The best way to brighten your week with love #poetry #MondayBlogs

Illustration: Émile Friant "Study for Les Amoureux / Soir d'automne" (Lovers / Autumn evening) 1888

Polemics by Jim McGarrah

Here’s a mistake I frequently make,

I say poems are made from words. 

But that is to say killing is an ordinary

task in war or all the tools for every job

come from Sears. Tonight, my poem

works as a bartender who, like an acrobat, 

leaps on a narrow shelf. Steadied

by one leg and a waitress 

with arms covered in pagan tattoos, 

he retrieves a bottle high

above the bar’s mirror breaking

neither neck nor sweat. Tonight

my poem is love as these two people

brush against each other and hesitate

till all that needs said is said in silence.

Leaves fall from trees constantly

without fearing death. The bartender

doesn’t know this. That’s why, 

drying glasses with a damp towel, he looks

away each time she returns for an order.

 Jim McGarrah's poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of four books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down (2003), When the Stars Go Dark (2009), Breakfast at Denny's (2013), and The Truth About Mangoes (2016), a critically acclaimed memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the 2010 Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and the sequel entitled The End of an Era. His nonfiction books, Off Track and Misdemeanor Outlaw, were published by Blue Heron Book Works of Allentown, PA. Jim is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and a founding editor of RopeWalk Press, as well as the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review. 

Connect with Jim online: https://www.facebook.com/JimMcGarrah.author/

Look behind the mind's eye #Poetry #ThursdayThoughts

Illustration: Wem Town Hall Ghost, public domain

Butter and Bread

by Vincent Francone

Capping a night of long conversation

I said: It’s a certainty that you’ll live 

well after I’m dead.

In an effort at levity, you replied 

that if I died you’d immediately 

join a nunnery 

as if I were Hamlet imploring 

and making reference to 

imaginary whoring.

But why would you want to sacrifice your life

because I had the bad taste to die?

You smiled, said you’d be well taken care of— 

God would be your butter and bread

more than I gave you living or dead.

Vincent Francone was born in 1971.  A veteran of the legendary Aspidistra Bookshop, he spent years as an autodidact before earning a BA from Roosevelt University, where he now teaches first year composition and the occasional literature class, and an MA from Northwestern University.  His work has been published in Rhino, New City, Akashic, and The Oklahoma Review among other journals, and he won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition.  He lives in Chicago with his wife and his Chihuahua, Haruki.  

Connect with Vince online: http://www.vincentfrancone.com

What #value does #music have in the Outlaw Life? @jmcgarra

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The music of the sixties, especially protest music, has ruined all other rock music for me. The era was a time of innovation unlike any other in rock & roll history and I was an impressionable teenager then, overwhelmed by the unique and powerful sounds. It was as if gods tied lightning bolts together and wrestled them apart through thunderous clouds. It was the magic of coming alive once and for always. So much so that everything I hear now seems derivative, either language-wise, thematically, or melody-wise. The only other time in music that I can compare it to as a touchstone is the bebop jazz era that preceded it by a decade or so. Interestingly, both groups of musicians working in both genres rose to fame considered as outlaws in the music world by their contemporaries. It was almost impossible to hear the music on or in conventional venues during their perspective eras.

Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana, John Mayhall, Roger McGuin, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakefield, Leslie West, Keith Richards, Duane Allman, Johnny and Edgar Winters, not to mention the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were doing things with guitars and keyboards and the new synthisizers that the great jazz innovators of the fifties had attempted with horns and pianos (i.e. Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Parker, Mingus, etc.). I still listen to the unprecedented and iconic riffs, finding something I missed every time. It’s almost like reading great poetry over and over again. The same thing is true of Dylan’s imagistic lyrics and the vocal harmonies of the Beatles and Crosby, Still, & Nash.

