It is the way of things that, in the week I was reading and writing about Audre Lorde’s first essay in Sister Outsider, I met her in another book too. In “The History of Black People” from Magical Negro (2019), Morgan Parker writes: “If you cut open my heart,
How anxious I was, about rereading this story; I had confused it with “In the Fall”, a heart-breaking story about Scott, a horse (you know the rule about spoilers and animal stories, eh?) who was once all black but became grey around the eyes by the time that story
The laundry hangs on the clothesline in the background, while Alistair MacLeod speaks to his wife Anita about what their life was like when the kids were young. It’s there, in the film “Reading Alistair MacLeod”, that I see Anita patiently waiting, while he pulls out a small stack
Those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Feel free to skip past the section that I've titled The Underneath, written with those who know the story-or other
Rereading Cat’s Eye while rereading Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Margaret Atwood emphasized the parallels between the narrator’s and author’s childhoods. I was a teenager when I read Cat’s Eye for the first time; I would have had no idea that Elaine’s childhood of lakes and insects was Peggy’s childhood
