Blog

Standarized Test Mania, Dutch Style

I just finished Skyping with my son and daughter-in-law in The Netherlands. It is always a joy to speak with them, and after each time I do I miss them more. They both are teaching—he music in an international school, and she English in a public school. While my son...

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Telling the Dancer from the Dance

Recently I went to a joint dance performance by the Heidi Latsky Dance and Axis Dance troupes intended to honor the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Both companies are composed of able-bodied and disabled dancers. In addition to the stage...

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Girls Are Good, Too

China just announced that it is ending its one-child policy. Not that this means families can have as many kids as they want—just that now they legally can have two. In fact, minorities and couples in which both husband and wife are themselves only children were...

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A Temporarily Full Empty Nest

This summer, for one week, we had all three of our children living in the house at once. This was a rare event. When our oldest son went to college in Chicago, he, of course, came back home on holidays and vacations. But he hasn't really lived here since 2004 when,...

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Fresh Off the Boat Went Off the Rails

I really used to like Fresh Off the Boat, a sitcom about the Huangs, a Chinese family relocating to Orlando in the 1990s, based on the life of Eddie Huang. (Okay, maybe Jessica, the Mom, has too much Tiger in her, but Constance Wu usually steals the show.) And, being...

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A Hospital Thanksgiving

My father died on Thanksgiving 18 years ago in a hospital decorated with orange crepe paper streamers and cardboard images of pilgrim hats and turkeys. He was two weeks shy of 93, but had been active and alert until he was 90. My mother had died 30 years before, and...

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Terracotta Daughters

My daughter called me Friday just as my husband and I were entering a downtown gallery. We had gone to see an amazing installation: “Terracotta Daughters” by French sculptor Prune Nourry. The exhibit consists of 116 statues, lined up in rows, modeled on eight real...

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Poet Mark Kraushaar Writing About Writing

What are you working on?I’m always either revising poems that were abandoned in the middle of failing or, of course, working on new poems. I’ve been at work on a poem now based on a photo I once saw of a young man on a Triumph motorcycle polishing the tank while just...

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My So-Called Writing Process

Thanks so much to Deborah Clearman for inviting me to participate in the writing process blog tour--and not to pour cold water over my head.Here goes:1) What I’m supposed to be working onI am “working” very sporadically on a new young adult novel with an element of...

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A Tree Dies in Brooklyn

This morning men in hard hats and lime-green rain suits arrived in bright orange trucks. One truck carried a cherry picker, the other a wood chipper. They blocked off our street. The tree outside our house had died (been killed, we think), and the City had sent a team...

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