Along with that is the emotional resonance created by some of the great songs. I can hear the opening notes of Street Fighting Man, Master of War, Eight Miles High, Fortunate Son, or a dozen other songs and be transported instantaneously to a march or a sit in where I was making some anti-war speech and the crowd was roaring. At a time when sex was as casual as shaking hands—just a way to say hello—I can hear Guinevere or Suite Judy Blue Eyes, Girl from the North Country, Spanish Harlem Incident, A Case of You, and be making love to Mary O'Donnell on a blanket at Bear Creek in upstate New York, or Black Magic Woman and be slipping off Roceria’s black lace panties in Mazalan, Mexico. I can hear Strawberry Fields Forever and suddenly be coming down off my first acid trip at 3am over a plate of half-cooked scrambled eggs in a booth at the Big O all-night diner in Owensboro, Kentucky. I can’t listen to Reflections by the Supremes or Paint It Black by the Stones or Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf without finding my way through a maze of jungle somewhere near the DMZ in Vietnam. I can’t hear Whipping Post without remembering Cathy leaving me over for a mediocre musician who had an unlimited supply of good dope and forgiving her because I might have done the same thing.

The very fact that this music was interwoven with the social and cultural revolution that was my history, the time in my life when I worked hardest at finding my own identity, makes it iconic to me. Unlike classical music, or jazz, when I hear this music I remember who I am and why I am and how I got to be this person I am, a Misdemeanor Oulaw. And as I approach my seventh decade of life I’m finally getting to the point that I like who I am…consequently, I will continue to despise Clear Channel radio and the banal imitators that pollute the airwaves pretending the noise they make is somehow original. I’ll climb into my time machine constructed from vinyl and fueled with Rye whiskey (my doctor lets me have one drink every now and then). Once settled behind the wheel, Van Morrison and I may travel Into the Mystic or maybe I’ll Take the Highway with the Marshall Tucker Band. Regardless, my journey will be as free and joyful as it was forty years ago. I guess that’s why they call this music “classic.” And, why I write so often about that time with respect.

Jim McGarrah's poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of four books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down (2003), When the Stars Go Dark (2009), Breakfast at Denny's (2013), and The Truth About Mangoes (2016), a critically acclaimed memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the 2010 Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and the sequel entitled The End of an Era. His nonfiction books, Off Track and Misdemeanor Outlaw, were published by Blue Heron Book Works of Allentown, PA. Jim is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and a founding editor of RopeWalk Press, as well as the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.

The best response to the request for a #love #poem #MondayBlogs

Response to a Request for a Love Poem

by Vincent Francone 

My wife wears her gold earrings in the summer nights

going to dance wearing black looking like the small hours 

her skin the cinnamon of angry skies.

Her eyes match her clothing 

which she wears like fog combing over the skyline.

Her fingers are peninsulas 

her back is a map with rivers from my fingers

her feet hold her to the earth 

her toes are painted like beach-washed stones

her hair falls like empires 

or is coiled like the center of a sunflower.

She wears her hair off her shoulders

and I never fail to lock onto what little memory remains 

of our first careless ardor

while she meanders through our conflict 

taking her time to make up her mind

as assiduously as she works on her make up.

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

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Read a review for Like a Dog: 

A Chicago critic once asked Nelson Algren," Why can't we ever read about happy marriages?" Algren replied, "Because there are none."
Like a Dog shows us the same can be said of the average job. Francone leads us from a purgatorial mail sorting job on the South Side to a rat-infested North Side bookstore (where a budding writer can find a kind of happiness), and finally into academia, where so many writers are forced to labor. Well-told stories, original characters, lots of laughs.

VINCENT FRANCONE: a voice to reckon with #review #memoir

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Review for LIKE A DOG:

Vincent’s colorful escapades in Chicago’s workplace offer the reader witty, dark humor that provides the perfect balance of genuine suspense and Gen-X satire. The book starts out in the Southwest Suburbs with Vincent toiling in dead-end mail sorting job that provides several memorable moments and characters that keep the pages turning. The middle part of the book finds Vincent moving to the North Side and encountering a serious of hilarious encounters with eccentric roommates and questionable residences. Vincent’s time at the storied Aspidstra Book store is where the book really takes off. The various employees and patrons of the book store felt both familiar and timeless. The final portion of the book finds Vincent traversing the world of academia. Rich storytelling combined with razor sharp dialogue painted against the backdrop of 1990's Chicago make this an excellent read, and more importantly, Vincent, a voice to reckon with.

