Tired Clichés and Fine Familiar Phrases
A few weeks ago LinkedIn invited me to contribute to some teaching materials for writers. The subject was avoiding clichés. As usual, I found myself objecting: it’s true that a badly-placed cliché can stop...
Category: history
Books and Islands: Book Review
I was born and raised in Minnesota, much of which lies in Ojibwe country. For years, however, I assumed that I should study my own heritage, namely German, and so I grew up in...
Tintagel in Late Antiquity
Tintagel in Late Antiquity was a conference, held in Truro, Cornwall, April 21-23. Although I am pretty much an outsider, both to archeology and to Cornwall (a transplanted American!) I’m really glad I went...
Nomads don’t need Archives
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is an exhibition organized in Australia, now travelling to Europe and the US. It looks a lot like an exhibition of paintings, and it would command close attention and...
Writing and Responding
Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) is a book about the contemporary relationship between plants and people. More specifically, it is about the conflict and potential reconciliation between a botanical, scientific, written understanding of plants, and the orally transmitted...
Inherit the Wind
If you google “inherit the wind,” you’re overwhelmed with information about the film by that name from 1960. It is a dramatization of the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial, in which a schoolteacher is accused...