Clem Taylor’s Ode to Joy
“Beauty has a way of turning up in places where you’d least expect it.” Our friend Clem Taylor, who died last month, won the Peabody Award for this story he produced for 60 Minutes. “Joy in the Congo” originally aired on …
Author: Margie Smith Holt
Gabriel García Márquez – Responding with Life
While visiting Cartagena last month, we had the opportunity to see the seaside home of Gabriel García Márquez. At the time, we wrote our own, humble, homage to the great Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer and journalist who died yesterday at age …
The Chemo Versus Sex Ratio
“So… how often do you get it?” asked a friend in an e-mail. “More often than sex? You better not have to get chemo more often than sex.” I received that e-mail six years ago this week, while sitting in …
Luna de Miel (The Honeymoon)
It was a sultry night in Cartagena de Indias. The prostitutes were lazing on benches and pretending to talk on their cell phones in the shadow of the Puerta del Reloj, where the three wide arches of the main …
Tagged with: travel
On the Road: Cartagena
“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is …
Tagged with: travel
Winter, Through the Looking Glass
I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer …
Midnight, Atlantic Standard Time
Originally published in the St. John Sun Times In typical island fashion, it was hard to tell when the old year ended and the new one began. The party was at Skinny Legs in Coral Bay where the unadvertised festivities (New …
Thanksgiving Questions
Originally published in the St. John Sun Times We are now hoping to arrive by Thanksgiving. The boat is ready. After spending two months in the yard in Maine, the 70-foot Sonny is docked in Newport, Rhode Island, freshly painted and …
Four Score and Seven Years Ago…
How much can you say in a two-minute speech? On the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, here are Abraham Lincoln’s immortal words. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived …
She Should Have Called re:Write
Words aren’t generally the first things that come to mind when thinking about the opera, but writing figures prominently in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. In Act I, the bookworm heroine, Tatiana, meets Onegin, falls instantly and madly in love, and decides …