Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Tag: writing
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Thoughts on Licensing: Why I Prefer CC-BY Licenses
Robin DeRosa recently posted an open question about CC licensing on Twitter that got me thinking: Thinking of changing my @creativecommons default license from CCBY to CCBYNC. I get that CCBY is the more open technically, but I'm thinking here about my vision for open (in particular as it relates to public higher ed), and…
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My Summer Reading
I haven’t kept up as regularly with these monthly updates as I had hoped, but I did keep reading through the summer. I stayed really plugged into my dissertation reading and research, which really cut down my leisure reading, but I still managed to get through several books that struck my fancy in some way…
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Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal
I recently went to Salt Lake City for a family reunion. Among the relatives I saw was my only surviving grandparent, who is now 89 years old. He’s literally my oldest friend, and the oldest living human being that I know right now. His health is slowly deteriorating (he lost his driver’s license recently–which turns…
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Belle Waring
I can’t remember exactly when I first read Belle Waring’s poems. It probably would have been at least a decade ago, and I do remember that it was one of her poems about nursing, maybe even “It Was My First Nursing Job”. What I remember most was feeling that I had discovered a voice that…
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Joyce Maynard on her mother and adult love
A few months after meeting Sydney Bacon, Joyce Maynard’s mother, Fredelle wrote this, in a letter to a friend: You ask if ‘I’m in love again.’ No, it’s not that. ‘In love’ was the experience with Max, so many years ago and for so long. ‘In love’ was feeling one would go anywhere, do anything,…
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Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine
I just finished Bread and Wine, the second book in Ignazio Silone’s The Abruzzio Trilogy (translated by Eric Mosbacher). The book is a moving, funny, and sometimes unbelievable look into provincial life in Italy under Mussolini. Set near the start of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, the novel largely focuses on a character named Pietro Spina, an exiled Communist…
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Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara
At the recommendation of my friend Spencer, I recently began reading the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone’s The Abruzzio Trilogy, beginning with his 1933 novel Fontamara. It is an extraordinary bit of social-realist inflected anti-fascist satire, and I found myself quickly devouring it and eager to begin the next book in the series. It’s a very short book,…
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From the Preface to Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara
The art of storytelling — the art of putting one word after another, one line after another, one sentence after another, explaining one thing at a time, without allusions or reservations, calling bread bread and wine wine — is just like the ancient art of weaving, the ancient art of putting one thread after another,…
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Essay on Lorine Niedecker for Edge Effects
A few weeks ago, I was invited to write a short essay for the Edge Effects blog. If you’re not already familiar with it, Edge Effects is an outstanding blog run by CHE [the Center for Culture, History, and Environment], a group that belongs to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, which I’ve been…
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Expressing Gratitude
In 1934, when George Oppen was 26 years old, he published Discrete Series, a volume of his poetry. It included a preface from Ezra Pound, then living in Rapallo, Italy, which ended with these lines: “I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man’s sensibility and which has not been got out of any…
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In Search of Lost Whittenbergers
It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind ever since I dug out the old issue of the Whittenberger Summer Writing Project and decided that I wanted to try to find and contact everyone who had attended. I can only imagine what organizers of high school reunions have to deal with, but this has been…
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Whittenberger Summer Writing Project: 1998
One of the other things that I’ve recently decided to do (apart from weeding my library and pruning my record collection) is to finally dig into the huge pile of papers, photos, notes, letters, and memories I’ve stored in boxes and carried from apartment to apartment over the past decade or so. It’s just been…
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How to Write a Letter to the Editor
I know I keep writing about Oppen and his letters, but I just can’t help it. Today I was typing up my notes from his mid-60s letters, and remembered a pretty tremendous letter he wrote to Lita Hornick, then the managing editor of Kulchur, in response to Kulchur‘s decision to print “Soirées,” a Felix Pollak poem…
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George Oppen
I will try to keep this post brief, and being brief, it will certainly fail to capture the depth and breadth of my admiration for George Oppen as a poet and a human being, but I feel the need to essay–to make an attempt. I’ve just finished, this evening, a thorough reading of Oppen’s Selected…
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#2b: Designing and Making Invitations, Part 2
This is second half of a two part post on making and designing invitations. While this post isn’t technically about invitations, it does involve design work and letter press printing, so I thought it would make a nice complement to yesterday’s post. Because Laurel and I are both poets, we decided that we wanted to…
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At Long Last…
I have an approved dissertation proposal! What’s its title, you ask? Get ready, because it’s really sexy. “Thinking with the things as they exist”: Ecocriticism and Objectivist Poetics. Yeah. A thrilling tour through what I’m calling an “Objectivist” poetics (the writing of George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams,…
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Lorine Was Our Matchmaker: A Love Story
A picture of the finished rings. The ring Laurel made for me is on the left, the rings I made for her are on the right.
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On Seeing the One Thing Clearly
I’ve spent much of the past week trying with increasing desperation to write a dissertation proposal. It’s been the academic task that I’ve been ostensibly working on for nearly 18 months now, since I passed my prelims in early fall 2010. I don’t know what it has been so difficult for me to do, or…
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Lorine Niedecker and the 99%
One my favorite poets ever was Lorine Niedecker, a remarkable woman who spent most of her life living and writing on Blackhawk Island on the Rock River, just outside of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. At her death, she left behind a little library (including her now infamous ‘Immortal Cupboard‘, which consisted of, among other things, her…
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“Happy Geeks”: A Story by Steel Wagstaff, age 16
This past week I started teaching an introductory college composition course for a group of incoming UW student athletes. It’s a small group, just 14 male students, and most of the group are football players. For their second writing assignment, I gave them an essay that I wrote was I was around 16 years old…