Resistance in the United States of Amnesia
I noticed this post by veteran and medical student Juan Miguel Spinnato: “I always need to remind myself that most of the American public still isn’t able to see Bush’s war in Iraq as a…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
This I Know Is True
If you stay in relation to writing (rather than zoning out for six years) and you connect with writing friends, read, listen deeply, you will write what you want but most likely never the way…
Dear Srimatiji
You often said to me When we were face to face in Chicago “No worry” So I write to you far away With beaming confidence “No hurry”
Patience
There are years that ask the question and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston
Ramadan (Guests)
Dear Night Who’ll Endure More Than Fourteen Hundred Medical School Nights We do home-stays here Like many before us And some will continue after we leave Breaking the fast at Abu Hamid’s home On the…
Mindfulness with Words
Before hurling insults and accusations at another, one should consider one’s own state of mind and circumstances. The tendency to lash out, defame, and belittle is an aspect of conceit. The scriptures illustrate it with…
Share the Wealth with Katie Lochhead: A Life in Art
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences…because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make…
“People Know My Lai”
Cal wrote to Carla Nguyen and me in an email: “People know My Lai (Or they think they do) People over 60 or so Remember the name Calley But what about the others? I don’t…
Share the Wealth with Lynette D’Amico: Road Trip
“Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world…
On Book Six of The Brothers Karamazov
For Cab Yau Perhaps these will speak to you as we reconsider Dostoevsky’s masterpiece… “where we read truly, where the experience is to be that of meaning, we do so as if the text (the…