Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne is the central character in the novel The Scarlet Letter. For those of you less-familiar with this story, Prynne is accused of committing the sin of adultery and required to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her outer clothing as a mark of shame. Dr. Seuss employed a similar labelling scheme in…
Those N95 masks we all hear about, the ones that were hoarded and often resold for multiples of their previous price, likely aren’t enough to stop COVID19 from finding your nasal and bronchial passages. This also means that regular medical masks and definitely ones made from simple cloth won’t stop invasion either. Just this morning,…
“The Surabaya was a large steel box taking away his memories, devouring them” says Nobel Prize-Winning Author JMG LeClezio in his novel Onitsha. Boxes really are just simple containers. They hold things, separate them, sort them. A box has sides to it. Sometimes the sides are shapable, malleable — cardboard or paper-like material that can be pushed…
Spinning, spinning, spinning, twirling, twirling, speeding across the waves, the foam swallowing in a gulp at the beach. Chomp, chomp go the waves and the bubbles hiss as they fry against the sand. Regardless of temperature, the water has been shoved and forced powerfully to the shore and the sand must bear the weight and…
On a normal day in a normal way, madness would define itself as something so outside of experience that we can’t register it as part of our normality. An outlier. Something that happens to someone else. Something beyond comprehension and needing immediate attention. Something dangerous, crazy, impossible to interpret. Yet here we all are, sitting…
What’s it like to look out into the world and see nothing? To see nothing but confusion? To see a maze of possibilities all intertwined and crawling like ants, one over the other, each blocking the other’s view? Where hope is a four-letter word that is impossible to reach? Where it is imperative that impulse…
In my daily life wanderings, I read frequently. Sometimes I cross a sentence or series of sentences that really catch me and make me think. My mind likes to build those bridges between past texts and current applications. Yesterday, I was reading Richard Dawkin’s book Science In The Soul. In the collection, the article titled “The…
Here is a letter I sent today to our Hamilton Southeastern School Board Members in reference to their recent 4-3 vote to not include specified wording in Board policies recognizing often marginalized groups. Final vote by the board will be taken at the May 8 board meeting: Dear HSE Board — I am writing in…
Pearce Writing 