by Toni McNaron | Nov 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
As this country embraces more and more computer-based programs and devices that register and maintain personal information about all of us, I find myself thinking about privacy rights. Recently I heard a program on MPR about how much more seriously such rights are...
by Toni McNaron | Nov 14, 2018 | Uncategorized
By 1928, Virginia Woolf had established herself as a leading novelist experimenting with both form and content. Rejecting Victorian plots that were linear explorations of characters’ lives, Woolf had published Mrs. Dalloway in 1925 and To the Lighthouse in...
by Toni McNaron | Nov 5, 2018 | Uncategorized
Two years after publishing her gripping novel, Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward gave us a memoir entitled Men We Reaped. This arresting and disturbing title comes from the writings of Harriet Tubman who said: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and...
by Toni McNaron | Oct 27, 2018 | Uncategorized
That is the first line of a short poem by William Wordsworth, the English romantic poet. What follows is “when I behold/A rainbow in the sky.” Two magical happenings in my life recently have called Wordsworth to mind. A close friend and I have gone...
by Toni McNaron | Oct 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
During the Kavanaugh hearings, much was made of his heavy drinking during high school and college. I am a recovering alcoholic who will mark 44 years of sobriety on October 23rd of this year. My antennae are quick to pick up tell-tale signs of other people’s...
by Toni McNaron | Oct 11, 2018 | Uncategorized
The year I began teaching literature at the University of Minnesota in 1964, Leo Marx published his important book, The Machine in the Garden. Though Marx was teaching literature in the newly minted department of American Studies, I never met him. Because everyone...
