Follow Margaret's essays at Letter from Home!
A COMPLICATION IN CORDAGE - THE INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE OF KNOTS
July 15, 2021 When you hand around with truckers and sailors you learn the language of knots. Climbers and wranglers, arborists and roustabouts - they speak this language too. You can go anywhere in the world and find someone tying a bowline. It may be called by a different name, but it's the same configuration: the rabbit goes...read more |
THE BOMB IN THE BED: ASANA, RELIGION, AND THE DOOMED PATH OF CERTAINTY
May 27, 2021 Last week, the Alabama legislature reversed a 1993 ruling that prohibited teaching yoga in the public schools. The new ruling came with a caveat: yoga okay, but no Oms, no namastes, no Sanskrit names for the postures. To call the postures asanas, which is everyday yoga-speak, that too would be a no-no, as would...read more |
EYES ON BURMA; A PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE AND THEIR COUNTRY
April 8, 2021 In the late 1990s I traveled with a friend to what was then called Burma, and is now called Myanmar. We never intended to go to Burma; our plan was to explore Thailand, and perhaps move on to India after that. We even obtained visas for Egypt in case we still had itchy feet. I had never been to Asia...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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