Serendipity

I was searching for one thing on my laptop,  and I came across this feedback  from a SLU student in 2006… Dear Dr. Chmiel, I am writing you to finally submit my insertion. I apologize…

This Pilgrimage of the Heart

I first read the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time spring through autumn of 1997.  A couple of years later, I read the collection of Proust’s essays in On Art &…

Dear Isabel (Letter/7)

Friday 26 June 2015 Dear Isabel Happy Friday, you’ve finished one week at the new job. Page 8, top paragraph  I take back what I said yesterday about boycotting the word “solidarity.”  That first sentence…

Dear Isabel (Letter/1)

Saturday 20 June 2015 Dear Isabel What an honor to receive your letter. It could be published AS IS on a blog. You could give it as A TED Talk. (18 minutes!)

Photography as a Way of Life

for Oliver, Cami, and Julie Sebastião Salgado, From my Land to the Planet Contrasto, 2014   I first heard the name of Sebastião Salgado from Mev in the early 1990s.  She esteemed him more than any…

Email from Jaime in El Salvador

I have an internship in El Salvador this summer and was visiting the Casa during the beatification of Romero. The house was full of The Struggle is One books and I met a Nicaraguan volunteer…