LIKE A DOG:

 

Vincent Francone’s “Like a Dog,” as in “Work like a dog,” is a great read. A working class guy who comes up on the South Side of Chicago and moves north in a quest a better life, Francone takes us on a dazzling tour of minimum wage America over the last couple of decades. He’s has done it all; “I’ve tried telemarketing, copy writing, editing; I managed a courier center, I conducted background checks on potential healthcare employees, and worked in a stock room. . . .” And that’s before he goes to university and winds up, like so many other academics today, as a part-time instructor in a string of economically stressed public colleges. Francone’s descriptions of boring and soul-destroying work, the places where it’s done, and the people who do it are beautifully written, wildl entertaining, deeply poignant, and mysteriously inspiring. This is what it’s like to be alive in these times, “Like a Dog” insists, this is the battlefield of everyday life. These are your adversaries: mindless repetitive work, bored and boring co-workers, feckless bosses, plus your own inclination to work as little as possible, spend every penny you earn right away, and escape from bad job to bad job, without ever climbing any ladder that might lead to better paid if equally meaningless work. Best of all, this post-industrial odyssey down mean streets and corridors to mean offices and classrooms, dingy apartments, and dead end bars is full of gritty life. Francone is a gifted story- teller with a great, street smart voice. His protagonists and characters are brilliantly drawn.. And in their bafflement and self-destructive resistance to the work regieme that claims them they press back in an utterly realistic way against our recession-bred equation of employment, almost any employment, with salvation. Studs Terkel would have loved this book--John McClure, Phd

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

Tales from The Hot Dog Grill #review #cabaret

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Five Star Review for Tales from the Hot Dog Grill by Billy Ehrlacher!

Biting wit....hold the mustard

This is a wonderfully imagined and executed book! A comic, satirical novel disguised as a memoir, it follows the adventures of Jon and Kikki through the underbelly of fast food America paying particular attention to the pomposity of people with power over other people. The author is a seasoned (no pun intended) cabaret performer who uses his biting wit on those whose specialty is making other people's lives miserable, but the reader still emerges with their faith in humankind.

Tales from the Hot Dog Grill: 

"The setting of our tale is Doomsdale" and Jon and Kiki's story goes downhill from there! College students, Jon and Kiki work for the OTHER hot dog stand in Doomsdale and their boss, Wicked Wilma, hires them to go underground and work for the popular competition to discover their secret ingredient....hint: it's not the sauce! A modern day Candide, Jon romps through the absurd world of fast food and concludes it's the WORST of all possible worlds.

About Billy Ehrlacher:

Billy Ehrlacher obtained a bachelor's degree in theatre from DeSales University.  SInce graduating Billy has performed all over the Lehigh Valley as well as in New York City.  Some of his past theatre roles include:  Robert in Ceiling Art, Forrest in Warped Speed Dating, Lab Tech in Women are From Venus Men are From Uranus, Ahmed in Getting Complete, Barry in Lois's Wedding, Mickey Black in Tony & Tina's Wedding, Sal in Tony & Tina's Wedding, Grumio in Babes in Toyland, Al in The Philadelphia, Snout in a Midsummer Night's Dream, Mike in Dinner With Marney, and Etienne in The Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. and Mohameed in The Tale of the Allergist's Wife among many others. He has performed his well received cabaret act at The Duplex Cabaret Theatre, Don't Tell Mama, and The Laurie Beechman Theatre all in New York City.  A civic minded individual Billy is a longtime advocate and a staunch supporterof Downtown Allentown.  In 2012 his efforts were awarded with the 2012 Downtown Ambassador Award.  Billy also  previously hosted his own radio show called, The Billy Show.  He is  presently working on developing not one but two  web soap operas.  One has a working title of The Neighborhood, and the other Dumpster City.  Billy Ehrlacher resides in Allentown, PA.

"Since you asked." Behind the Scenes with #BHBW Mastermind @bathshebamonk

Every fiction writer has a moment... 

