News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This week FPR welcomed Doug Sikkema as another member of the editorial team for the website. Doug will be helping commission and edit essays and book reviews, and he’ll also be writing for us. We’re glad to have him on board! Also, if you subscribe to Local Culture the spring issue should be landing in your mailbox any day. We trust you'll enjoy it and perhaps share it with a neighbor.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Calvin Coolidge's autobiography, Colombian farmers, and whether St. Benedict would use Zoom.
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Joshua Pauling reviews The Innovation Delusion and concludes "the mundane reality of maintenance is actually what sustains economies, schools, homes, and communities in the long run."
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Elizabeth Stice tackles the "cancel culture" debate by drawing on The Professor and the Madman. She argues this film can model the power of forgiveness and the possibility of restorative justice.
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Heather Morton reflects on the experience of reading To Kill a Mockingbird with her daughter last spring. She discovers---as all parents can confirm---that her children have much to teach her.
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The first regular episode of The Brass Spittoon podcast dropped this week. John Murdock chats with John de Graaf about affluenza, Stewart Udall, the politics of beauty, and more. Please subscribe to the podcast on whatever podcast platform you use and, if you enjoy this conversation, rate and review it. Doing so will help us get this podcast off to a good start.
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In this excerpt from his new book, Will Hoyt describes the present and past of this portion of eastern Ohio and reflects on what this place might teach us about how Americans have related to the land.
John Zheng has edited a collection of interviews with the poet Dana Gioia. There's much in these conversations worth attending to, but here's Gioia's response to a question about his status as a regional writer rooted in California:
Life doesn't occur as an abstraction. Each person's life happens in real time and specific places. The best writing usually emerges from that reality.
The problem for most writers is that they read things written in London or Paris, Vienna or New York, but that isn't where they live. Literature seems like an art that happens somewhere else. They worry that no one will take their actual lives--far from any cultural capital--seriously. Consciously or not, these writers begin to marginalize their own existence. That is a fatal mistake. Imagine if Faulkner or Joyce, Austen or Achebe felt their home landscapes were not worth writing about? . . .
One purpose of poetry is to allow us to see and bear the truth. The poet needs to reconcile our imagination with the world we actually live in--which is so often disturbing or confusing. Even in the best of times and places, there is always a distance between our inner and outer reality. In our beautiful but despoiled state, the distance is enormous. That gap is where a poem needs to begin.