I first read Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr back in 2022, and immediately fell in love it with it. I recently picked up it back up and reread it. During this read through, I kept thinking about the ways that death impacts all of us and the ways that memory sustains us, topics I have been looking at fairly often over … Read More “Life’s an exercise in making memories”: Our Sustained Existence
Earlier this semester, Jadyn DeWald asked me to participate in a reading on campus. He asked me to do this a couple of years ago, and for that I event I wrote my short story “Paper.” Following that reading, I also wrote a post on the process behind composing the short story. For this semester’s reading, I debated what to read. I kept oscillating … Read More “This Story is Continuing to Develop”
Last year, I read Magda Szabó’s Kaitlin Street, and after finishing it, I knew that I wanted to teach because of the ways that the novel explores themes of memory, love, family, and more during turbulent times. As I constructed my syllabus for “The Reverberations of World War II,” I toyed with adding Szabó’s Abigail, a novel about a young girl at a boarding school in Hungary during … Read More Memory of the Past in Magda Szabó’s “Katalin Street”
+ epideictic, funeral, memory, rhetoric
Last week, I attended a memorial service for a student who recently passed away. I arrived early, planning to take a seat and pay my respects to a student who always made everyone around them better, asking about others even while they were dealing with the decline in their own health and physicality. When I entered the space, I expected to just sit and … Read More Extending Our Roots to One Another
On a recent trip, I stopped for coffee in Monticello, Georgia, a small town with a population of around 2,500 about 60 miles southeast of Atlanta. As with many older, small towns, everything centered around the town square, a space with the courthouse, shops, an inn, and other businesses. The middle of the square, where the old courthouse once stood, had become a small … Read More The Juxtaposition of Memory in Public Space
Interminable Rambling 