...when she realizes she wants to spend her life telling stories, and mine is this: I was seven years old, walking to the library on Saturday morning with my older brother.  I had been reading since I was four and was addicted to reading for escape, and by Saturday morning, I usually had five books, the library’s limit, ready to exchange.  But that week there was one I hadn’t gotten to.  I don’t remember its name; only that the cover was illustrated with sepia drawings of owls and woodland creatures.  On the top of the pile in my arms, it caught my brother’s attention. 

“What’s that one about?” he asked.

My brother never talked to me.  He was two years older, involved in his boy’s life and found my world unworthy of his attention.  When he asked me a question that required more than yes or no, I was determined to impress him.  So I made up a story.  For five minutes, as I spun a yarn about a not-so-wise owl raising a skunk, my brother listened attentively and, unbelievably, laughed.  I suppose if there had been a dancing bear on the cover, I might be wearing tap shoes right now, but a story was what was wanted, and that was that.

My parents had moved from a coal patch near Hazelton, Pennsylvania, and we were living in Bethlehem, the steel Mecca two hours to the south.  My father worked days in the steel mill’s blast furnace and nights in a silk mill.  My mother worked in a sewing factory.  Because they hadn’t the time to make friends in Bethlehem, our entire social life took place on weekends when we drove back to Hazelton to visit our huge extended family. 

It was the early 1970s.  

Many of the underground coal mines in that part of Pennsylvania were closing down, and most of the damage that mining could do to my family had already been done—uncles who died before I knew them, a grandfather who lost an eye in a cave-in, a handsome cousin who dragged an oxygen tank behind him because of black lung.  My family seemed to me to be a stable of beasts of burden, discarded when no longer needed and left to wonder what the hell happened to them; a painful exercise, because pack mules are not trained for introspection. 

But life went on.  A few of the men got jobs in strip mining, running huge steam shovels that scooped the skin off the ground to access the coal near its surface.  It was easier on the men than tunnel mining, but more brutal on the earth, and the landscape of my youth was covered in slate.  

I have sixty-four cousins, all older, so I attended lots of weddings where we children were allowed to drink whiskey sours and eat maraschino cherries till we turned red, then green, and a reception could last for days, the polka band playing on until the last dancer dropped a last dollar bill into the accordion player’s case.  Everyone in my family danced.  It was our way of making recreational conversation.  Talk that didn’t impart practical information was suspect.

Religion permeated every aspect of our life, as it does for all people whose survival is a lottery.  Because my father was Roman Catholic and my mother was a Byzantine Catholic whose church followed the Gregorian calendar, we celebrated every holiday twice: two Christmases, two Easters, two New Years.  Services at my mother’s church, St. Peter’s and Paul’s Ukrainian Church, went on for hours; the priest, resplendent in gold lamé, intoned the service in English first, then in Church Slavonic, then in Latin.  At Sunday supper at my grandfather’s house after church, before we were allowed to start eating, my mother and her sisters would chant an a cappalle prayer that lasted ten minutes.  My mother had sung in the church choir and they all had beautiful voices.  But it shocks me now to remember what we prayed for: that the tunnel mines, which paid better wages, would reopen, and our men, by God’s intercession, could go back to being beasts of burden.

My parents were always exhausted: with three full-time jobs between them, children to support, a house to maintain, and the weekly pilgrimage to the coal region.  

Plus we had taken in a magical, slightly unhinged creature, Babba, my father’s mother, who nicked, scorched, or broke just about every valuable object in our house during manic bouts of housekeeping.  My mother spent hours trying to repair the damage, especially Babba’s biggest offence: filling my head with bizarre ideas about life and fantastical gossip about the other neighborhood Babbas: Mrs. Marzak, Mrs. Horwath, and Mrs. Szilborski.  To me they looked like Humpty-Dumptys in aprons, but Babba spun stories that made them the most remarkable people in our neighborhood.  The clash between Babba’s fanciful visions and my mother’s pragmatic version of life kept our house on constant edge.  To escape, I retreated further into books, reading under the sheets until three in the morning by flashlight, and, when allowed, sleeping over in the homes of friends from school. 

