- Ancestral division of labor

In doing some reading and note-taking on the history of agriculture for my blueberry project, I came across this.
The need to care for children helped create division of labor among hunters and gatherers. Men hunted, women gathered. Of the two pursuits, gathering was clearly more important. While the capture of a single large animal might [...]

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- Reverse commuter

Do you know the work of the contemporary poet Deborah Garrison?
This one, in particular, is something I read out loud to myself every year, in the fall around this time.
I Saw You Walking
I saw you walking through Newark Penn Station
in your shoes of white ash. At the corner
of my nervous glance your dazed passage
first forced [...]

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- One way to pass time

This is what Grace said, in sequential increments, after I gently asked her to stop reading over my shoulder:
I am just going to lie down on the couch…
and use my mind…
to keep busy…
and make objects move…
and race across the room…
and watch them.
And so I watched eight-year-old Grace, and that indeed is what she seemed to [...]

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- Feels like this

In an essay, Patricia Hampl writes:
I was attracted too to the in-between position of the writer. More exactly, I was after the suspended state that comes with the act of writing: not happy, not sad; uncertain of the next turn, yet not lost; here, but really there, the there of an unmapped geography…
The elusive [...]

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- Walk into the dark

This excerpt is from a ruminative and sparkling post by writer and teacher Alexander Chee on today’s Koreanish:
Part of what is interesting to me about writing is how writing is a social act—a performance for others, a way to connect that has not one guarantee to it. You write and you don’t know that anyone [...]

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- Good question

In an essay on memoirs in the September 2008 Harper’s Magazine, Francine Prose writes:
On nearly every occasion when I’ve been invited to speak about both fiction and nonfiction writing, someone has asked my opinion of the scandalous disclosure that James Frey had fabricated sections of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. I reply that I’m [...]

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- Advice

From Sara, Grace’s reading teacher who is tutoring her over the summer:

Read one book at a time.

From Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, who published a fascinating and enjoyable article, “The Writing Community: A New Model for the Creative Writing Classroom,” in the Spring 2008 issue of Pedagogy:

… To write like a professional, the writer will [...]

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- Images

I love the images in these two lines, from two different pieces:
All over the room, like boats softly tooting their horns in a harbor on a foggy night, men were weeping. (Nicholas Dawidoff, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” New York Times, Sunday, June 15, 2008)
and
At times I was lonely, but it was a bearable loneliness, [...]

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- Opinions

As dinner ended, Lydia, Eli, and I discussed our summer trip. (Grace had wandered off to the television; Jimmy is at a dinner meeting.) Eli is impatient for us to nail down the date and destination. The children have opinions, which enrich but complicate the process.
Lydia (suddenly): I know! Let’s rent one of [...]

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- What you remember

Sunday. The water was 52° F. today; the air was 68°. Grace, Elena, and Sarah went into the water the moment we got to Cold Storage Beach; my father stood there, knee-deep, for a few minutes and then dove in. Later, I went in all the way, as promised. I lasted about [...]

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