings, month-long excursions that have “flingers” writing freely for fifteen minutes each day in response to various “prompts.” I’ve dipped into Cynthia’s Free Write Flings twice a year f...
Mar 12, 2018•12 min
This week on StoryWeb: James H. Cone’s book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare . It has been more than 25 years since I read Rev. James H. Cone’s book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. I was teaching an English 101 course focused on the writing of the Civil Rights Movement, and I wanted to learn more about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X and to understand better the relationship between them, the intersection points, if any, between th...
Feb 25, 2018•8 min
This week on StoryWeb: Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X . Malcolm X wrote his famed autobiography in collaboration with African American journalist Alex Haley (most famous for his epic book Roots: The Saga of an American Family ). If you are one of the many Americans who believe Malcolm X espoused violence, even hate, I urge you to read this compelling book. It reveals Malcolm X as a much more nuanced thinker and leader than depicted in mainstream media. The Autobi...
Feb 11, 2018•8 min
This week on StoryWeb: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Birmingham, Alabama, protesting racism and racial segregation in the city. He was arrested on Good Friday for demonstrating, which a circuit court judge had prohibited. While he was in solitary confinement, Dr. King wrote what is arguably the most important letter in American history. It was addressed to the white clergy of Birmingham, who had publicly crit...
Feb 04, 2018•13 min
This week on StoryWeb, Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles . Born in 1876, Susan Glaspell was a prominent novelist, short story writer, journalist, biographer, actress, and, most notably, playwright, winning the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Alison’s House. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the ground-breaking Provincetown Players, widely known as the first modern American theater company. In fact, it was Glaspell who discovered dramatist Eugene O’Neill as she was searching f...
Jan 30, 2018•1 hr 6 min
This week on StoryWeb: Elizabeth Strout’s book Olive Kitteridge . Has there ever been a grimmer, more taciturn main character in a book than Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge? We’ve all known someone like Olive, someone who looks like she’s just bitten into a lemon, someone for whom a kind of self-righteous grumpiness rules the day. What’s so unlikely is to have such a Gloomy Gus serve as the focal point of a book. And it must be said: Olive Kitteridge is not a sympathetic character. As reader...
Jan 21, 2018•7 min
This week on StoryWeb: Emily Dickinson’s Poem 372, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” For Patricia and our students Emily Dickinson’s Poem 372 is not – technically speaking – a story. And Dickinson is not a storyteller per se. But her nearly 1,800 poems speak deeply and powerfully to the human condition. They give a still unparalleled account of what it is to be human. Poem 372 does have some elements of storytelling. Instead of “once upon a time,” we get “after this, then this.” And t...
Jan 07, 2018•8 min
This week on StoryWeb: James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” James Joyce’s “The Dead” is widely considered to be his best short story, called by the New York Times “just about the finest short story in the English language" and by T.S. Eliot as one of the greatest short stories ever written. The storyline is simple enough: a long-married Irish couple -- Gretta and Gabriel Conroy – attend a lavish dinner party thrown by his aunts in celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6). At the par...
Dec 31, 2017•23 min
This week on StoryWeb: Richard Thompson’s song “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” For Jim, in honor of his birthday My husband, Jim, and I love this song by Richard Thompson and its signature line, “red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme.” In fact, the first concert we saw together was Thompson playing at the Boulder Theater, and of course, I sported a black leather motorcycle jacket. When Thompson sang the song, one of his most popular, and got to this particular line, Jim called out...
Dec 24, 2017•9 min
This week on StoryWeb: Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In honor of the winter solstice Without a doubt, the most famous poem about winter is Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In fact, Garrison Keillor says that this is perhaps the single most famous poem of any kind in the twentieth century. Frost himself called the poem “my best bid for remembrance.” Written nearly in the blink of an eye in June 1922 after Frost had been up all night finishing hi...
