This is the third and newest book in Sally Wright’s well-received “Ben Reese Mystery Series.” The first two—Pride and Predator and Publish and Perish—drew rave reviews from the Washington Times, National Review, Publishers Weekly, and the redoubtable Ralph McInerny. The new book’s premise is intriguing. It’s 1961. Elderly Scottish professor Georgina Fletcher leaves an Oxford...
Imagine, if you will, a residential street in Madison, Wisconsin, where every neighbor is a member of the university faculty. Is this a metaphor for Hell? A trip to the Twilight Zone? A sequel to Richard Russo’s tenure-track satire, Straight Man, or Jane Smiley’s Moo? None of the above. The Society of Friends is a...
It was an editor’s dream: poems of this caliber, unsolicited and unexpected, in my post office box. The verse was assertive, muscular, practiced but never unsurprising. Who was this man? Everyone else knew, it seemed. Richard Moore’s poems and essays had been widely published for more than 15 years before the publication of his first...
Leo Widicker farms outside Bowdon, North Dakota. Last winter, Widicker had a quarter section—160 acres—that was badly wind-eroded from several dry summers and snowless winters during which there was no ground cover. Much of the topsoil had blown into a highway ditch. In May, a hopeful Widicker planted that quarter section in wheat. A crew...
On our Disneyland day, the first time for all of us, we rose at 6 A.M. to be sure to get there early, as we’d been warned to do. We showered, dressed, wolfed a donut in the Comfort Inn lobby, and proceeded to our Hyundai, parked in back. The right rear window was shattered. The...
A friend says her secret wish is for some very old distant relative, who she’s never met and won’t miss, to die and leave her a fortune. Waiting for rain this summer is a lot like that—only less realistic. In what threatens to be our third virtually rainless summer, I watch the ten o’clock news...
It’s gone just about too far this time. In the past year, North and South Dakota were included in a group of states described as “America’s Out back” by Newsweek. As if that weren’t bad enough, both states were also left out of a Rand McNally photographic atlas. (The editors smiled urbanely, one imagines, and...
Last year I wrote about the Poppers, Frank and Deborah, the Rutgers University husband-wife duo who theorized that the Great Plains—from Texas to North Dakota and from Oklahoma to Denver—were fit to be nothing more than a “Buffalo Commons.” The couple predicted that the Great Plains, whose largest city is Lubbock, Texas, will slowly dwindle...
Two years ago, because it felt inevitable and right, I took the happy leap of faith that I had been approaching for years and became a Catholic. The reasons why are perhaps fodder for another letter at another time. Let me just say here and now that current church music and liturgy were not among...
It’s the little things—not the front-page disclosures—that suggest to us that we’ve been had. Take, for instance, a 1987-88 study by the Oregon Department of Transportation. ODOT studied 551 students between 16 and 19 years of age who had completed driver education programs, 581 students who said they would have taken the course had it...
It’s bound to happen. As the prodigal metropolises east and west of North Dakota accumulate garbage, after they’ve tried and failed at recycling and incineration, they’re going to want to put that garbage somewhere—stuff it where it won’t offend a constituent or blemish a perfect urban concrete-scape. These folks are naturally going to think “wasteland”...
The first “Zip to Zap,” or “Zap-In,” made headlines around the world, in places as different as Pakistan and Russia, to say nothing of Washington and Miami. It was 1969, with civil rights and anti-Vietnam marches, US forces in Southeast Asia at an all-time high, and, the year before, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the Democratic...
There I was, nearly 36, being paid to do mundane work (but not paid nearly enough), unable to finish any of the large writing projects I’d been working at, and victim of a series of professional disappointments. This was a far cry from the international literary fame I’d envisioned at age 19. I was old,...
For some reason (perhaps God knows why) I recently started receiving packets of postcard advertisements from Media Management’s Ministry: Values for Growing Churches. “Dear Pastor,” the top card began. I read that an identical packet had been sent to two hundred fifty thousand other “pastors,” along with a card from Media Management saying, “building? teaching?...
Elsewhere, life is predictable: the State Legislature wants a raise, Khomeini wants someone dead. Tiny Tim is running for mayor of New York, and Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith are pregnant, ecstatic about it, and planning to move up the date of their second marriage to each other. Inside the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes,...
In America, we can judge the significance of an event by the pre-maturity and questionable taste of the memorabilia it spawns. In mid-January 1989, three months before the Women’s International Bowling Congress (WIBC) was scheduled to descend upon Bismarck, North Dakota (pop. 45,000), the J.C. Penney store was selling T-shirts that claimed “I Survived Bowling...
