By Jarret Keene
Coyote skittering the blacktop
Jackrabbit rip-zagging a tumbleweed
In half
Jet plane blasting
Across a blood-orange sky
And where are you, darling?
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By Melissa Bowles-Terry
An old joke: A university is a loosely organized group of scholars, united only by their complaints about parking. We live and work in our departments, mostly: anthropologists hanging out with other anthropologists, chemists bumping into chemists. There are few places we routinely encounter one another outside of our discipline-specific spheres.
By Paul Michelsen
This is how you write a poem
You make the hieroglyphics
do a little dance, then
let them make sweet love
How you remember
your loved ones
The living and the dead
By Stephen Siwinski
“Good deal.”
That was Dad’s way of saying something was satisfactory, his highest form of praise or a way to wrap up a conversation that had gone on a little too long. It was a utilitarian phrase that could be unfolded and used in any situation like a trusty pocket knife. Dad loved deals.
By Michelle Aucoin Wait
While God’s sunshine plays around the little tomb where her remains are buried, by the side of her second husband, and her sons and daughters, Marie Laveau’s name will not be forgotten in New Orleans. The Times-Picayune (17 June 1881)
By Staff of Nevada Humanities
One positive side of social distancing is spending time with some good books. Here’s what our staff at Nevada Humanities are reading.
By Stephanie Gibson
As I hole up at home, the rhythm of the day – rise, run, coffee, child wrangling, commute, work, home, dinner, more wrangling, bed, repeat – completely upended, I’m trying to establish some routines that make this new normal feel more, normal. Besides taking many deep breaths, spending time researching how one homeschools, and setting up my Nevada Humanities home office, here are a few things that bring some peace, joy, and connection to my days:
By Anny Ayala Ortega
My introduction to roller skating was when I saw Michelle Steilen, a.k.a. Estro Jen, in this profile of her skate part for Bones Swiss Bearings. In 2017, I asked my best friend Jennifer to learn how to roller skate with me, and so we did. It took a lot of courage and getting over fears, and in the end was about pushing through and learning the steps together. It’s a sport you can immediately fall in love with.
By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Since we are halfway through Women’s History Month in March and April’s National Poetry Month will be here soon, we thought it appropriate to celebrate the works of women poets from Nevada. We cannot highlight all of the women poets in the Silver State so we pulled a few poets who have contributed to the Double Down blog. Enjoy!
As the challenges presented by COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) continue to evolve rapidly, Nevada Humanities’ top priority remains the health, safety, and well-being of our Nevada communities. With the growing prevalence of COVID-19 nationally and with its appearance in Nevada, we are carefully monitoring both federal and state guidance on how to minimize exposure to and spread of the virus. The health and peace of mind of our staff, board, partners, grantees, and program participants will guide our decision making in the coming weeks.
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By Louis Niebur
Twenty years ago I made my first trip to Reno from Los Angeles. I knew nearly nothing about the Biggest Little City other than what gay culture taught me (via the campy 1939 movie The Women): "Marry for love, marry for money. Where does it get you? On the train for Reno!"
By Joanne Mallari
As a student who grew up in a low-income household, public programming gave me valuable opportunities to engage with the arts. My earliest literacy sponsors included local librarians and mentors who worked with students in Las Vegas’ Clark County School District. When I started writing poems in sixth grade, my English teacher connected me with a summer program called the Southern Nevada Writing Project.
By Jane Fundis Tors
“Here’s to Lieutenant Gaetan Picon of the French Foreign Legion,” my father would say with his glass raised. The military rank may have been an embellishment, but history holds that Picon created the French liqueur while serving in Algeria. It would become the foundation of the Picon Punch drink, for many a symbol of the American-Basque and part of the northern Nevada experience.
By Christina Barr
Every year, as I drive across Nevada to head to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, I have four hours of deep-Nevada-landscape-road-trip time to think about the things that emerge when you stare at miles and miles of endless highway: life, love, work, poetry and of course, the passing of time.
By Angela M. Brommel
More than 20 years ago I met a retired Dean of Humanities through a course I was taking as a study of religion major. His name was Dee. Within moments of opening his door, he impatiently asked who I was and why I was qualified to be there. Before I had a chance to answer, he told me to sit as he started to tell me about his life’s work. As part of that story, Dee told me that each year he required students in his Introduction to Humanities course to memorize and recite Spring and Fall: to a young child by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wept as he recited it to me, and at that time I didn’t understand the poem or how it moved him.
By George Perreault
This poem was recently published in The American Journal of Poetry.
some folks who got shot today,
make it a whole bunch, a good score,
and sure some young ones are best,
give us headlines and ticker scroll,
the body count rising like a pledge drive,
maybe flashing lights and mouths, all that
By Katherine Fusco
In Ling Ma’s Severance, the undead are familiar. They are familiar not because, in the year 2020, we have all lived through the zombie trends in literature, film, and television. The fast zombie, the slow zombie, the funny zombie, the smart zombie—we’ve had them all. No, the undead in Severance are familiar because they are so much like you and I.
By Brad McMullen
Every year since 1985, thousands of people have made the trip out to Elko, Nevada in the dead of winter, gathering together in order to celebrate and commemorate the vitality of the artistic traditions of the American West at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Though the event has grown a bit from the 60 chairs set out by Western Folklife Center founding director Hal Cannon and poet Waddie Mitchell 36 years ago, the event still provides a place for people from all over to come together and have all kinds of conversations.
By Peter Michel and Aaron Mayes
Before gaming, before hotels, before the tourists came, the Las Vegas valley of the 1800s was home to Native American Indians, explorers, miners, ranchers, and settlers heading to California, who wandered, set down, picked up, and mostly moved on. When the San Pedro, Salt Lake, and Los Angeles Railroad decided to use the local springs on the old Stewart Ranch to water its locomotives, and, almost as an afterthought in 1905, laid out a small townsite around its depot and train yards, the latest Nevada boom town suddenly appeared. This eruption of a new town in the desert is vividly captured throughout the early family photo albums now housed at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, (UNLV) Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
By Amy Pason
Over the holidays, my family likes to play board games. This year, we played Seven Wonders where the objective is to build a civilization strategizing resource and building cards. Sometimes your strategy might be to build marketplaces so you profit from other players buying resources. Sometimes it is more advantageous to develop the arts. While other times, you might need to go on the offense to gain armies if your opponents decide to take a defense strategy (for the record, I was able to best my parents’ points gained in battle by focusing on points gained by my science and education buildings).