Logo of the War Childhood Museum, Sarajevo. Design: Anur Hadžiomerspahić. Used by permission You hear that girls pretend to be mothers and boys soldiers. What I see are children playing intensely and seriously at life; like puppies they exercise and train with every move they make. Wars drag them from one place to . . .
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March 8, 2022, 12:23 a.m. I’ve been counting time, reckoning. . . It’s been 26 years, 1 week, and 2 days. . . It’s been 4 years, 2 months, and 28 days. . . It had been 3 years, 10 months, and 22 days. . . The siege of Sarajevo lasted for . . .
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Like many of you, I’ve been glued to the news this past week following Putin’s senseless, illegal, and immoral war on neighboring Ukraine. Our eyes are filled with images showing the horrors of Russia’s invasion. We stand in solidarity with the people of the Ukraine and our hearts and thoughts are with . . .
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(Amherst, MA, 03/04/2022) If there is ink for this hour if there is something to say to write that would send the tanks the convoys and transports into reverse on the roads they have rutted send them back to the borders they crossed send them back, and the hours too that have . . .
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(Photo by David Lombardo) Last night it rained, and then turned cold.Today the trees are coated in ice,every bare branch, every tiny needleon the evergreens. Now the sun’s come out,the sparkle on the trees is dazzling,enough to lift the heaviest heart,enough to make you think this world’snot so hopeless as it seemed . . .
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Tonight, driving home from the Mass Review office, I listened to a report on All Things Considered. An expert from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies opined on the distinctions between “invasion” and “incursion” and how best to describe what’s happening today in Ukraine. It’s difficult, of course, to keep one’s blood from boiling, or to . . .
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Photo from Mondonuovo, directed by Davide Ferrario, produced by Movie Movie, Bologna, 2003. This year, during the second night of January, one of our favorite writers passed away. Gianni Celati was a brilliant thinker, an innovative, experimental stylist, and an influential translator—and most of all, he cared about people, about communities, and about . . .
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A review of Visions of Crumbling Houses and Conversations with the Wind Taking Flight by Gianna Celati. In the “Foreword” to his Conversations with the Wind Taking Flight, Gianni Celati states that: Writing is a conversation with whoever will read us, and conversations carry us like the wind—we never really know what the . . .
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I came to know Gianni Celati through his writings (if knowing a person in this way is possible), beginning in the late 1990s when I found his book Narratori delle pianure (“Storytellers of the Plains,” translated as Voices from the Plains) in a shop in Ferrara, a town in northern Emilia Romagna not far from . . .
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Dear all, I’m writing to give y’all an update on the efforts to stop the hideous Black Ram proposed timber sale on the Canadian border in Northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley, where only three adult female grizzlies with cubs remain. This ancient forest, a survivor from the last period of global warming, 800 . . .
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