Blog Archives - Marianne Murphy Zarzana

Making Love and Revolution: Abigail and John Adams

5/19/2011

Today, at the end of a wonderful road trip from Marshall to Tucson and back, Jim and I finished reading aloud First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis. We both give it five stars.

Part biography, part political history, and part love story, this book's a refreshing read. It brings to life the founders of our nation with all their hopes, dreams, warts, vanities, and full humanity. Over the years, Abigail and John exchanged over 1,200 letters, and Ellis selects their own words to weave a strong narrative.

If you want to learn more about the American Revolution, the republic's dicey early years, and America's preeminent first couple, this book will take you on a great ride.

How You Know

5/17/2011

American Life in Poetry: Column 321

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

For me, the most worthwhile poetry is that which reaches out and connects with a great number of people, and this one, by Joe Mills of North Carolina, does just that. Every parent gets questions like the one at the center of this poem.

How You Know

How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning,” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The difficulty
with love, I want to say, is sometimes
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived
or left. Love is the elephant and we
are the blind mice unable to understand
the whole. I want to say love is this
desire to help even when I know I can’t,
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars,
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes,
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things
she has asked about over the years, all
those phenomena whose daily existence
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head.
I don’t even know how to match my socks.
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says,
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Joe Mills, whose most recent book of poetry is Love and Other Collisions, Press 53, 2010. Poem reprinted fromRattle, Vol. 16, no. 1, Summer 2010, by permission of Joe Mills and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

Off to See the Wizard...

5/15/2011

Today is the birthday of the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, according to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

In 1900, Baum wrote the book that made him famous, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The book began as a story he told to some neighborhood children; Frank thought it was so good that he stopped in the middle of the story to go start writing it down. The story of Dorothy, her dog Toto, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man was an instant classic.

Frank Baum wrote, "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."

Last summer we were thrilled when our daughter Elaine gave us tickets for our wedding anniversary to see the wonderful musical Wicked, based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, a re-telling of the 1939 film of Baum's classic story from the perspective of the witches of the Land of Oz.

What memories do you have of watching The Wizard of Oz or reading the book? What books have you enjoyed that re-imagined a classic story from a whole new perspective?

My husband, a Brit lit specialist, and I love Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, so when I saw a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith for sale at our SMSU campus bookstore, I couldn't resist. I haven't read it yet, but I'm prepared for the laughs and the ride I know it will provide. Mary Ellen Quinn writes on amazon.com: "Mash-ups using literary classics that are freely available on the Web may become a whole new genre." I say, why not?

The Journey

5/14/2011

"The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles . . . only by a spiritual journey . . . by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home." - Wendell Berry

"Chernobyl Year" by Jehanne Dubrow

5/13/2011

American Life in Poetry: Column 320
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

When I was a little boy, the fear of polio hung over my summers, keeping me away from the swimming pool. Atomic energy was then in its infancy. It had defeated Japan and seemed to be America’s friend. Jehanne Dubrow, who lives and teaches in Maryland, is much younger than I, and she grew up under the fearsome cloud of what atomic energy was to become.

Chernobyl Year

We dreamed of glowing children,
their throats alive and cancerous,
their eyes like lightning in the dark.

We were uneasy in our skins,
sixth grade, a year for blowing up,
for learning that nothing contains

that heat which comes from growing,
the way our parents seemed at once
both tall as cooling towers and crushed

beneath the pressure of small things--
family dinners, the evening news,
the dead voice of the dial tone.

Even the ground was ticking.
The parts that grew grew poison.
Whatever we ate became a stone.

Whatever we said was love became
plutonium, became a spark
of panic in the buried world.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Jehanne Dubrow, whose most recent book of poems is Stateside, Northwestern Univ. Press, 2010. Poem reprinted from West Branch, No. 66, 2010, by permission of Jehanne Dubrow and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

J. Patrick Lewis to Serve as Children's Poet Laureate

5/13/2011

The Poetry Foundation announced yesterday that poet J. Patrick Lewis will serve as the nation’s third Children’s Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children’s Poetry to the Poetry Foundation for a two-year tenure. The award, which includes a $25,000 cash prize, aims to raise awareness that children have a natural receptivity to poetry and are its most appreciative audience, especially when poems are written specifically for them.

As a child, I fell in love with the music and magic of the countless poems my parents read to me. Some of my favorites, just to name a few, were: "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear," "The Land of Counterpane" by Robert Louis Stevenson, and "The Raggedy Man" by James Whitcomb Riley.

What were some of your favorite poems as a child? What poems do you like to read today to your own children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or godchildren?

If You Were Stranded on a Desert Island...

5/11/2011

The other day Kerri Miller, host of "Midmorning" and "Talking Volumes" on Minnesota Public Radio posed these questions to listeners: "Every book lover has a favorite literary character, but what if you had to be stranded on a desert island with that character? Who would it be, and why?"

Here are some of the listener responses: Robinson Crusoe (expected, right?), Gandalf, Mr. Darcy, James Bond, Jane Eyre, and Atticus Finch. The reasons people gave for choosing their particular character were multi-faceted and made for a fascinating conversation. You can access the full podcast by clicking on Kerri's name above.

So who would you choose? And why?

First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis

5/10/2011

Today Jim and I started reading together the book First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian. Wonderful writing and fascinating story of American history seen through the relationship of Abigail and John, what we'd call a power couple today.

The last book we read together was Julia Child's My Life in France, which revealed much about French cooking but also the fascinating love story of Julia and Paul Child. Now we've headed back in time to travel through the American Revolution with Abigail and John. They left behind about 1,200 letters that Ellis uses as primary sources to tell his story. A great read so far.

Yellow Medicine Review at SMSU

5/9/2011

In 2008, thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, on behalf of the Difficult Dialogues Initiative on the campus of Southwest Minnesota State University, a new publication, Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought, was launched by Dr. Judy Wilson, Associate Professor of English at SMSU.

The title, Yellow Medicine Review, incorporates the name of a river in Southwest Minnesota. According to the YMR website, "The Dakota came together at the river to dig the yellow root of a special plant that was used for medicinal purposes, for healing. Such is the spirit of Yellow Medicine Review."

The website notes that "Yellow Medicine Review opens a new pathway for scholarly and creative expression. New paths lead to new places, into the territory where emerging voices and visions are beginning to take their places among already established indigenous writers, artists and scholars."

YMR encourages submissions from indigenous perspectives in the area of fiction, poetry, scholarly essays, and art. The journal defines indigenous universally as representative of all pre-colonial peoples and is published twice yearly. The Spring 2011 issue is now available.

See the website for details, to order single copies, and for subscription information.
You may also order current and past issues via Yellow Medicine Review's Storefront at Amazon.com.

If you've already read YMR, I encourage you to post a comment here with your feedback.

Happy Mother's Day

5/8/2011

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there! I am grateful for my mother, Eileen Ahern Murphy, for many reasons but especially for how she always encouraged my passion for writing. She read to all six of us kids, she always took us to the library, and she made reading seem magical. She is a voracious reader herself. I can recall her at the breakfast table reading the local newspaper, the Chicago newspapers, and the Christian Science Monitor. She loved to read Erma Bombeck's column, "At Wit's End," for the humorous slant she gave to family life. And she never missed reading Ellen Goodman's column covering the cultural and political topics of the day with insight and common sense. One of her all-time favorite writers is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of both Piltdown Man and Peking Man. Here is her favorite quote by him:

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

What part did your mother play in you becoming someone who loves to read and write?