Good People in the Bad Lands

There are many stories of earth’s creation, but the one an Ojibwe father tells his son in Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman is one of my favorites. “In the beginning,” the father says, sitting outside in the autumn sun, “the earth was covered with water . . . “ And when the Creator decided there should be… Continue reading Good People in the Bad Lands

Escaping Underground and into the Clouds

The woman seated next to me at the book group describes almost word for word the image I’ve been trying to put out of my thoughts since reading it a few days earlier. It is worse than grim, but part of me is glad that we cannot forget it. So many stories move quickly in… Continue reading Escaping Underground and into the Clouds