No other creature holds the same romance
in the minds of Icelanders as herring.
—Anita Elefson, historian, Herring Era Museum
I sit at a tiny coffeehouse nestled on the southern rocky coast of Iceland’s Snaefellsnes Peninsula, a finger of jagged …
Read MoreINTRODUCTION
Barry Lopez is one of the world’s foremost thinkers and writers about human beings and their place on this planet. Few writers have thought more deeply about that relationship or have written more powerfully and eloquently about it. The …
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Sometimes I feel like a goddess
with many hands . . . except human.
One hand is amber-gloved, dripping
with honey, and two constantly shoo
the flies. Two hands play “Miss
Mary Mack” while two pairs clap
to “Rockin’
My mother hanging sheets on a line
in ’47. The wind believes it won the war,
just like the rest of America,
and swirls her black hair in a manner
the photo likes to recall.
Her simple skirt and blouse
Because she lives alone and my hands reach
where hers can’t, she asks of me this favor.
It is narrow and soft, my mother’s back.
When I massage in small circles, my mother
circles her own mother, who
Wir sagen uns Dunkles
—Paul Celan
It began so quietly that no one could hear it.
How to begin a story that can never be told? For a long time, I started to tell the story by not telling …
Read MoreMy truck’s compromised radiator steaming, I pulled off for pepper flakes, expecting nothing more than having to call Triple A if I couldn’t fix the situation. This was in the parking lot of a place called Halfway Barbecue, down on …
Read More1.
Hazel Hicks was the first “None” to graduate Crossley State College as a religion major. Hazel herself thought it nothing special. She thought it an obvious choice for someone like her. Which is to say, a person who took …
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1966
Qingxin remembers that the character 万comes fromin the Oracle Bone Script—a scorpion with large pincers and a poisonous sting at the end of its jointed tail. How does a bug come to mean ten thousand, as in “毛主席万岁”—…
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