Dec 17, 2017•9 min
This week on StoryWeb: Rick Nelson’s song “Garden Party.” For Julia, in honor of her birthday In 1972, my two-year-old sister could sing all the words to this Rick Nelson hit. Why she latched on to this particular song when it came on the car radio none of us will ever know – not even Julia. She would sit in her car seat – not one of the safety-conscious car seats of today – and practically dance in her seat, legs and arms bopping to the beat. So “Garden Party” has a special place in my memories...
Dec 10, 2017•7 min
This week on Story Web: the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo . I suppose I must have a dark sense of humor indeed to think of the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo as a comedy – even if I do realize that it is a dark comedy. I mean, what can you say about someone who shrieks, then laughs uproariously, at the woodchipper scene? Yes, Fargo is a weird and dark tale – from William H. Macy as Jerry Lundegaard, the pathetic car dealership manager who pays two sleazy criminals to kidnap his wife, to Steve Buscemi as ...
Dec 03, 2017•8 min
This week on StoryWeb: Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz,” A story contained in sixteen short lines of poetry – that is Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” This autobiographical poem tells of a little boy dancing with his drunk father as his frowning mother looks on. How to read this poem? Is the speaker a man looking back at his drunken father with affection or remembering the fear he felt at his father’s whiskey binges? Love and fear simultaneously? There is mixed, conflicted affectio...
Nov 26, 2017•7 min
Lydia Maria Child: “Over the River and Through the Wood” In the 19th century, Lydia Maria Child’s name was nearly a household word. An outspoken abolitionist, women’s rights supporter, and crusader for Native American rights, Child was also a prolific author. A journalist and editor, she wrote novels and short stories (often using fiction to express her anti-slavery views), poems and children’s books, and domestic manuals for wives and mothers. Her most famous book – which went into 33 printings...
Nov 19, 2017•8 min
This week on StoryWeb: Lee Smith’s memoir, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life . I first fell in love with Lee Smith’s fiction nearly thirty years ago when I was a cook at Le Conte Lodge in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. On my afternoons off, I’d sit on my cabin porch, reading first Lee’s novel Oral History, later her novel Fair and Tender Ladies. She created characters with such powerful voices – women and men of Appalachia who spin yarns through story and song. Granny Younger’s voice and Ivy ...
Nov 12, 2017•7 min
This week on StoryWeb: Jill Ker Conway’s memoir The Road from Coorain . The Road from Coorain traces the unlikely story of young Jill Ker’s journey from a sheep station in the western grasslands of New South Wales, Australia, to the position of president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Journeys of such epic proportions are rare even for the increasingly ubiquitous genre of memoir. But the young Jill – hemmed in by the extreme drudgery of sheep farming, the tedium of the dry, parc...
Nov 05, 2017•6 min
This week on StoryWeb: Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” For this spooky Halloween edition of StoryWeb, I’m featuring Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Everyone knows this haunting poem – but less well known is Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he explains how he quite methodically wrote the poem. Now “The Raven,” you have to understand, made a splash. Poe was a relatively unknown writer when he published the poem in January 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror and again the ne...
Oct 29, 2017•15 min
This week on StoryWeb: Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas . Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is known for her stunning self-portraits. You might not think of her immediately as a painter who tells stories through her art. Indeed, you could be forgiven if you think of her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, as the more narrative painter of the two. After all, his paintings told tales of the Mexican Revolution. But Kahlo’s paintings tell a tale – the same tale – over and over again, nearly obsessively, ...
Oct 22, 2017•12 min
This week on StoryWeb: The Partridge Family’s song “I Think I Love You.” Fifth grade – and the song I can’t get out of my head is “I Think I Love You.” Every girl at Griffith Elementary School – make it every girl at schools around the United States – feels the same way. How we swooned over David Cassidy, the teen idol who played a made-for-TV band’s lead singer. The fictional band was The Partridge Family, based loosely on the real-life Cowsills, a family pop band popular in the late ’60s. The ...
Oct 15, 2017•7 min
This week on StoryWeb: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales . Whan that aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour. . . . Oh, how I loved learning how to recite these opening lines to “The Prologue” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. While I was by no means a scholar of medieval literature (modern literature being far more to my taste, as you know if you are a devoted StoryW...
