Creativity, Community, and Secret Agents
Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot; Graphic design: Chris Ware In Chicago, a glimmer of the world that ought to be, in our midst: Elementary-age kids chatter, laugh, and hunch over their latest writing projects, jotting down what they know about superheroes. Tutors admire their writing or ask prodding questions. My Morning Jacket plays in the background. Then, the kids circle on a carpet and do some very painless...
Cains & Abels Sing Their Heads Off
Two hundred people fill a sparsely furnished sanctuary, singing at the top of their lungs. They are untrained singers with plenty of vocal eccentricities. No instruments give the right key or take the edge off the voices' peculiarities. Stumbling upon a scenario like this would make many people flee for the exits. And, knowing that the lead singer of Chicago-based indie band Cains & Abels had grown up in th...
Of Public Transit and Human Nature
Photo: Wally Gobetz. "Shoot," I mutter, looking at the clock on my computer. It's 4:30 p.m. in Oak Park, Illinois where I've just finished teaching, and that slates me for a 5:15 transfer to the Brown Line train in the Chicago Loop. Which means I won't get a seat. Which means I'll be shoved into a space more precariously crammed than my closet. Which means that I will be practically hugging about five other comm...
Midway through aMike Rose Semester
Photo by Alexandre Laurin Rita, a student of mine, came to my office last week to discuss an upcoming paper. "How's your research going?" I asked. "I am a bad writer," she said. At the start of the semester, Rita wrote an essay describing the shame she felt whenever she sat down at the computer. Sentences conspired to reinforce her feelings of inadequacy. When she asked people to help her, they labeled her a...
Free Bubble Wrap, and Other Joys of Urban Simplicity
Photo: Patrick Boury Anyone who has ever had a dog and a skunk on her property at the same time, loaded hay into a loft in July, or contemplated the best way to catch a horse that just took off through the woods knows that rural life has its challenges. While cities provide their own complications, it's time to set the record straight. Our cultural imagination has us thinking the country life is the good and sim...
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 in the flickering light cast by tabletop candles. I entered the Green Mill as hungri...
