“When I first met Filiz Hosukoglu at my first Oldways Conference on Crete in 1997, she impressed me with her quiet manner, her knowledge—about food and about life—and her stories about Gaziantep, her…

“Over the 40 years I taught English and Humanities at Clemson University, students arriving at my door in Strode Tower were greeted by a bewildering array of passive-aggressive cartoons, photographs, and quotations. These…

  “The man at the table across from mine/is eating a painting with a knife and fork./It looks to be a lesser Pollock, or perhaps/a Clyfford Still, regardless, abstract/expressionism, surprisingly modern/for a restaurant…

“People say, what does it matter? It’s harmless. The Queen is only a figurehead. It brings in the tourists. But she is more than a figurehead. Every piece of potential legislation that may…

“Almost as suddenly, I thought of all the important lines by others that have stayed with me through the years: ‘You must change your life’ (Rilke), ‘How soon unaccountable I became’ (Whitman), ‘practice…

“This fall and winter, Mark Addison Kershaw’s identity, Lo, his very being, fell into the hands of thieves, varmints, and villains. His intellectual property writ large (and captioned) across the vasty spaces of…

“The tumult of raging nature that I watch with fascination incongruously stirs a memory of a Greek song I learned as a child where Thunder is a giant woman whose bracelets rumble as…

“Since your death, my entire body has gradually dismembered, so why shouldn’t my feet be outside in the bushes walking around by themselves while at the same time not really there at all?…

“Manny Albam was a terrific musician, composer, arranger, teacher and, best of all, a warm, funny human being and friend. I first met Manny when I was in high school in Rochester, New…

“A few years after seeing the film for the first time, I adapted the line from Inigo Montoya to fit my own narrative, and reflect my own dire conclusions: ‘Hello, my name is…