He Will Cover You with His Feathers Rhiannon Conley I am thinking about two hornbills I saw in the Milwaukee zoo the day my sister runs away with her new boyfriend. She, just nineteen, the whitest in our family’s flock of black, submits her confession: “I am pregnant.” She will
Amanda Osgood Jonientz The Bakken Goes Boom: Oil and the Changing Geographies of Western North Dakota edited by William Caraher and Kyle Conway is a collection of works by scholars, journalists, artists, and poets. As the introduction explains, the aim of this collection is to present the “human side of
This review appears in North Dakota Quarterly 83.1 (Winter 2016) Richard Wirick Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women. Ed. Stephen Emerson; Foreword by Lydia Davis. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015. Pp. 432, $26 hd. The stories of Lucia Berlin (how’s that for a Cold War mother’s
A light dusting of snow can’t hide the fact that the Northern Plains are enjoying a balmy spring thaw. So in honor of the return to spring, I changed up the masthead a bit to reflect (literally) the spring light on the melting snow.
Michael Wittgraf Why would a 53-year-old college music professor, composer, and department chair bother to memorize on the piano several Chopin waltzes on his down time during a six-month sabbatical, despite other creative obligations that required a large investment in time, none of which required piano playing? For quite a
This week we received copies of North Dakota Quarterly 83.1. Taking nothing away from the content, the cover is a spectacular photograph by Chuck Kimmerle who served as campus photographer for the University of North Dakota for many years. Kate Sweney, our managing editor added this: The artwork for our
Kathryn Sweney My obsession with crime fiction started in about fifth grade when I checked out all the Perry Mason books I could find at the public library. Later I progressed to the so-called “hard-boiled” detective fiction from the 20s, 30s, and 40s: primarily Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet. Later
I sometimes find myself calling North Dakota Quarterly a literary journal. I think this fulfills some personal pretension that I am participating in the larger project of literature in some way. It’s closer to the truth to call North Dakota Quarterly a public humanities journal. Reading through the archives provides ample evidence
When I agreed to review Richard Edwards’ book Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota Before the Oil Boom for a well-regarded journal, I almost immediately regretted it. I had already heard stories of proud North Dakotans giving this book, wrapped in lutefisk, to other North Dakotans at the holidays.
North Dakota Quarterly 