May 2025

Dedicated to Nathan Kempner, beloved son of Gale & Burt, 7/20/1992—4/6/2025.

From the Publishing-Editor of Hubris: Many of our Contributors here at Hubris have gone silent this past month. I asked for submissions in response to Current Events (“Current Events” being a Southern euphemism along the lines of calling the American Civil War “The Late Unpleasantness” ) and then, largely, watched my in-box in vain. I was able to write nothing, myself. Writers in Guatemala, Greece, Patagonia, New Mexico, and elsewhere around the globe? Crickets. All of us, all of us, wherever we live, are in silent mourning, it seems, and while we may be cobbling together posters of protest and letters of outrage, we’re unable to synthesize, to analyze for our readers what is befalling us all in real time. Our words, daily, are overtaken by events, as we, ourselves, are overtaken by events. Thus, I am more grateful than ever for the writers who responded this month with columns: Kevin Van Tighem, from Canada; Kathryn E. Livingston, from New Jersey; and Rev. Robin White, Skip Eisiminger, Jenks Farmer, and Claire Bateman from South Carolina. At the end of May’s offerings, I append a beautiful essay from our Archives, Burt Kempner’s “My Better Half,” in remembrance of the Kempners’ son, Nathan, to whom this issue of Hubris is fondly dedicated.

May’s Home Page Artist, Rosalind Forster, writes: “I am a painter printmaker, known for my watercolor paintings and linocut prints. Trained as a graphic designer and after working for several years for a London design group, I moved to Derbyshire, where I set up my own print workshop to produce posters for the Derby Playhouse and Winster Wakes. With the acquisition of a full-sized Albion press, I developed my technique of lino-cutting using the reduction process, where the block is gradually cut away between each printing to create complex and bold images with up to 16 colors. I started painting in 1982 after taking a course in lithography, a more painterly printing process. My work was published by Christies Contemporary Arts as a series of seasonal floral still lifes—a constant theme for me, sometimes involving a chance encounter, but more often a careful arrangement of favorite objects such as lace, jugs , shells, and flowers. Light plays a key role, especially as since 1989 I spend many months on a small Greek island. Here the dramatic and crystal clear light has been inspirational in my series of sunlit doorways and olive tree linocuts. My original watercolors and limited edition lino prints may be bought from Artfinder, and commissions ordered directly from me here.” (Editor’s Note: To read a beautiful, in-depth interview with Forster by Stella Sevastopoulos, click on Rosalind Forster: Nature’s beauty translated into art.)

Wing + Prayer

“Digging in the Dirt (John 8 & 9),” By Rev. Robin White

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2025—All I have wanted to do these past several weeks, is to get down on my knees and sink my hands in dirt. It is, for me, a kind of prayer. Digging in the soil, mixing with my hands old, dead, and depleted soil with new, dark and saturated, enriched with compost soil. It is so satisfying to participate in the transformation—with the hope of new life; seeds gently pressed into the amalgam. Dirty fingernails and an aching back have been life-giving. The hope of sprouting seeds and blossoming plants have sustained me as I try to balance the horror of daily news with an attempt at some order in the midst of chaos. It is reported that exposure to microorganisms in dirt protects us from anxiety and depression, boosts concentration and focus, and stimulates the body’s production of serotonin. (Read more . . .)

Book Excerpt

“From Understory:  An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss & Hope,” By Dr. Kevin Van Tighem

HIGH RIVER, ALBERTA Canada—(Hubris)—May 2025―There is more than one way to lose one’s hearing. When the sounds of life vanish on their own, that’s the worst. Gordon Ruddy, a Jasper friend, wrote me a note one day: “I’m getting old enough to see that there are a lot of birds just missing. That some birds were plentiful but are rare now. I try very hard not to get down. It’s hard.” I know that grief. It’s how I felt as I watched my mother’s final breaths; the same sorrow washes over me sometimes even now when fishing one of Dad’s old streams. The difference is this: we expected them to go, but we expected the world that made them to carry on. Now we grieve a far greater (Read more . . .)

