This is the third installment about my multi-section poem responding to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Here are links to parts 1 and 2. Slidell was a suburb when I lived there, a bedroom community. Most adults worked in New Orleans like my parents did. They drove the Twin Spans or Highway 11 across the … Continue reading Reclamation Part 3
Learning to Holiday
"The Cajun Night Before Christmas" by Trosclair If I do the math, I guess I've been celebrating Christmas now longer than I didn't, though I'm still not really comfortable with it. I was raised a Jehovah's Witness and didn't leave the church until I was 26 but those are the years when you learn how … Continue reading Learning to Holiday
Reclamation Part 2
This is the second installment about “Reclamation,” a response poem to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Part 1 is here. We moved around a lot when I was young—by the time I started second grade I’d been in four schools in two states—but when we got to Slidell, we stayed. We moved there in the … Continue reading Reclamation Part 2
Search for community, search for beauty
"Seraphim" by Patricia Spears Jones The last time I took a fiction workshop I wrote a not very fictional story about a person leaving the only church he’d ever known and trying to work through the loss that came with the decision. It wasn’t a good story, but also the audience (my classmates) mostly didn’t … Continue reading Search for community, search for beauty
Reclamation Part 1
The story of Robert Frost’s appearance at John F Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 goes something like this. Frost had endorsed Kennedy during his presidential run, and Kennedy had used an adapted form of the final stanza of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as part of his stump speech. He reportedly would close it … Continue reading Reclamation Part 1
