Truman Students Arrested at Nonviolent Protest

Photo by the LA Times. The two Truman students
are the first and third seated protesters from the right.

For this week's Truman Index, I wrote a feature on two students (one, Greg Fister, an old Prep News comrade) who were arrested during a nonviolent sit-in at the Shaw QuikTrip earlier this month.  For anyone curious about what it is like to be arrested for activism, take a look. Here's the first page (below the Halloween story) and here's the second page. In addition, here's the video referenced in the story showing the police officers using force on Greg to break the line of seated protesters. The Ferguson October events, which included this sit-in, produced a new wave of demonstrations that captured national attention. Depending on the outcome of the grand jury decision, we may soon see even more.

"Wasn't it a revelation...?"

Galway Kinnell thought cancer would kill him years ago. After a prognosis gave him only a short while to live, he wrote the poem "Why Regret," which takes the form of a series of questions--to his wife or to the reader. Shortly after, he found he had years more to live. Kinnell's ecstasies in that poem and others like it--"That Silent Evening," "St. Francis and the Sow," and "Rapture"--are all the more intense and believable for the way in which he sucks the marrow of ugliness in much of his other work, such as "The Bear" and "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible." Poems like those won him his critical acclaim, establishing him as the nature poet unafraid of the inhumanity of nature. He told the Los Angeles Times that “I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.”

But now that Kinnell has finally passed away from leukemia, perhaps it is time to return to the rhapsodic poem he wrote when he believed he was dying--to focus more of our attention on what brought this poet of fingernail-rot and earthworms his deepest joys. 

Three Watercolors Find a Home

Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, which published my poem about biting an apple in 2013, was kind enough to publish some recent watercolors of mine. Two are from Ireland and one is of a Monarch butterfly emerging in our backyard in St. Louis. Now to find homes for my other stray poems and paintings!

Index Ferguson Feature

Here's the link to my feature for the Truman Index on the Ferguson protests. For those of you who read the perspective that Nick and I wrote for the Prep News, it's mostly similar stuff, but this one is more from my viewpoint as a participant and less as an observer analyzing the situation at a remove, and is therefore a bit more personal to me. I also felt that the need for this kind of work at Truman was greater than at SLUH, since in Kirksville we are hours away from St. Louis, and many of us come from elsewhere and do not have a local angle on the story. 

I wrote this thinking it would just be in my normal opinions page column spot, but they made it a full-spread feature. I'm not sure how I feel about the design above the story, but I'm glad they used some of my pictures (recognize anyone in the bottom left corner?)

More importantly: the #HealSTL office, led by Alderman French, is open as of this morning in Ferguson. They are calling for volunteers from anywhere and everywhere to help work on solutions for St. Louis. Their website is due to launch soon, but their Twitter is live.

Ferguson Perspective

Nick Fandos and I teamed up once more for the Prep News as emeritus editors to write a perspective on our experience of attending a protest march in Ferguson. I was deliberately hesitant to publish thoughts on the Ferguson crisis on this blog, because I feel that there is a lot of substantial work as well as a lot of unhelpful noise out there on the Internet already about this issue. While the press corps has done good in bringing national attention to the protests, some have also done a disservice to the community by only focusing on the late-night confrontations with militarized police forces, making what was in fact mostly a series of peaceful, passionate protests look merely like a string of dust-ups. I don't want to add even in a small way to that mistake. The minority of violent agitators are as much of a menace to the nonviolent protesters as they are to the police. 

But we sat with our thoughts for a while, and this piece is what we have so far.  (If you're like me and prefer to pretend you're reading a print newspaper, click here and turn to page 6. Check out the other great coverage there, too.) What we hoped to do with this piece was engage with our high school community, the place we learned big lessons in journalism, civic engagement and the value of urban neighborhoods. However, I think it could also serve as one source for my friends who do not live in St. Louis to get a handle on the situation, which looks quite different day-to-day than what cable producers have typically chosen to show.

But for the developing story, I suggest you follow protest leaders on Twitter. The hashtag #HealSTL was recently created to bind together actions directing the protest's energy towards initiatives to move forward and combat racial injustice.  Look up State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (@MariaChappelleN), Alderman Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) and Committeewoman Patricia Bynes (@patricialicious), for a start. We could be nearing the crucial point at which protesters either disperse slowly or coalesce into a unified movement, and leaders like these have a good sense of what's happening on the ground and what's coming next.

While I will welcome questions and comments about this issue, please be civil, and please read up elsewhere on the issue before making claims about it. Our feelings and opinions are complex enough; we can at least try to be familiar with the set of established facts and debunked myths.

Orono Sketches, Part 2

Well, I don't like this one as much as the one I did at NUI-Galway, and I paid for the dusk setting in blood collected by the diligent campus mosquitoes, but I'm glad I got to give watercolor a shot here.  This is Stevens Hall at U. Maine-Orono.

Summer Leaves

Here's the link to my first post for the blog of the vernal pool research program at University of Maine-Orono, "Of Pools and People." They're also on Facebook. It's my first foray into writing about a branch of ecology which is still very new to me: biogeochemistry, the study of fundamental environmental processes. There's a couple formatting hiccups in it that will probably be rectified soon, but I figured I might as well just link to it now, trusting in your generosity not to condemn me too badly.