While I Draw Breath

“Robin Song,” By Dr. Kevin Van Tighem

HIGH RIVER, ALBERTA Canada—(Hubris)—May 2025―Mornings now are full of robins, some high in the weeping birch where they glow in the sunrise, others in the shadowed backyard oak, but most of them hidden in the big spruce trees that are scattered through the neighborhoods. Later they will drop into mountain ash trees to feed on wizened fruit or explore snow-free patches of ground to hunt awakening insects, but at first light they huddle in their roosts and sing together. Some sing the familiar territorial robin song but most sing variants, like a kind of avian jazz improvisation. Collectively, it’s like a frenzied chorus of excitement but if you spot one, as often as not it will seem entranced, nearly immobile. Only its beak moves. What are they singing for? (Read more . . .)

Words & Wonder

“Chaos & Catastrophe,” By Kathryn E. Livingston

BOGOTA New Jersey—(Hubris)—May 2025—Back on January 9, I was watching President Jimmy Carter’s funeral on my laptop when my husband entered the room. He stopped short, peered at my screen, and gasped, “Are you crying over Jimmy Carter?” “No,” I sobbed. “He was a wonderful man and he led a long life. I’m not crying over him.” Mitch seemed baffled, for I’m not one to cry over TV funerals (corny commercials are another matter). “It just seems like our country is in that casket there!” I wailed. And so, perhaps, it was. On that day that now seems so long ago, I watched as Republicans and Democrats rose to sing Carter’s praises (among them the sons of former president Gerald Ford and former VP Walter Mondale). (Read more . . .)

Skip the B.S.

“The Kabuff: My Desk,” By Dr. Skip Eisiminger, aka The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2025—Over the 42 years I taught English and interdisciplinary humanities at Clemson University, students arriving at my office door were greeted by what must have been a bewildering array of passive-aggressive cartoons, photographs, and quotations. These were taped, glued, and thumb-tacked to my door, door frame, and bulletin board. I’m not sure where the impulse arose, but it might have been Emerson’s advice to write “whim” on “the lintel of your door post.” I had no such romantic pretense; I only wanted to introduce myself to those waiting for an audience in my chambers. Many times, I arrived, and finding students perusing my door, I was reluctant to interrupt them. (Read more . . .)

Plant People

“Natives of The Deep South,” By Jenks Farmer

COLUMBIA South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2025—Where I grew up, we revered our native plants. We grew them for beauty, fascination, food, and shade, knowing that our plants captured the imagination of the rest of the world. Our native plants appear in literature, paintings, movies, and even comic books. Native plants of the Deep South have inspired emotion and provided nursery income for centuries—they even played pivotal roles in the country’s founding. Recently, a young horticulturist said to me, “Y’all (meaning older horticulturists) focused on pretty flowers and pretty gardens. It’s time to think about plants that do more. Time to give native plants an important place in the nursery industry and in home landscapes.” That sort of got my dander up because it’s flat-out wrong and more than a little dismissive of my career. (Read more . . .)

Speculative Friction

“The Poetry of Tamara Miles,” By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2025—Tamara Miles says she has always loved poetry and all forms of literature, which is why she became a college English teacher. Her work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Fall Lines, Oyster River Pages, and The Tishman Review, among others. She has had many wonderful opportunities to read publicly, both in the US and abroad. For the last few years, she has served as the president of the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Miles’ approach to writing poems is to choose something to examine, to celebrate, or to grieve, because this is how memory serves us. (Read more . . .)

Pinhead Angel

“My Better Half (Revisited),” By Burt Kempner

GAINESVILLE Florida—(Hubris)—April 2020—She was fluent in kindness and spoke several dialects of compassion. When playgrounds taunts and threats reduced me to impotent tears, she gave me comfort. When my imaginary friend came to visit, she set out an extra place setting. She wouldn’t let me pass a flower without stopping to linger over its shape and color. When it rained hard and worms writhed helplessly on the surface and I raised my foot to strike, she halted me in mid-stomp. She taught me how to laugh at things that were funny, not cruel. I think I was six or seven when she began to die, when others started telling me she wasn’t a suitable playmate. Even my parents turned on her, gently but insistently. “Boys don’t . . .” “Boys never . . .” Her outline grew fainter, her voice thinner as her influence began receding farther and farther into the distance. (Read more . . .)

