Thursday, July 5, 2012

Link Corral: Cheryl Strayed in DC; Baseball Poem on Redux

Problems with the blogging program which has delayed my posting…grr! 

Hope everyone had a nice Fourth.  Back in my impressionable youth, I read Follow My Leader, where a boy goes blind because his friend throws a firecracker at him, so I’m excessively cautious.  (Actually, it’s very nice to see that the book is still in print, especially since it was originally published in the 1950s. After the firecracker incident, the boy learns how to cope with being blind, eventually ending up with a guide dog.  A good hunk of the Amazon reader reviews are by old-timers like me, gushing about reading the book back in grade school!)

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Some unfinished business from my previous post about power and the storm…thanks to Cheryl Aubin, I have been reminded of the four basic “conflicts” (which are not themes at all, though I’m certain that’s how they were presented to us at our crackerjack school; always so exciting to be discussing Jack London because you instantly recognized “man vs. nature”):

Man against man
Man against nature
Man against society
Man against himself

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Mark your calendar:  Cheryl Strayed, author of WILD and the beloved “Sugar” of the “Dear Sugar” column on The Rumpus, will be appearing at Politics & Prose bookstore on August 10, 7PM.  I’ll be there!  Details here.


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New on Redux:  2 poems by Julie L. Moore, one of which brings the intersection of two of my interests, baseball and the Midwest:

…They are losing by a lot of runs.
It’s hot as Texas as the sun bakes
the boys’ skin like dough,
as they sweat like pepperoni.
Our attention is, to say the least,
divided. …

Work-in-Progress

DC-area author Leslie Pietrzyk explores the creative process and all things literary.