| Our First Summer
by Laura Foley We dined that June in Verona, Dante's town,
drinking wine in the square, the two of us alone.
No place to stay overnight, backpacks stashed
by our knees, pensioni and hotels full, stone streets
eerie and still, my first visit to the ancient country.
Soon the opera would end, the midnight streets fill,
but by then we were gone on the next train, next town,
where at dawn we dozed on a high marble ledge
of Bologna's cathedral, as we waited for the air to warm,
stores to open. We found an Italian wool hat for you
with button on top, a handsome cap I still have,
still marked with your sweat, the graceful curve
of your skull.
“Our First Summer” by Laura Foley from The Glass Tree. © Harbor Mountain Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It's the birthday of novelist Louise Erdrich (books by this author), born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her mother was French-Ojibwe, and her father was German; she and her six brothers and sisters were raised in a close, loving family. Instead of watching TV—they didn't own one—the children were encouraged to write and to memorize poems. She went off to Dartmouth in 1972, the same year the university started admitting women and the first year of its new Native American Studies program. She started off as a poet. Her first book was Jacklight (1984), a book of poems based on the thesis she wrote for her master's degree in 1979. She said, "I began to tell stories in the poems and then realized that there was not enough room." So she moved on to fiction. She published her first short story, "The Red Convertible," in 1981, and "Scales" in 1982. Later that year, Dorris convinced her to enter a new fiction writing contest, so in the space of two weeks she wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman," and she won the $5,000 prize. Two years later, she published Love Medicine (1984),a novel made up of 14 interrelated stories. Love Medicine is populated with characters who live in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, or its nearby reservation. There is Marie Lazarre, who starts out life convinced she wants to be a nun, and her rival Lulu Lamartine. And Nector Kashpaw, the man who loved Lulu but married Marie anyway. After Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich wrote many novels set in the same fictional universe, and Marie, Lulu, and Nector all reappeared, along with others connected to them. Her novels include Tracks (1988), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), The Plague of Doves (2008), Shadow Tag (2010), The Round House (2012), and Future Home of the Living God (2017). Erdrich said, “By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging.”
It's the birthday of novelist Harry Crews (books by this author), born in Bacon County, Georgia (1935). Crews enlisted in the Marines during the Korean War, then went to college on the GI bill. He got married, and had a son. But his family life fell apart—he and his wife got divorced, then remarried, then divorced again after their son drowned. He was convinced that he had started too late, that he would never make it as a writer. His first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published in 1968—when he was 32 years old. He proceeded to publish seven novels in the next eight years. His other books include the novels All We Need of Hell (1987), The Mulching of America (1995), and Celebration (1998); and the memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978).
It's the birthday of novelist Elizabeth Bowen (books by this author), born in Dublin (1899). She was an only child, and her parents came from good families but didn't have much money. Her father was mentally ill, in and out of hospitals, and her mother died when she was 13; after that, she was raised by various relatives. She said, "The original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt.” Bowen's novels include The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949), and Eva Trout (1968). | 
