This winter my writing appeared in two publications:
The first is a profile of the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, which appeared in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, where I'm a contributing editor.
The second is an essay on the imagination, which appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, a publication of NYU's Department of Medicine. You can find "A Figment of Your Imagination" in the full text PDF.
Happy reading.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Welcome, Spring!
Hello, gentle readers. I admit I do not know how many readers I have, or if your temperment is gentle, but I have always admired writers who directly address the reader, acknowledging the intimate contract that a text makes between a writer and reader.
The title of this post is my optimistic hope that March 1 heralds the beginning of spring. We've experienced a record-breaking winter, with levels of snow I've not seen in almost thirty New England years.
Spring is a time for renewal, for rejuvenation and rebirth. While digging the bushes out of the snow, my mother was ecstatic to find a tiny burst of green. What has long been hidden shall be revealed. We come out of hibernation and return to the road, so to speak, undertaking new journeys.
After a nearly five year hiatus, I've returned to a project dear to my heart - a translation of a memoir by a woman who was an Uruguyan political prisoner in the 1980s. I spent a wonderful term in Montevideo, while I was studying Latin American literature.
As I deepen my writing about concepts of home, with my perspective always shifting, I have been reading many tales about what happens when home is hostile. Narratives of captivity span centuries and the globe. Among those I suggest are Even Silence Has End and Captive. Both are modern day tales of imprisonment after kidnapping.
We can be captives in many ways - some not as dramatically as others, yet I would define captivity by two features - a state of being still, at rest, deprived of motion and a sense of being kept apart. People can be trapped, not physically, but mentally, in worlds where they cannot understand because they lack the language to communicate. In Budapest, I loved learning to speak some Hungarian, so that I could feel a part of my community. Here in Hartford, I've met several Hungarians in the most unexpected places and felt an instant bond with them when I ask, Hogy vagy?
I've started teaching and tutoring immigrants from Latin America and Africa in English - I have a student each from Bolivia, the Congo and Peru. Each has a different reason to study. Some want to break employment barriers. Today I met a woman who studies in English because she cannot communicate with her granddaughter, as the younger generation's mother tongue is not the languge of the old homeland, but English.
I'm also tutoring first-graders in reading. Through this, I'm rediscovering the miracle of language at its most basic level. Nothing compares to the joy of a child sounding out a word or recognizing it by sight for the first time. What a priceless tool that word will be and what journeys of understanding it will help them take, through the imagination and the factual world.
Speaking of seasons of continuity and renewal, I was excited to learn recently that the Blank Pages Society, the creative writing society I founded at Central European University, is alive and well, holding their latest event in February. Hooray for the arts thriving and co-existing with research and policy studies.
Welcome, spring. May you soon uncover the roots of intellectual projects, of friendships, of delights you'd forgotten, of what you least expect.
The title of this post is my optimistic hope that March 1 heralds the beginning of spring. We've experienced a record-breaking winter, with levels of snow I've not seen in almost thirty New England years.
Spring is a time for renewal, for rejuvenation and rebirth. While digging the bushes out of the snow, my mother was ecstatic to find a tiny burst of green. What has long been hidden shall be revealed. We come out of hibernation and return to the road, so to speak, undertaking new journeys.
After a nearly five year hiatus, I've returned to a project dear to my heart - a translation of a memoir by a woman who was an Uruguyan political prisoner in the 1980s. I spent a wonderful term in Montevideo, while I was studying Latin American literature.
As I deepen my writing about concepts of home, with my perspective always shifting, I have been reading many tales about what happens when home is hostile. Narratives of captivity span centuries and the globe. Among those I suggest are Even Silence Has End and Captive. Both are modern day tales of imprisonment after kidnapping.
We can be captives in many ways - some not as dramatically as others, yet I would define captivity by two features - a state of being still, at rest, deprived of motion and a sense of being kept apart. People can be trapped, not physically, but mentally, in worlds where they cannot understand because they lack the language to communicate. In Budapest, I loved learning to speak some Hungarian, so that I could feel a part of my community. Here in Hartford, I've met several Hungarians in the most unexpected places and felt an instant bond with them when I ask, Hogy vagy?
I've started teaching and tutoring immigrants from Latin America and Africa in English - I have a student each from Bolivia, the Congo and Peru. Each has a different reason to study. Some want to break employment barriers. Today I met a woman who studies in English because she cannot communicate with her granddaughter, as the younger generation's mother tongue is not the languge of the old homeland, but English.
I'm also tutoring first-graders in reading. Through this, I'm rediscovering the miracle of language at its most basic level. Nothing compares to the joy of a child sounding out a word or recognizing it by sight for the first time. What a priceless tool that word will be and what journeys of understanding it will help them take, through the imagination and the factual world.
Speaking of seasons of continuity and renewal, I was excited to learn recently that the Blank Pages Society, the creative writing society I founded at Central European University, is alive and well, holding their latest event in February. Hooray for the arts thriving and co-existing with research and policy studies.
Welcome, spring. May you soon uncover the roots of intellectual projects, of friendships, of delights you'd forgotten, of what you least expect.
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