About Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Rebecca Tirrell Talbot has many part-time identities. She is an adjunct professor, teaching English at Concordia University and a writing-intensive freshman seminar at North Park University. She is a part-time technical writer (and thus, she has adopted the mantra, "technically, I should be writing") and works on her own creative nonfiction, too.She enjoys writing about Chicago, where she and her husband Sean live, and her thesis about Chicago's Uptown neighborhood won an outstanding thesis award from Roosevelt University.
Articles by Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
The Courtyards of Rebirth:
Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Part II
It is appropriate to tiptoe into the courtyards of suffering and rebirth and listen, watch, and learn.
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What Ghosts Teach:
Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Part I
Book available on Amazon.com.
What could being asleep for fifty years, and then awakening, teach a person about life? You might tell me to Google Washington Irving or the Brothers Grimm and see what lessons they intended, but I am dead serious when I ask this question.
I ask it because in the early part of the [...]
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Keep up the Conversation:
A Reflection on David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was one of the few creative nonfiction writers who really captured the whole postmodern messiness of today. I haven’t read anyone else who can accomplish the pat-your-head-while-rubbing-your-belly feat of creating work that is both hip and packed with moral insight. I am afraid that the new space he created will be like a room after a party, deserted and echoey, now that Wallace is gone.
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One of Authenticity’s Last Great Sanctuaries?
Photo: Sean Talbot
It didn’t surprise me when Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam movement and host of the Uptown Poetry slam, told me that ministers sometimes “lurk in the shadows” of the Green Mill Lounge, a prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy, during the Sunday night poetry slam. When I first moved to Chicago, I, too, lurked [...]
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Mütter Museum’s Gruesome Grace
The Mütter museum claims to tell stories about the human experience, and as I swallowed my squeamishness and faced specimens in jars, I realized the morbid collection resonates with Christian ideas of truth, goodness, and even beauty.
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