I was honored to be asked by the Chicago Tribune (Printers Row) to reflect on Maya Angelou and her dazzling career. I re-read and read newly. I watched more than two dozen interviews. And over and again, as I worked on the piece, I watched the great life force that was Maya Angelou read her best poem, "And Still I Rise." I encourage you to listen, too. It will change your day. Put some jazz into your shoes.
My piece begins like this:
She bought her clothes for their colors in secondhand shops — "beautiful reds and oranges, and greens and pinks, and teals and turquoise" — and wore them in happy mismatch. She danced feathers and a few sequins to Alvin Ailey's leopard print G-string — shaking everything she had. She spoke French, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Fanti and easily (mesmerizingly) recited John Donne, William Shakespeare, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, even Publius Terentius Afer, an African slave born nearly 200 years before Christ.
This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.
She worked the Melrose Record Shop selling John Lee Hooker and Charlie Parker; sang her heart out at the Purple Onion; toured Europe as the premier dancer in "Porgy and Bess"; lived in a houseboat commune with "an icthyologist, a musician, a wife, and an inventor"; and once described her life, to a rapt Merv Griffin, as one in which she'd been "obliged to be clever, to dance quickly, to edge-walk."
She brought poetic intimacy to the political; compassion to the margins; fervor to the campaigns of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Barack Obama; and smothered chicken, smoked pork chops and spoon bread to tables wrapped by friends.
A photograph, Marisa Silver writes at the end of her new novel, is “an alchemy of fact and invention that produces something recognizable as truth. But it is not the truth."It is as if Silver is writing about her own new novel here—about the melding of history and imagination, probability and conjecture that frames Mary Coin. The story turns around the iconic Depression-era photograph known by most as “Migrant Mother”—that young mother in a roadside tent, those distance-seeking eyes, those two dirty children snuggling away from the scrutinizing thievery of the camera’s lens. “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.” That’s the caption you’ll find if you search for the photo on the Library of Congress site. And then you’ll find this explanation, written by the photographer herself, Dorothea Lange.....
Read more...A novel in stories, a good one, is like a well-built house on a breeze-infused day—windows open, doors unlocked. Stand in the right place, and you’ll feel the stir. You’ll see surfaces give way to shadows, sunlight pool and recede. You’ll see that flicker just beyond—in the far room, at the turn of the stairs, back among the orchids in the broad bay window. The floor is solid. The walls are plumb. Little else is absolute.When It Happens to You, the first book-length fiction by the actress Molly Ringwald, is a well-made house—thoughtfully designed, conscientiously crafted, open to the intrigues of weather. A fraying marriage stands at its core—a philandering husband, a wounded wife, an angry six-year-old daughter, and a suite of frozen embryos. The old woman next door, a playmate’s mom, a fallen TV personality, a young violin teacher, and a cross-dressing child will all, somehow, be implicated in the familial mess—or feel the reverberating consequences. Regret will hang heavy, but it will not cure.
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