Emily Brisse

. The loon is a mythic bird in Minnesota. Wood ducks float close to docks, accept bits of bread thrown from children's hands; Canadian geese walk single file down residential streets. But loons. They keep their distance. Occasionally you'll see them floating in the middle of a lake. Rarely — and magically — they will pop up fifteen feet from your canoe and stare with their red eyes for a few moments before diving back into their solitary worlds. But what you can count on in Minnesota — the land that claims these creatures as its state bird — is hearing them almost anytime you are on a quiet lake in the presence of the moon. And you'd never mistake it. Children don't ask their parents whose call that was. It's a sound that seems to rise out of the mist, even on a clear night. One that seems simultaneously desolate and binding and old. They are ghosts in a way, these birds. And you listen for them as you would movement in the backyard when you are home alone.  . Vid...

Happy 4th of July!

Minnesota:   originally   the   name   of   the   river,   from   Dakota   (Siouan)   mnisota, literally,   "cloudy   water,   milky   water,"   from   mni     "river,   stream"  +  sota   "slightly   clouded." Just in case you were curious. :)

 

Recently I went to a reading and discussion at Magers and Quinn. The guest writer was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Hailed as the "literary granddaughter" of Chinua Achebe, she is by most accounts pretty hot stuff in the writing community. You can read more about her here:   http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/06/14/100614fi_fiction_20under40_qa_chimamanda-ngozi-adichie   I'd read her short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck  before attending the event, so I already knew her subject was—among other things—Nigeria. This was what interested me most: how a place rooted her writing, how everything came back to her original home. During the discussion time, she talked about being haunted, yes, by the effects of colonialism and by Nigeria's violent past, but her strongest display of emotion came when she described her frustration with outsiders who felt that—because they'd visited or studied some corner of Africa—they already knew her story.   ...

You want to see magic? Forget Chris Angel, forget Houdini, forget even Josef Kavalier's amazing adventures in Kavalier and Clay.  Instead, come to my neighborhood on a sultry June evening—thunder brewing and bubbling in the distance—and walk with me along trails through the heady scents of honeysuckle and lavender and clover, through the dark woods rustling with rabbits and sleepy toads, down to where the air cools, a stream emerges, and a long thick marsh is lit up, friends, LIT UP by not only the moon, not only the stars, but by thousands and thousands and thousands of fireflies. It was the night sky reversed. The sky tipped over. The stars become these small bits of illuminated bodies that I could follow with the palm of my hand, scoop up with my other, bring to my eyes, and ever-so-gently hold, marvel at. Release. They flew away with so much nonchalance. What is it to be so at ease with what touches us, with what our movements reveal?  I cannot stop seeing this scene....