Monthly Archives: December 2013

We want to walk into the pages…the closer we get, the better.

Posted on December 26, 2013 by Tony Herman

What kind of reader are you?  Anne Fadiman gives a book-length answer to that question in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.  She tells stories  about her passion for reading books.  For example, she describes the thrill of going to … Continue reading →

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Some time when the river is ice ask me what mistakes I have made.

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Tony Herman

This is the first line from a well-loved poem by William Stafford. He often writes about things that appear to be calm, but aren’t.  I think his poems are like that, too.  At first glance, they don’t seem very challenging. But … Continue reading →

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“Even then I sensed this . . . would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.”

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Tony Herman

This novel is a collection of beautiful sentences about self-discovery.  For example: “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, … Continue reading →

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“Trust that the presence of long-held stories in your memories are there for reasons beyond entertainment.”

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Tony Herman

John Dewey, one of my heroes, said that you don’t learn from experience — you learn from thinking about your experience. That’s the idea that What Our Stories Teach Us is based on. Linda K. Shadiow outlines a three-step process of description, interpretation, … Continue reading →

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