It took millennia for North Dakota soil to acquire what nutrients it has (and they’re substantial) in the Red River Valley along the eastern border, the silt-rich bottom of huge prehistoric Lake Agassiz. It took only a hundred years or so for man to nearly deplete it. And now John Gardner, a North Dakota agronomist,...
Fun for the whole family, the ad for the movie said. (I was relieved to know that it wasn’t zany or lafF-packed, although later I would have settled for that.) Our kids, then eight and 13, deserved a celebration for lasting through the final day of school before Christmas vacation, so, loaded with grotesque candy...
“Poetry is the most overproduced commodity on the market, next to zucchini.” —Judson Jerome, Writer’s Digest poetry columnist since 1960 According to a 1985 study cited by Writer’s Digest Books, 23.3 percent of all people who think of themselves as writers—or “more than two million people“—write poetry for publication. It follows that there are then...
Eastern Montana: a gigantic plate of congealed gravy. Chicken gravy. A shimmering, menacing, pale silver-yellow, begrudgingly patched with some better-off-nameless light green culture. We’re talking stubble here in this drought year, not chest-high grain. The gravy platter stretches east and west for 500 miles, from just inside the North Dakota border to Shelby, Montana (dare...
She’s embarrassing and unpredictable, known as a “gadfly” and a “maverick” (among other names). She admits she’s never been a joiner. She has alienated both political parties and the Minnesota media. There are no topics on which she doesn’t have a strong opinion and no circumstances under which she would stifle any opinion. One cringes...
When I was 11, I saw a photo of the Radcliffe campus in fall, with a beautiful long-haired blonde in a plaid wool skirt sitting on a flight of leaf-covered steps in front of a red brick building. (Fran Schumer saw a similar picture.) A beautiful long-haired blonde is what I hoped to be someday,...
Our sixth-grade daughter’s class made the “Hiroshima lanterns” late in May when the North Dakota Peace Coalition came to her parochial school. The kids painted the paper sides of the 8″ x 8″ boats with rainbows and flowers and the word “peace,” and made plans to light the candles and set the boats afloat on...
Election Day nears, and two faceless candidates leer ahead of us like dopestarved punks who know there’s nowhere else for us to go. They need a fix, and in the process we’ll lose our money and our dignity. If that’s all we lose, I guess we’re lucky. These strange men (and the occasional odd woman)...
It was hard times down at the Bismarck chapter of The National Organization for Women. The girls were tired of playing “Old Maid” and “Hangman” all day, and to some of them even the prospect of a date with a fascist warmonger executive was beginning to look good. Something had to be done, and fast....
Linda Hasselstrom is a friend of mine, although we don’t write often or know each other well. I visited her South Dakota ranch, between the Black HOls and the Badlands, only once, six years ago, at which time I had the unwitting bad manners to ask her how much land she owned. It was an...
Deborah Epstein Popper is a graduate student in geography at Rutgers University, and Frank J. Popper chairs the university’s urban studies department there: in New Brunswick, New Jersey, about as far away from the Great Plains, in every way, as you can get. The Poppers published a long article in the December 1987 issue of...
Anxious to be liked, mainstream Churches roll over and piddle on the floor regularly these days, and seem to do so with the greatest vigor in the spring, when the pasqueflowers sprout on virgin soil and the “renewal” comes to town. Fundamentalist Protestants have had “renewals” for ages and call them “revivals.” Neophyte Catholics and...
My first-grade son was recently bitten in the arm by an exuberant classmate. Luckily (said his principal) my son was wearing a heavy jacket, and the boy’s teeth didn’t puncture his skin: “Human bites are even more dangerous than dogs’, you know,” she reminded me. Yes, I’d read that, and agreed that we were lucky—and...
I had the intense pleasure of visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire in August. Although I’m happy where I am, I think I could be happy there, too, and if anyone wants to give me a family-and-pet-sized cabin halfway up a mountain, write to me in care of Chronicles. I fell in love with...
“What ever happened to real men . . . the kind of men with good old-fashioned values like honesty, integrity, sincerity, and ambition?” asks FOOD—Farmers of Ongoing Determination—in a promotional flier. It turns out that they think they have a corner on the real-man market—and I’m willing to let them suspend my disbelief. North Dakotans...
I came across Mitch Snyder’s name the other day. Remember Mitch? He made the news first about three years ago, when, as head of the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), a Washington-based “homeless rights” group, he spoke out against the indignities perpetrated against 61 -year-old Jesse Carpenter, who “froze to death in the shadow of...
Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.” Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted...