Book Review

“The Pillow Museum: Stories, by Claire Bateman,” By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—April 2025—I preface this review of Claire Bateman’s most recent book, The Pillow Museum: Stories, with an admission: I know the author. Theoretically, knowing Bateman, and knowing something of her biography, having read her previous books and corresponding as I do with her (in my capacity as Editor of Hubris and her capacity as Poetry Editor of Hubris), you might be forgiven for imagining that I know Bateman too well to write about her work with any objectivity. In this you would be mistaken. The Bateman whom I know as a former colleague in Clemson University’s English Department and as the poet who, monthly, introduces Hubris’s readers to contemporary poets whose work may be new to them or me is not, in any way, shape, or form related to the author of The Pillow Museum. (Read more . . .)

Skip the B.S.

“Words, Words, Words: Development,” By Skip Eisiminger, aka The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—April 2025—E. M. Forster’s critical assessment of tomes coincides with my own: readers praise them because they’ve managed to read them. I used to tell my classes that James Joyce’s Ulysses, one tome I did manage to complete, is a great novel, but I never assigned it because I’d be forced to read it again. As a former professor of English and Humanities, I should be ashamed because Moby Dick (with 635 pages in the original) or War and Peace (with 580 main characters and about 20 more in minor roles) are among the lacunae on my curriculum vitae. I’m sure I’d have a better opinion of both novels if I’d read more than the Classics Illustrated Comic Book synopses. (Read more . . .)

Hapax Legomenon

“The Final (God Help Me) Frontier (or, Still Seeking Salvation via Facebook Marketplace),” By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—April 2025—Do not imagine that a minor event such as total hip replacement surgery has slowed me down this past month. Au contraire de ce que tu prétends, cela n’est pas le cas! Rather, I have found something else that a woman can enjoy while lying flat on her back in a bed of pain (though would that it burned up calories as well as money). For weeks, now, I’ve been merrily scrolling through Facebook Marketplace for things my business partners then have to go fetch for our booth at The Rock House Antiques. The latest “thing,” a snowy white credenza-cum-breakfront, about 7’ tall and 5’ wide, is made of solid wood, and required professional movers to retrieve and install. (Read more . . .)

Speculative Friction

“The Poetry of Angie Mazakis,” By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—December 2024—Published by University of Arkansas Press, and named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Boston Globe, Angie Mazakis’s first book, I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First, was chosen by poet Billy Collins as a finalist for The Miller Williams Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Mizna, and the anthology Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. Mazakis’s essays have been published in The Atlantic and Gulf Coast. She has an MFA from George Mason University and a PhD from Ohio University. (Read more . . .)

Words & Wonder

“Solemnly Swear,” By Kathryn E. Livingston

BOGOTA New Jersey—(Hubris)—April 2025—My mother occasionally advised me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.” She hammered this home when, at the age of five, I asked my brother’s date why she had spots on her face. My childish question was forgiven and innocent enough (I was five and he was 17) but had I followed our mother’s advice into my adult years I wouldn’t be true to the snarky person I truly am. That said, I don’t wish to be mean and I’m aware that the border between snide and full-blown hater can be tricky to navigate. Fortunately, I get around my nasty inner self by not saying everything I’m thinking aloud, which could be quite hazardous. (Read more . . .)

Planetary Hospice

“Off-Kilter & Oozing Mercury: Our Beloved Earth,” By Dr. Guy McPherson

BELLOWS FALLS Vermont—(Hubris)—April 2025—Human activity is quite literally changing the tilt and rotation of Earth. According to a headline at BBC on 20 December 2024, Human activity is changing Earth’s tilt and rotation. What does that mean for the planet? The subhead tells the tale: “Scientists have found that using underground water has more of an impact on Earth’s tilt than melting polar caps.” The article was written by climate scientist and Professor Emeritus Bill McGuire. It begins with six paragraphs that demonstrate McGuire’s ability to teach: “Even though we can’t feel it, most of us are aware that our planet spins like a top during its interminable journey around the Sun. (Read more . . .)

