This morning I found a faded copy of a newspaper photo, certainly from the old Society Page of a Richmond Virginia daily, showing a group of three young people, two men and a woman, marching down Monument Avenue in that city, the broad magisterial artery where the greats of the Confederacy are memorialized in huge marble statues.
Blog Posts on Kentucky
Digging Up The Bones – The Blue Box
As I prepare for publication next month, I face the daunting task of listing all the material I’ve used in The Blue Box, many letters, speeches, bills of sale, wills and genealogies that were stored in the blue box itself.
Coming Soon: The Blue Box, Three Lives in Letters
The long waits publishing entrails always make me wonder why writers sometimes refer to their new books as their children; surely no pregnancy lasts two years or more, and few professional writers wait to see their next book launched before laboring mightily to begin the next one.
Just A Girl From Kentucky
There is a thread connecting Jill Abramson to the girl buried in my woods: both confident, outspoken, strong women, they faced an opposition they perhaps could not have imagined because it is almost never mentioned: the opposition of the male establishment, in the person of a famous publisher or in the person of a nameless drunk, who made them examples of the price we must still be prepared to pay.
And Now It’s Running!
The Wolf Pen Mill millstone is turning for the first time in three decades!
Going Home
How do we teach girls the daring they need to leave home? Perhaps it depends on dismissing some of the sentimental clouds that obscure the reality of home, and remembering that Sting’s north of England was a place of grime and hard work.
But he clearly was born with the need and the drive to get out. Is this something that comes naturally, without encouragement, to boys? What are our girls missing?
Neighbors…
The truth is that progressive ideas, whether about equality or water quality, have never taken root here; those are the seeds that fall on rocky ground, sprout and rapidly wither.
Icebox to Refrigerator
When I was growing up in Kentucky, an enormous wooden box with chrome handles on its many doors crouched in the back pantry, a dark room that I felt was not really safe. Why? Probably just the darkness, the many closed cupboards, and the icebox, which I didn’t know how to name.
Ten Favorites: Can We Still Grind Corn?
Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago.
Can We Still Grind Corn? Wolf Pen Mill, Kentucky
Stream water will gush over the wheel, and it will turn, and the stones will grind, and the old building will shake, just as it was all intended to do more than 150 years ago.