I am participating in the American Cancer Society Read Every Day challenge. This is an easy one for me, as I read every day anyway! So I am blogging my reading this month in the hopes that you might enjoy my literary journeys, and that you might consider supporting my fundraiser to fight cancer and support cancer patients through Relay for Life. Go to main.acsevents.org/goto/elizabethdonald to read my essay and donate.
February 12
Today’s reading was a reread of an essay by Carl Phillips, included in his writing memoir, My Trade Is Mystery. It’s really a lovely book, and very useful for me as a writer. There are a couple of segments in it that I use for my composition classes, so I was reviewing the segment titled “Silence“ before presenting it to my 102 students.
In it, Phillips isn’t actually talking about silence as in the absence of audible sound. He’s talking about the kind of silence that happens when you allow art to fill you. When you set aside the phone and the noise and the distractions and truly focus on art, on its message, its rhetoric, if we were to use an English professor word. How does it speak to you?
You can’t really do that if you’re watching the show with one eye on your phone scroll or playing a match-three game. You have to set aside the distractions for silence to fill you.
This is one reason why I believe that going to the theater, whether live or movie, is the purest form of engaging in the art. People stomp and yell all the time about how much it sucks to go to the movie theater because you can’t pause the movie, etc. To me, that’s a feature, not a bug. You can’t pause. It is socially unacceptable to be scrolling on your phone through the movie. You can’t stop and have a conversation with the person next to you or run out for more snacks. Well, technically you can, but then you can’t pay your rent.
You are forced into a position where everything else must be still, and you sit in the dark, and wait for the magic that Nicole Kidman tried to tell us about in that lovely corny video that we’ve seen mocked so many times. She’s not wrong.
That was key to my other “reading,“ which couldn’t possibly count for this, but definitely made an impression. I attended opening night of a new production by the Black Theater Workshop at SIUE, a play called “Blood at the Root.“ It’s a dramatization of what happened in Jena, Louisiana in 2006, when student protests led to racist hate/homophobia and eventually erupted into violence.
The play was an interesting blend of abstract and traditional drama. Some segments were dramatized through modern dance, through and almost dreamlike performance of color and sound… And others were heart-wrenchingly real. The young actress playing the main character, our protagonist, who actually was not involved in the altercation that sent the six to jail, absolutely shone as a brilliant and nuanced young actress.
If anything, the play illustrated better than most television shows I’ve seen in many years what it’s like to attend a high school in the absolute circus that the United States has become in the last 20 years. The issues those young children dealt with are depressingly similar to the issues we’re still dealing with in 2025, and with no greater sage wisdom than we had then.
A fascinating set design, in the round in what is usually a black box theater with an abstract construction of rope, representing the tree that was at the center of the dispute. And looped within it were not nooses, but similar enough in style to represent the three nooses students had hung from a tree outside the high school in 2006. I would love to talk to the designer about his choices.
If you get a chance to see “Blood at the Root,” I strongly recommend it.
Feb. 13
Today I read a succession of dark dystopian horror stories, disguised as the news.
I only managed one poem as an evening chaser. I think I need to switch to something fluffy for my next fiction read.
Feb. 14
Today I read my father’s latest sermon. After retirement, my father went to seminary and became a Lutheran pastor. His sermon focused on what it means to stand up for true Christian principles like justice, peace, kindness, compassion, and advocacy for the poor, the homeless, the refugee, the stranger in our land. Okay, he didn’t cross the line of actual politics, but as he pointed, Jesus was political. Always remember when asking what would Jesus do, that flipping tables and beating jerks with a whip is an option.
Feb. 16
This weekend, I finished Authenticity, a poetry collection by Lesley Day. I heard Ms. Day read some poems at a recent event at a local bookstore, and was struck by the raw honesty of her verse. She was married to a man struggling with mental illness, who one day put a gun to her head, stopped himself and went into the other room to shoot himself. As a widow with two young children, she poured her grief, pain, depression and anger into her poetry, and I had to buy the book. It’s clear she’s a beginning poet – there’s a lot more tell than show in her verse – but there’s a clarity and honesty to it I admired.