Daughter of Heroines

The year is 2023 but it feels as if the calendar has rolled back a hundred years for women and girls in Virginia, and just about anywhere else in the Western world. Hyperbolic? Over the top? Sadly, no. Each day women are censored, denigrated, and erased; called bigots for speaking biological fact; losing to men …

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The Wholesaling of Diversity

The melting pot is behind us, that metaphor for a culture that many of us grew up in, a culture that diminished minorities and ethnic cultures, encouraging them to dissolve into the vast sea of the American Dream.        But does the culture of diversity that has replaced it simply re-stratify power; a slight of hand …

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The Trail of Angela’s Ashes

You are going home this night to your home of winter,To your home of autumn, of spring, and of summer;You are going home this night to your perpetual home,To your eternal bed, to your eternal slumber. – The Carmina Gadelica Roots, memory, heritage. It’s all there in consciousness, the wherewithal to encounter who we were, …

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Exiled

We saw it  in crushing deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner, and the brutal beating of Rodney King, and all those men and women who came before, shackled and stolen, torn from an earth that was once their own. And the sin and deep shame of racism endures. But we are told that we …

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A Long Way Up: Reflections on Memoir

Maedv O’Hlfearnain Some of my fondest childhood memories are those of my father and me. He was lanky and handsome, his form topped by a thatch of thick black hair. I was his sidekick,  and we were travelers, he and I, pioneers, wending through the small of time. My father was a funny man, a …

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