Follow Margaret's essays at Letter from Home!
TO FIND HOME
June 2, 2022 Sometimes I just want to tell you who I am and where I come from, forget the need to write and polish a piece for a newspaper column. I want to leave behind my professional training, my writing skills, my accomplishments, and open the heart's door. I'd start at the beginning if I knew where that was. Oh, so many ways to tell a story. I'll just say there was a long time...read more |
WALKING THE WALL: WHERE POETRY AND PRESIDENCY INTERSECT
April 21, 2022 Something is there that doesn't love a wall. These are the words of Robert Frost in his poem, “Mending Wall.” It’s been years since I sat down and read that poem. I spent most of the month of March thinking about walls and I was curious about what the old Vermonter had to say. If you’ve never read it, please do...read more |
HERE, AGAIN; THE WAR IN WHICH WE LIVED
March 10, 2022 It’s the second day of March. This won’t go to print for more than a week. We all know what a week can bring. It was exactly a week ago that Ukrainians woke up to their country at war. But I am writing this now because the moment feels more important than a newspaper timeline. And because acts of aggression are timeless...read more |
Welcome!
The trains go by my house 62 times a day. Some say no, 120 times a day. Now, that's a big difference. Why do some of us see double what others see, hear twice as many trains as everyone else? Has anyone actually counted? If I'm out walking by the tracks, I count the engines and wave at the engineers, and sometimes they toot their horns and wave back at me. But it's curious, don't you think, that we all see and hear different numbers of trains? I'm curious to know what you're curious about, what your mind and brain are thinking. I'd like to make this space a place of conversation. I do it by decree at this very moment: From here on out we think and ask and answer out loud to each other. Let's begin!
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Margaret Erhart earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of five novels and many essays and articles. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, and most recently in Northern Arizona’s Mountain Living Magazine and Flagstaff Live!. Her commentaries have aired on NPR. Her fourth novel, Crossing Bully Creek, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. Her fifth, The Butterflies of Grand Canyon, was a finalist for an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She has taught poetry to first-graders in Tuba City, and fiction to college students. She lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona.
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