Oct 08, 2017•7 min
This week on StoryWeb: Dolly Parton’s song “Coat of Many Colors.” Call it maudlin or sentimental, but Dolly Parton’s song “Coat of Many Colors” is undeniably an American classic, so much so that it was adapted to a made-for-television movie in 2015 and to a sequel, “Christmas of Many Colors,” in 2016. The song is not particularly innovative artistically speaking. It doesn’t push the envelope in any way. And yet . . . it tells the story of the Parton family so honestly, vividly, and memorably – a...
Oct 01, 2017•11 min
This week on StoryWeb: Alex Haley’s book Roots . In January 1977 when I was sixteen, I joined 130 million Americans to watch the television miniseries based on Alex Haley’s book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It was broadcast eight consecutive nights, and like countless other viewers, I was glued to the TV set every night. I was there, front row, center, for every episode. The concluding episode still ranks as having the third largest audience in television history. Who can forget Kunta ...
Sep 24, 2017•10 min
This week on StoryWeb: Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room.” I’ve featured Elizabeth Bishop previously on StoryWeb. “The Moose” – set in Bishop’s home province of Nova Scotia – is one of my favorite poems, as it tells so powerfully the ordinary – but extraordinary – experience we all have from time to time: an encounter with wild life, with the “wild life.” Set in 1918 and written in 1976, “In the Waiting Room” – set in another of Bishop’s childhood locales, Worcester, Massachusetts – a...
Sep 17, 2017•9 min
This week on StoryWeb: Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest . Really, has there ever been a play funnier than Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest ? No matter how you experience it – by reading the play, seeing it performed live, or watching one of the film adaptations – you’re sure to be splitting your sides with laughter in no time. Even if you’ve seen the play or one of the films before, you’ll laugh just as hard – maybe even harder – than you did the first time you saw...
Sep 10, 2017•8 min
This week on StoryWeb: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah . Nigerian Chinua Achebe was the first African writer to publish a major novel in English – a novel in the colonial master’s language. Published in 1958, Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo and his traditional Igbo village and the devastating transformation it undergoes with the arrival of British colonialists. But the novel is every bit as much about Okonkwo as a tragic hero – his story regardless of time and place – as...
Sep 03, 2017•7 min
This week on StoryWeb: Langston Hughes’s poem “Theme for English B.” Oh, how I love this poem! It packs so much into a short space. Published on its own in 1949, it was included in Langston Hughes’s 1951 collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. Though it gains more resonance when taken with the entire collection of Hughes’s bebop poetry, it also stands successfully on its own. In “Theme for English B,” Hughes imagines a 22-year-old black student—a transplant from North Carolina – living at the H...
Aug 21, 2017•6 min
This week on StoryWeb: Langston Hughes’s book of poems Montage of a Dream Deferred. I play it cool And dig all jive That’s the reason I stay alive. My motto As I live and learn Is dig and be dug in return. So goes the poem “Motto” in Langston Hughes’s 1951 jazz collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. The list of my favorite Langston Hughes poems would be long indeed, but no volume of his poetry makes my heart sing like Montage of a Dream Deferred . Not only does it include justly famous poems l...
Aug 13, 2017•11 min
This week on StoryWeb: Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor . While “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Moby-Dick get a lot of attention (and are taught frequently in high school and college classes), fans of Herman Melville’s work think a lot about a piece he was writing at the end of his life. Though Melville had been working on the novella Billy Budd, Sailor for the last five years of his life, it appears that he may not have finished it when he died in 1891. It’s surprising that Melville h...
Aug 06, 2017•24 min
This week on StoryWeb: Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California.” In so many ways – both in his poetry and in his interviews – Allen Ginsberg made clear that he owed a great debt to Walt Whitman. Indeed, Ginsberg’s most famous poem, “Howl,” stands as a nearly direct response to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” published in 1855, a century before “Howl.” But perhaps nowhere does Ginsberg make their kinship clearer than in his 1955 poem “A Supermarket in California.” In what seems at fir...
Jul 30, 2017•7 min•Ep. 145
