New Year Love
by Kristal Leebrick

I remember our breath
in the icy air
and how the northern lights gathered
in a haze at the horizon,
spread up past the water tower
then vanished into the dark.
I remember that January night in North Dakota:
We left the dance,
the hoods of our dads’ air force parkas zipped tight,
our bare hands pulled into the coat sleeves.
We ran
into the wind
down the drifting sidewalks of our eighth-grade lives
to the brick-and-clapboard row houses on Spruce Street.
We ducked between buildings
and you pulled me close.
A flickering light from someone’s TV screen.
A kitchen window.
Your fingers tracing my face.
Your hair brushing my eyes.
Your skin, your lips.
My legs.
My heart.
I remember that January night in North Dakota,
but I can’t remember your name.


“New Year Love” by Kristal Leebrick. © Kristal Leebrick. Reprinted with permission of the author. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of American novelist E.L. Doctorow (books by this author), born Edgar Lawrence Doctorow in the Bronx (1931). Doctorow was named for his father’s favorite writer, Edgar Allan Poe. Doctorow said, “He liked a lot of bad writers, but Poe was our greatest bad writer, so I take some consolation from that.”

Doctorow’s novels tweak American cultural myths and history, such as his breakthrough novel, Ragtime (1975), which takes place in and around New York City as World War I looms. It features a host of fictional characters interacting with real-life historical figures like anarchist Emma Goldman, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, Henry Ford, Teddy Roosevelt, and escape artist Harry Houdini.

After being discharged by the Army, he worked as a reservations clerk at LaGuardia Airport and as a script reader for CBS television. It was while reading scripts that he began to formulate his own idea for a novel. He wrote a violent Western fable called Welcome to Hard Times (1960), which was later made into a movie starring Henry Fonda. His second book, Big as Life (1966), was about a group of New Yorkers who find two human giants standing in the Lower Hudson River. Doctorow said, “Unquestionably, it’s the worst I’ve ever done.” By the time it was published, he’d been the editor-in-chief at Dial Press for several years, working on books with James Baldwin and Norman Mailer. Frustrated, he quit and began working on The Book of Daniel (1971), which was a fictional memoir by the son of real-life American citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of being spies for Russia and executed in 1953. It garnered good reviews, but not much sales.

Three years later, he published Ragtime, and the ensuing acclaim drove Doctorow and his wife to consult the I Ching, which told them they should cross a great river. Doctorow took that to mean the Mississippi River, so he and his family moved to Utah, where he taught for many years. He said the move was necessary because, “America never gives you anything without you having to pay for it.” Ragtime was made into a film by Milos Forman (1981) and featured James Cagney’s last screen appearance. It was also adapted for Broadway (1996) and became a long-running musical, winning Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score.

Doctorow went on to write World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005), which centers on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through the South at the end of the Civil War (1864–65). Andrew’s Brain (2014) was his last novel before his death in 2015.

On writing, Doctorow said: “It’s like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights illuminate, but you can make the whole trip that way, you see.”

And: “When you’re writing a book, you don’t really think about it critically. You don’t want to know too well what you’re doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. The book is constructed as a conversation, with someone doing most of the talking and someone doing most of the listening.”

Today is the birthday of essayist and fiction writer Barry Lopez (books by this author). He was born in Port Chester, New York (1945), and grew up in Southern California and New York City. He’s written several books of nonfiction, which often deal with the relationship between human culture and the physical landscape. The San Francisco Chronicle described Lopez as “the nation’s premier nature writer,” due in part to the subject matter of books like Arctic Dreams (1986) and Of Wolves and Men (1978), but he denies that title. He said: “I’m not writing about nature. I’m writing about humanity. And if I have a subject, it is justice. And the rediscovery of the manifold way in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life.”

His latest book, Horizon (2019), is a travelogue. He also published his 10th book of fiction, Outside, in 2014. In February 2020, Lopez was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Barry Lopez died on Christmas Day 2020 after a long battle with cancer, a few weeks shy of his 76th birthday.

He wrote: “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Elizabeth Strout (books by this author), born in Portland, Maine (1956), to a family that had lived in that state for eight generations. She grew up in a series of small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. She moved to New York almost a quarter-century ago, and she loves it there, but she still misses the way people identify with the land in Maine, and the physical landscapes of New England.

She began thinking of herself as a writer at a very young age. Her mother bought her notebooks when she was four or five years old, and she would ask Strout to write down the things she saw, or to describe her impressions of the shoe salesman. It took her almost seven years to write her first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1998), and only her close friends and family knew that she was working on it; it was made into a TV movie by Oprah Winfrey. Her collection of linked short stories, Olive Kitteridge (2008), won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Italy’s Premio Bancarella. She’s the first American author to win that prize since Ernest Hemingway. In between those two books, she wrote a best-seller, Abide with Me (2006). Her most recent books are The Burgess Boys (2013), My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), Anything is Possible (2017) and Olive, Again (2019).

Today is the birthday of poet Khalil Gibran (books by this author), born in the mountain village in Bsharri, Lebanon (1883). When Gibran was a boy, his mother decided to leave her alcoholic husband and take her four children to America. They settled in Boston, where they had relatives, and it was there that a charity worker noticed that Gibran appeared to be artistically gifted. He studied art, in addition to his regular schooling. His mother wanted him to learn about his Lebanese heritage too, and so Gibran went to a prep school and college in Beirut when he was 15. He started a literary magazine with a classmate, and was voted “College Poet.” He returned to Boston in 1902, when he was 19. Members of the aristocratic Boston society found him charming, and they began inviting him to social gatherings, where he discussed philosophy and poetry.

One day, a man named Alfred A. Knopf was invited to a gathering at Gibran’s apartment. Knopf was just starting up a publishing company, and when he saw how fascinated people were with Gibran, he decided to offer the man a publishing contract. Gibran’s first two books with Knopf weren’t very successful, but his third was a collection of 26 poetic essays called The Prophet (1923). It didn’t sell well at first, but gradually gained a readership, becoming especially popular in the 1960s; it was eventually translated into more than 30 languages. Gibran is now the third-best-selling poet in history, after William Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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