We Are Kindling Schist because in U.S. education, "it was always burning." Read. Comment. Submit.
Family Quartet I: The Ring
For my father’s family “There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility.” —Mark Twain It was a gently chiseled curve of white gold, a barely measurable arc at its slightest, circling to the other side where the simple floral setting embraced the expertly angled diamond and its tiny attendants. The […]
Family Quartet II: The Heron
To my mother and her family (and especially to Lisa) ”You can refute Hegel, but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.” —W.B. Yeats They didn’t much look at each other or talk about it when it happened. It could have happened to anyone, after all: the visibility in the back of those newer […]
Family Quartet III: Sometimes We Are Right
For Milo and Eleanor and Avi: Into the New “We think so then/ We thought so still.”—Edward Lear “May we stride into that morass, senses left, dreams fevered, and underpants brightly colored.” —G. L., 12/31/2015, personal text Most of us agree we lived the most intensely in our first hundred years. We thought we knew, […]
Family Quartet IV: Midsummer
To David, Gabriel, and Amelia, and to the young woman I once was Emily […] Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute? Stage Manager No. Pause The saints and poets, maybe —they do some.” —Thornton Wilder, Our Town She drifted a little back into a dream, something about […]
Family Quartet: Gratitude
These stories are dedicated to my dear family, past, present, and future. Our families more than anyone shape us, and I am forever grateful that mine are who they are. However, our friends help us realize who we are and who our families are and give us sustenance in ways families can’t. So I am […]
ANGER’S PLACE by Your Co-Editors
Debbie: When you and I first began We Are Kindling Schist, my primary motivation was anger. I was angry at what I was facing at the school where I worked at the time, and I was trying to make sense of it all, to decipher how this professional anger reflected other events in my life, […]