It’s Charismatic Prayer Sharing, Thursday nights at 8:00 P.M. in the Community Room of the large Catholic church I attend with my family. Because I’ve been wanting to learn to pray better, I went recently. Lou, the man I’d talked to on the phone, walked over and greeted me. Another, Stan, a seraphic, unkempt. round...
American poetry has for the past few decades been going through what can only be called an adolescence, discarding rules and conventions simply because they existed. Poetry and all the arts go through a healthy siege of anarchy every so often, but this was more like terrorism than a revolution; these revolutionaries, unlike the Romantics,...
The Knights of Columbus Club is just beginning to buzz as we pull up at 7:45, 15 minutes fashionably late. Our cars hold two families of three people each; the two small boys—cousins, one in each car, for sanity’s sake—love each other madly and can’t bear the five-minute drive from our dinner at Bonanza. My...
My husband, a beef jerky afficionado, tells me that C & I Jerky, Ltd. makes some of the best he’s ever tasted. Ileene Nodland and Cheryl Knutson produce it themselves in Dunn Center, North Dakota, which had 170 residents during the 1980 census and has fewer now. Knutson started out making her special venison jerky,...
“Directions for Iowa’s Economic Growth” ought to be required reading for every local and state government body, to say nothing of the boys in Washington (the less said about them, the better). Drafted by a University of Iowa research team under the direction of the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Planning and Research...
Between now and the turn of the century, 16 eastern and southeastern states will celebrate 200 years of statehood. Here in the hinterlands, seven more states will have their 100th birthday. Then there will be just five state centennials left, with Alaska and Hawaii as late desserts in 2059—when many East Coast states will be...
Fairbanks has an interesting hypothesis: that early prairie women loved the plains and their adventurous lives here as much as pioneer men did. I have never believed in the myth that every pioneer woman was long-suffering, silently hating the prairie and the man who brought her here. I was pleased to think that I’d found...
It was Homecoming 1986 at Jamestown College in southeastern North Dakota. Scott Westcott, 19, was at the dance. So was Shaun Erickson, 28, a senior who lectures and writes widely about his homosexuality. The room was crowded, and, according to Westcott, his eyes kept meeting Erickson’s across it. Young Westcott didn’t like that one bit....
A recent Time article reported an astonishing new find. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that men are good for women. Actually, there’s more to it than that—what they really found out, or think they found out, is that regular relations and, more specifically,...
It was their ordinariness that made them matter. . . . Individual life was by its very nature a tragedy; it came to an end; for all of us it was going to be a short way to that grave. But the ordinary life of a society was a comedy that just kept going on....
In the heartland’s fiercest modern-day shoot-out—farmers versus lawyers and bankers—it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad. Charles Niska, farmer and father of eight, is serving two consecutive one-year sentences in the North Dakota State Penitentiary for illegal practice of law and jumping bail. Niska got into trouble helping his neighbor Richard Schmidt...
Zig Ziglar came to Bismarck recently. (My husband, who doesn’t do aerobics, likes his finger of Cutty before bed, and is understandably paranoid about his decadent life-style, says it feels to him as if Zig comes here once a month.) A lot of people I know went to the performance, and many bought Zig’s books...
This is not an invitation. Frankly, if you don’t live here already, most of us would rather you stay where you are, although we can’t blame you for wanting to come. Oh, some of our businessmen and bankers and ministers and mayors and tourism promoters might, in the prejudicial atmosphere of their workplaces, look down...
July 4. There’s a sad little cluster of peeling white bleachers, but they face the sun. Most locals elect to sit on a blanket on the hillside opposite, where the view is great in spite of the dust. To keep the blowing grit down, a tractor and sprayer work the arena to a perfect moistness;...
1. Fargo, North Dakota—Not long ago, in a city far, far away from almost everything, there was founded an abortion clinic called the Fargo Women’s Health Organization. A little later came an antiabortion counseling center, which its supporters named the Fargo-Moorhead Women’s Help and Caring Connection, Inc. The abortion clinic obtained a temporary injunction and...
North Dakota—the last place most people ever think of-makes the national news from time to time, usually as part of a survey or study. Sometimes the results surprise those of us who live here, but mostly they don’t. For instance, studies publicized in the past year indicate that we’re the state lowest in stress, that...
I try to be a calm and charitable person. But just when I have some of my smaller base urges under control—my flippancy, my latent cynicism—I trip in some new droppings of those sincere, well-meaning U.S. citizens whose rhetoric can’t be distinguished from the Kremlin’s, and am freshly undone. This time the Boy Scouts and...