Author: Ilse Munro

Ilse Munro was born in Latvia and came to the United States as a war refugee. She was a NASA and Defense Department consultant, then the online editor at Little Patuxent Review and the prose editor at BrickHouse Books. Her short fiction, collected in Cold and Hungry and Far From Home, appears in TriQuarterly, Atticus Review and Wake and made her a finalist in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Contest and Short Story Award for New Writers. Her novel Anna Noon is in the works. She lives in a historic millworker’s house on Maryland's Patapsco River. For more, see http://ilsemunro.com.

by Ilse Munro

Delighting in Doubt: Deceptive Art

Between belief and disbelief, certainty and uncertainty, trust and distrust lies doubt. Doubt can be deliberate questioning or a state of indecision, resulting in a reassessment of what reality means or a paralyzing suspension between contradictory propositions. An uncomfortable condition, as Voltaire observed, but preferable to certainty, which is inherently absurd. Or some surprising gap stretching intellect […]

by Ilse Munro

Reader Response: The REAL Lucille Clifton

We love getting your reactions to the material that we post. If your message contains new information or images relevant to one of our posts, we’ll even publish it as a separate piece. Here’s what one of our readers, also a contributor, emailed me regarding “A Tribute to Lucille Clifton.” Dear Ilse, Thanks so much–wonderful piece. […]

by Ilse Munro

A Tribute to Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton lived in Columbia, Maryland, where Little Patuxent Review is published. In 1979, Lucille became the second woman and first African-American to serve as Poet Laureate of Maryland. In 1988, she was a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry finalist for Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems. In 2000, she received the National Book Foundation Poetry Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000. […]

by Ilse Munro

Lady Chatterley, My Father and Me

In 1928, when the English author DH Lawrence had Lady Chatterley’s Lover privately printed in Italy and Alfred A. Knopf published a heavily censored abridgement of the novel in the United States, my father was a 21-year-old undergraduate studying philosophy and theology at the University of Latvia. In 1930, when Lawrence died at age 44 and US Senator Bronson M Cutting […]

by Ilse Munro

Meet the Neighbors: CityLit Project

A journal like Little Patuxent Review requires a vibrant literary and artistic community to thrive–and even survive. In appreciation of the cultural entities around us, we present “Meet the Neighbors,” a series where we provide you with personal introductions. The term “CityLit” kept coming up. When Laura Shovan was tapped to be LPR editor some months before this […]