Clicks & Relativity

“Shelter Cove, California,” By Chiara-Sophia Coyle

SONOMA California—(Hubris)—April 2025—Spending five days in Shelter Cove on the Lost Coast of Humboldt County, California, and having it rain for four and a half of those days meant one thing: when the sun finally appeared, I had to make the most of it. That brief window of light became an opportunity for me to embrace the wild beauty, breathe in the fresh ocean air, and watch sea lions lounging on the single big rock comprising their home. If you know me, you know water is where my soul feels most at home. Naturally, I ended up capturing every water-related moment on offer—the ever-changing weather, the fleeting sunshine, and a sunset that stood out as one of the most breathtaking I’ve seen in a long time. (Read more . . .)

Beauty Emerging

“Aquarellas,” By Chris Jordan

PATAGONIA Chile—(Hubris)—April 2025—My mother, Susan Elizabeth Jordan Huggins, was an accomplished watercolor painter. She painted from my father’s photographs, and as a child I remember sitting on a stool next to her studio table, watching her lay down layers of wet color in gestures she called washes. Starting with a dab of blue or purple, she would spread it across the wet paper so thinly that it would almost disappear, leaving a subtle color gradient that was always far more interesting than the pure pigment she started with. Her favorite subject was skies, and I know she would have loved to see and paint the gorgeous skies of Patagonia. I call these Austral sky photos aquarellas (watercolors) in memory of my sweet Ma. (Read more . . .)

Epicurus’ Porch

“Spring Has Blown!” By William A. Balk, Jr.

ELKO South Carolina—(Hubris)—April 2025—Everywhere you turn, there’s another sign of spring’s exuberant arrival: sneaky peeks at emerging new foliage; buds on trees and shrubs; so many flowers have started to blow. Do you know that term as applied to flowers? To blow? It’s from Old English, and it means to bloom or to flower—and this botanical usage is the root of the term “full-blown.” There’s a beautiful small tree called Shadblow (Amalanchier arborea, or Serviceberry), which gets its name from its regularly blooming at the time of the shad runs in the rivers. The signals that make us know that spring is finally, officially here are subtle, sometimes ephemeral, but persistent about declaring the season’s change. (Read more . . .)

Eating Well Is the Best Revenge

“Prospero’s Kitchen: The Odyssey of An Ionian Cookbook,” By Diana Farr Louis

ATHENS Greece—(Hubris)—April 2025—Last year, Prospero’s Kitchen, a collection of stories, customs, not to mention recipes from the Ionian islands, experienced its fourth incarnation, no small feat for any book. Last week, a new bookshop in Kifissia, a northern suburb of Athens, Greece, offered to host a “delicious book presentation” to celebrate this event. June Marinos, my co-author, and I chose a few of our favorite dishes to entice our guests into coming and buying our cookbook. Before we served them, they had to sit through a short history of Prospero’s origins and subsequent career. It all began on a tennis court in the late 1980s. (Read more . . .)

Fairly Unbalanced

“Idiocracy 2.0,” By Michael J. Tallon

ANTIGUA Guatemala—(Hubris)—April 2025—In all my nearly 60 years on this pretty blue marble of a planet, I’ve never seen an era more defined by boastful stupidity than right now. Truly, when sitting down to write a column about the state of our democracy and the existential danger our nation currently faces from Donald Trump’s commitment to unreality, I’m at a loss. How do you even approach political analysis in 2025 without first acknowledging just how rock-headedly obtuse, how fact-and-reason resistant our nation has become? Take, for example, this recent headline about the wildfires in Los Angeles that, according to several appraisers, will cost over $250 billion (billion with a B) in property loss, economic disruption, and environmental damage. (Read more . . .)