Bethlehem was a company town and Steel poured money into the local school system.  The kids whose parents managed the steel (among the highest paid executives in the country at that time) attended the local public schools alongside the kids whose dads manned the mills.  Reading and writing were top priority, and I seized on the opportunity to write.  I wrote for the school weekly.  I had a column in the “student” section of the local daily and co-edited an alternative newspaper put out by kids from all the local high schools.  By the time I graduated from high school, it was clear I was going to be a writer.  Wasn’t I one already?

So I was outraged when my parents told me that not only would I not be going to college (“Why would a girl go to college, except to find a husband?”) 

...but that my mother had arranged for the sewing mill where she worked to hire me.  They had earmarked me all along to fit into their blue collar niche where, if I got lucky, I’d eventually marry a neighborhood stoker.  When I protested that I was a writer, my father said that there was plenty to write about in my spare time “right here, unless you’re blind,” and I answered “maybe, if you’re a brute.”  Who wanted to read about the black and blue collar life?  John O’Hara and John Updike, my Pennsylvanian writing heroes, never mentioned mines or mills, babbas or their grandfathers’ homemade hootch.  Their characters had martini glasses welded to their fists and dressed for work in suits and silk ties.

You don’t have be in a cave-in to be buried alive.  On my eighteenth birthday, I moved into a boarding house.  To everyone who said: once you’ve left, you can’t go home again.  I answered: who cares?

I was rescued by my mother’s brother, Uncle Mike, who had broken with the family tradition of mining and gone into another business—crime.  He invited me to lunch at a swank private club in Allentown, ostensibly to give me some avuncular advice.  Like him, I was different, he said, and as he didn’t have any children of his own, he’d decided to help me out.  He handed me an envelope full of hundred dollar bills to get me started on my own.

I was adrift but afloat, and by the time Uncle Mike’s money began to run low, I had concluded that moving out wasn’t enough of a break with my past.  I needed an official annulment, so I enlisted in the Army and got myself stationed in Germany. 

Once in Europe, away from coal patches and steel mills,...

...I would find out what “real life” was like and would reinvent myself to fit in.  I spent my leave in museums and galleries.  I traveled to every country I could get to by train, and I ingratiated myself into the European milieu by telling people I wanted to be a painter.  I knew enough German and French, which I’d taken in high school, to tell new acquaintances in their own language that I didn’t speak it at all, which they found charming.  I was well-read enough to alight comfortably on the surface of most subjects without being asked to bore down.  I was an exotic to the Europeans I met: an American who wasn’t an American.  I don’t know why I found that flattering, because it meant I was nothing at all.  What was I?

After my enlistment was up, I stayed in Europe, getting my undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland’s European Division, working in the university textbook office, and studying painting with a teacher there.  If I occasionally met someone from Pennsylvania and they asked where I was from, I said I was an army brat who’d never stayed in one place long enough to call it home.  Or I claimed that my entire family had died in a plane crash, which people found too grisly to pursue or too preposterous to believe.  I wasn’t alone in this.  Expatriate communities are full of people who have discarded former selves and no one asks for details.

Part of my metamorphosis included marrying someone as far away from me on the social meter as possible: a WASP I met in Paris.  We came back to the States briefly to make it official.  We got married by a JP on the wrong side of Bethlehem, with a junkie banging on the door during the ceremony, trying to “borrow” ten bucks.  I wore a black motorcycle jacket and our wedding pictures were taken in a photo booth in a mall.

That my family couldn’t understand what he did for a living (banking) was part of his appeal. 

“What does he do? What does he make?” 

“Money.  He makes money, Mother.” 

My appeal to him was that I had never seen the inside of a country club.  I was refreshing.  He wanted to disown his background too and marrying me was a coup because his family had never encountered anyone from my social class before, at least not at the dinner table.  One of the few times I saw any of them, we visited two of his cousins in London, where one taught acting and the other worked as the financial advisor to an Arab sheik.  When they tired of tearing each other apart after too many glasses of Cutty Sark, they turned on me and told Polish jokes.  I felt like I was in a Tennessee Williams play, but at least I was now part of a people who didn’t carry their lunch in a pail when they went to work. 

