2016 | Laura McBride

“On seeing a photo of the Antarctic – 2019”

October 27th, 2016

“If it comes to this

If one day, you are someone who cannot afford to see what everyone now sees

If some day, everyone is someone who cannot see what everyone once saw

If the wild abandon of our voyaging season

has been brought to its own AIDS-like end

Remember

You can experience this

You can enter the intimate world of your own mind and

See that towering prow of ice

Feel its chill wind

Hear the shocking crack of its calving

And don’t forget

The pinpoint spray of freezing rain on your starboard cheek

The glinting knife of a sun’s ray slicing through cloud

The mournful call of a bird you cannot make out

or the silent flight of the one you […]

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What one person can do

October 15th, 2016

I’ve been meaning to post this short review I wrote of Bryan Stevenson’s incredible memoir, Just Mercy. I was so very moved by this book.

From Off the Shelf, May 3, 2017

Time magazine called Bryan Stevenson’s JUST MERCY one of the 10 best nonfiction books of 2014. The next year, it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. I wouldn’t have known. The book was sitting on my nightstand, making me feel slightly guilty.

It had been recommended to me by a trusted source, but I knew it was about the author’s work as a lawyer representing people condemned to die, and somehow, it just didn’t seem like the right book to pick up when I was hoping […]

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I was thinking about courage

June 19th, 2016

Writing is nearly always hard. Capturing inchoate ideas and feelings and experiences, forcing these into precise words arranged intentionally, demands fierce psychic energy: more with every passing year. It is tempting to say that the drain comes from all that is not expressed, all the ways that the words are less than what I feel or think, and yet I’m not sure this is true. What keeps me writing, what draws me back to it, is the way that the words suddenly become more than what I knew, the way a sentence will take off and reveal so much that I had not realized was so.

Almost anything is easier to do than write.

Recently, my publisher asked if I would compose a letter to […]

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