Unexpected Intersections

Last night after dinner, my husband and I were talking, brainstorming some world-building and scenarios related to my current writing project, and it wasn't long before we were both laughing out loud. A really good laugh, or even better, a conversation filled with laughter, always leaves me feeling lighter. I love a good laugh. That said, I'm not the kind of person who generally laughs out loud while reading a book (or watching a film or series). I can read (or see) something that I think is absolutely hilarious, and at most I'll probably crack a smile or give a soft chuckle. But one of the writers who can make me, even me, laugh out loud is Terry Pratchett.

I guess it's a sign of how many laps I've done around the sun that so many creators whose work and lives I've admired are dying. Leonard Cohen. Maya Angelou. Terry Pratchett. Ursula K. LeGuin. And now Toni Morrison. When someone dies, their untold stories die with them. I wrote about that in this essay , published in Skirt! magazine in May, 2017. When a creative person dies we lose their untold stories, but their life's work remains, both a comfort and a legacy, as if they haven't left us entirely. In 2004 Toni Morrison gave the commencement address at Wellesley College. You can read a transcription of the address in it's entirety here (there's also a link to the video ). Here are some of her remarks that resonated with me. Regarding the future, I would have to rest my case on some bromide, like the future is yours for the taking. Or, that it’s whatever you make of it. But the fact is it is not yours for the taking. And it is not whatever you make of

I can't remember a time when I didn't know that there was a famous British author named Jane Austen, but I never encountered her work as a younger reader. As an adult, my first encounters with her work were through film adaptations, which prompted me to purchase three of her best-known novels, Pride and Prejudice , Sense and Sensibility , and Emma , with the intention of reading them. But life and a couple of international moves didn't support those reading goals for several years.

I first encountered the work of Mark Twain, like many American students, in high school, reading  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  in English class. And while as an adult, I'm grateful for the many classics that I was exposed to during my education, I confess that, unlike Dickens or Poe, I was not inspired enough by what I read in school to read more of Twain's work on my own. It wasn't until a few years ago, while on vacation near Luzern, Switzerland, that my path unexpectedly intersected that of Mr. Twain's once again. We were hiking on Mt. Rigi-Kulm when, to my surprise, a plaque informed us that we were following in the footsteps of Mark Twain. What I didn't realize at that time was how extensively Twain traveled in Switzerland, or that his chronicles of his European travels, including time spent in Switzerland, were published in A Tramp Abroad.