Somewhere along the way, my husband and I decided to stop being the heavy artillery for the each other’s wars.  And after we parted, I began to write in earnest.  I had tasted enough life beyond the “dark satanic mills” to allow me to invent sophisticated worlds that starred me as a really cool person. 

My divorce made me think I could write about divorce, specifically a hip divorce lawyer with a Scottish terrier (I’d always wanted a dog, an unthinkable luxury in a family that had enough work taking care of its humans) who solves a murder!  The pages dripped with characters saying what I thought were cool, witty things to one another, in a cool, hip environment.  The murder was incidental.  Nobody liked the guy or missed him when he was gone.  And the divorce part was weak: I was friends with my ex, so what could I know about the real pain and loneliness caused by a less-than-friendly separation?  The feedback I got on that novel was, “Are you making fun of divorce, divorce lawyers, or the entire mystery genre?”

But like a train unable to brake, I kept going, manuscripts piling up behind me like squashed box cars.  If I was unsure of myself because of my unsophisticated upbringing and patchwork education, my literary alter-ego could be brazen, confident.  I would write about things that were shiny and smart and “full of money”.

I wrote another novel, about a woman from a bourgeois family, who brings a cell of terrorists to their knees; a screenplay about a painter who becomes the toast of the New York City art world; a novel about twin child actresses who……It doesn’t matter.  A friend who read everything I’d written at the time asked me if it was just a coincidence that the father character in every story was killed off. 

By this time, I had stayed away from home for almost twenty years.  I’d returned to the States, and was living in Boston, selling paintings out of my studio.  It was the first time in my adult life that I owned a television.  I can testify to its addictive quality because I know more about Boston sports teams than I think is normal.  But there was one interview that struck me, an old re-run (Boston loves to replay its glory days) of a local sportscaster talking to a then-young Larry Bird.  How, the interviewer asked, could he anticipate where he was supposed to be on the court?  Bird said that when he was playing, it was as if suddenly everything was in slow motion, and a split second before it actually happened he saw the play unfold in front of him—saw where the ball would end up—and he would go there to catch it, shoot it, or hit the open man. 

That seemed like good advice for writing.  Slow life down, see the ball arcing through the air, landing in the hands of the open man.  But to anticipate what happens next, you have to have practiced on the terrain.  You can’t write about what you don’t know.

And what did I know?  I knew myself, of course.  I knew my own struggle to deny where I had come from, thinking a change of scene would change who I was.  The human heart in conflict with itself, as William Faulkner said, is the only thing worth writing about.  And I knew all about that.  

The settings for my next stories chose themselves--slate piles and slag heaps, breakers and blast furnaces.  The characters were varied: Babbas bargaining with God, men defining themselves by their jobs and despairing when they lost them, runaways trying to succeed in Hollywood, working class women selling their souls to step into the middle class.  I’m always startled when people ask which character I identify with, because it’s obvious: they’re all me.

My brother phoned me two years ago to tell me that my father was ill and that I should go home to make peace with him.  I had sent him my writing over the years, still fishing for fraternal approval, and he admonished me: don’t show Dad your new writing.  It will upset him to see how you see him.

My father and I had kept up a barely civil connection—Christmas cards signed with his full legal name as if I might not remember who “Dad” was.  At our first meeting, because we were both nervous and because we’d never really talked, I handed him a couple of my latest stories to break the ice.  He read them right then, and, amazingly, he laughed.  He didn’t, he said, think I’d been paying attention.   

In my writing I had already come home, so I decided to stay.  

Occasionally now, I take my Dad for drives.  We inspect the ruins of the steel mill where he worked, which, in a cosmic joke, is being converted into gambling casinos.  We drive up to the coal region to see who--a few relatives--and what--a little strip mining--is left.  When the coal miners in West Virginia were asphyxiated in a tunnel explosion this winter, he took it with a matter-of-factness I’d always found brutish but which I now saw was the stoicism of our kind.  He’s from a breed of people that do dangerous work, live hard lives, let God decide their fate, and don’t talk about it much. 

Because what, he asks me, is there to say? 

Well, as it turns out, I answer, quit a bit.     

Connect with Bathsheba Monk here: http://www.bathshebamonk.com