THOMAS LARSON

(New English Review November 15, 2014)

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The Hobby Lobby decision, written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Alito and passed by a 5-4 ruling in June, continues to reverberate in American culture like a car alarm that won’t shut off. As most everyone knows, the Court had to decide whether “three closely held corporations [which] provide health-insurance coverage for methods of contraception . . . violate the sincerely held religious belief [italics added] of the companies’ owners.” Contraception here refers to four of twenty methods approved by the FDA, intrauterine devices or pills that supposedly prevent a fertilized egg from implantation in a woman’s womb, which is defined as pregnancy. To prevent such implantation of a viable embryo is considered by some to be abortion. More important, religious fundamentalists say that once sperm meets egg, an ensouled human life has begun. Ending it, pre- or post-implantation, is murder.

(TriQuarterly October 21, 2014)

For me, the edgiest of the double-edged questions we’ve all asked a teacher, a colleague, or ourselves concerns the “outline”—first, when do I do it, before, during, or after I write, for which the mordant answer is yes, and second, why do I do it, which is harder to quantify because it suggests that planning a piece may be categorically different than writing a piece, as though the pair are maliciously counterbalanced, feathers and lead. I say malicious because such a myth (writing fun, outlining dumb) invites a more emotional query: Does the outline mean that we must succumb to that which is not writing, as though we’ve fallen from rapture to drudge—Lewis and Clark giving way to the Conestoga wagons?

(San Diego Reader August 20, 2014)

For Gary Strawn, one prime indicator of the menacing intensity of the 2014 drought—and the health of San Diego county’s dozens of streams—is the presence of rainbow trout in the upper reaches of Boulder Creek.

On a mid-morning in June, I, Strawn, and Doug Taylor, the former a riparian volunteer and fly fisherman, the latter, ambassador with the San Diego River Park Foundation, are stepping gingerly through dead or dying underbrush on our way to one of two known trout pools. Strawn and Taylor have been here, in the last couple years, restoring a River Park-owned creekside parcel with native plants and fishes. We are five miles east of Cuyamaca Peak, the site of this stream’s headwaters at Cuyamaca Dam in the Cleveland National Forest.

(Psychology Today Blogs #1-8, March-November, 2014)

Cuddling With Mamie

To introduce myself for this, my first blog at Psychology Today, I’m the author of The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, Hudson Whitman Press, 2014. The book rewinds and unravels my life during and after my three heart attacks.

The core argument of the memoir is a relational one: My recovery, as good as it can get after the damage of three myocardial infarctions, surged once I shared my condition with my long-time partner, Suzanna. In addition, I cut out dairy, ramped up my exercise, and added supplements. A no-oil Vegan and daily walker, I have lost 35 pounds as a plant-based eater, and it’s been three years since my last angioplasty.

(An Afterword to Rank 'N' File by John Abel, Summer 2014)

Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague. —Vincent Van Gogh

I admit to struggling with a couple phrases while I tick-tock my way through John Daniel Abel’s latest sad and poignant collection of speaking images. (His previous marvel was The Last Word: Sixty-One American Epitaphs.) The phrases that trouble me are underclass and working-class. Why? Their sell-buy dates have passed. Anymore, such terms as the wealthy, the middle-class (the politicians’ fantasy), the nouveau riche, and other mass descriptors have lost definitional distinction. The problem is, cliché guarantees stereotype: ah, the poor—ignorant, opinionated, desperate, racist, self-abusive. You know the drill. But couldn’t those knee-jerk responses fit any “class”? Aren’t the 1% ignorant, opinionated, desperate, racist, self-abusive?

(Written June 15, 2014)

“Feel Like Funkin’ It Up”

In the HBO series Treme, the opening parade sequence, all of 6:46, heralds the program—in its entirety—one that will ripple and storm and flood into 36 episodes over four years. The mise-en-scène depicts the post-Katrina re-jiggering of New Orleans, three months after, as it affects one neighborhood, the Treme. It’s a noisy array of street sounds and band music—a trumpet player oiling his valves, a glaring cop expecting trouble, a man lustily tipping a beer, a van going by blasting hip-hop, a fade-in/fade-out snippet of that wanton lullaby, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.”

(River Teeth Blog June 1, 2014)

Growing the Soil and the Soul

Sometimes a memoir, spilling into the ken of autobiography, must grapple with an author’s lifelong enigma—his book’s story, the story. As we read, we feel this cyclonic summing-up, the best chance after the life (or as far as the life has got) to say what, in particular, shaped that life’s core meaning. Perhaps the revelation is that we don’t get another go-round (obvious but important), that we never knew the storm was gathering while it happened (as much good as bad), and that the life we thought we lived was not exactly the one we did live (the new self the memoir discloses to its surprised narrator).