The consummate outsider, Gallant had access to a deeply unstable postwar world divided by borders, gender, and nationalistic labels, where exiles, refugees, immigrants, and the stateless had been set adrift in an endless search for home.

Nelson was there to teach me about the world.

I’d wandered into the music department freshman week in college, looking for a challenging course to take. Nelson taught Music 13, which was advanced music theory with lots of sight singing and dictation, and word was he was a tough grader, so you had to show up for every class and pay attention.

Twentieth century Canadian expatriate writer Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) explores the lingering effects of authoritarian power on social instability through themes of transnational migration, displacement, and loss.

There is a certain place on the left side of the neck that marks a person as a violinist, a pressure sore from holding the instrument against tender skin. It’s where the hard spruce of the violin ribs contacts flesh, a lumpy red chafe mark the size of a quarter that comes from the effort of keeping the instrument from falling to the ground.

One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth time, I pulled out all my eyelashes, one by one. I was thirteen.

…and I can feel the blindfold tight against my eyes, and it is one a.m. and I am crossing Flatbush Avenue not seeing, not thinking, soon not being…

I’ve always done my work at the kitchen table, an oversized, blonde, oak pedestal table that was one of the first pieces of “grown-up” furniture my husband and I bought for our new house almost thirty years ago.

I still remember the warm buttery taste of Flako Cup Cakes, which I made with my mother from a mix in a box. In 1963, even in Greenwich Village, cup cakes were two words. It was always Flako, never Jiffy or Duncan Hines, and I never knew why.

“The future isn’t waiting,” a Buffalo billboard says. Pictures of towering children outside the empty offices of Upstate Youth Empowerment Now aren’t waiting.

Voices of Women Born Before Rosie Started Riveting

Saratoga Springs: Journal Arts Press, 2018. Trade Paperback. Fine. Item #2207986

ISBN: 9780578199498

I think it was somewhere around the fifth or sixth layer of scribbled Post-it notes on top of each already note-strewn page in the composition book I’d bought especially for writing down every single impression I had while preparing to review Geeta Kothari’s short story collection, I Brake for Moose and Other Stories, that I started to doubt my ability to write even one coherent sentence about this book.

That summer before my mother lost her mind for the first time, I started to learn a violin concerto.

In 1992, in my former life as a free-lance violinist in New York City, I was one of 86 performers invited to participate in the world premiere of Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis at Carnegie Hall.

I Brake for Moose, Geeta Kothari’s debut story collection, throws into sharp focus the conflicts between identity and culture in a globalized world. In these eleven subtly connected stories, Kothari explores the deep challenges to self, presented by an uncompromising American value system that seeks to erase difference and make invisible the humanity of those who are not the same.

So all of a sudden, my dad swung the car off the road onto a little parking area and told me with great excitement and glee that we had just arrived at the most wonderful and amazing place in the whole world, called Flat Mountain, a place thousands of people drive for hours and hours to get to but often can't find at all, and weren't we so amazingly lucky to find it right here right now!

Nadia Ghent painted a stunningly vivid portrait of her father Emmanuel when, at his funeral service last April, she told the story of their day together on Flat Mountain. The story captured a moment in Nadia’s life with her father that distilled into a single enduring image much of what those of us who knew Mannie recognized as essential to his nature.