by Preeta Samarasan
Before I became a mother, I thought I’d take my child(ren) back to Malaysia for Deepavali every year. For various reasons, I haven’t made that particular trip with my daughter since she was born in 2009, although we’ve been to Malaysia three times as a family. On Deepavali day this year, I found myself once again trying to assuage my homesickness by listening to old Tamil songs on YouTube (be warned, unless you grew up watching Tamil films, you are likely to find these unbearably cheesy) and performing the meagre rituals I’ve been able to inject into our rural French lives.
Continue Reading
by Marshall Walker Lee
October’s the thick, sticky middle of my stuff season. I long to see the leaves flaming and falling on the Leelanau Peninsula; In the mornings I want sour cherry preserves on my toast and in the evening, after dinner and a walk in the brisk, fragrant airs, I want donuts from the Franklin Mill. Now that I don’t own a car I find myself fantasizing about a particular stretch of I-75, a corridor that begins north of Wolverine and runs 30 or so miles to the southern anchorage of the Mackinac Bridge, the largest steel suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere, a cobalt-and-cream behemoth, every bit as lovely as the Golden Gate. Give me a Detroit-made Corvette ZR-1 and I could tear that road to shreds.
Continue Reading
nonfiction by Tiya Miles
Here in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest, waterways were especially pivotal to Underground Railroad history, and movement to and across those waters highlights the remarkable bravery, determination, and resourcefulness of escaping slaves as well as their allies. The Old Northwest (the Midwestern territory designated by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787) was central ground for abolitionist struggle in the middle decades of the nineteenth century because of its location on two liquid borders. The line between the slaveholding country of the U.S. and the free realm of British-controlled Upper Canada (or Canada West), and the line between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio flowed through this region in the form of water.[2] The winding rivers and ample lakes that characterized the area’s geography and marked the boundaries between and among colonial-European states and Native nations also became physical markers, signs, and routes of the Underground Railroad.
Continue Reading
by Ann Marie Thornburg
Writing, it has been said, can sometimes feel like a lonely calling. It is exhilarating to roam around in your mind, but you might get tired or lost under that gaping blue sky. So you return to the world that surrounds you and revel in its many and varied gifts. And you return, too, to those writers who sustain and inspire you. They unfailingly reorient you toward your craft, your art, your humble and hopeful strivings toward doing something that might be meaningful.
Continue Reading
