(Continued from “Audacity, 50s Style: Part 1”) I met Jo Kellum of the Roc-A-Jets, Baltimore’s first all-girl band, in January. The Ravens still had hopes of going to the Super Bowl, and Jo’s East Baltimore neighborhood was festooned with purple and black. Jo and Carla Mandley, Roc-A-Jets’ drummer, sat down with me over tea. Although the band […]
Read More…When I find myself unaccountably crying as I reach the end of a collection of poems, when the combined weight of the poet’s felt human presence and the loss seeping through the poems brings tears, I know something powerful is about. This happened as I read one of the last poems,“The Last Out,” in Dan Gutstein’s Bloodcoal […]
Read More…Jo Kellum is one of the most audacious people I know. Not in terms of the look-at-me audacity of celebrity culture, where luminaries wear meat dresses or overturn tables on TV to grab attention. Kellum is quietly and unapologetically herself. Our friendship itself is audacious. Jo is a gay woman in her late 70s, a […]
Read More…Depending on the shine of light or the turn of a page, author Edith Pearlman shifts from the point of view of a lost six-year-old girl to an addict of a drug made from a Brazilian beetle. From a fed-up cancer patient to a pair of shop-lifting geezers to a Jewish student of Japanese. She’s a […]
Read More…Audacity and I had a test of wills a few weeks ago. On a whim, I’d signed up my teenaged son, my brother–eight years my junior–and myself for a mud run. We had eight weeks to train for the run, my first 5K, but there was no way to prepare for the obstacles: walls, nets, […]
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