Rebecca D. Martin lives with her family in Central Virginia (by way of Asheville, North Carolina). She is currently at work on her second first book, a memoir for T.S. Poetry Press about houses, their rooms, and the lives we do or don't live inside them. She is always at work on her first first book, a YA novel of Wales and wheelchairs, mysterious libraries and magical books, and - Is there anything more important in the world? - friends. Her published writings can be found here: http://rebarit.blogspot.com/p/essays-reviews.html
Portrait of Anna Hyatt Huntington
in response to Marion Boyd Allen’s “Portrait of Anna Vaughn Hyatt” at the Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, VA
Not a lady you Stand like a casual god and Fashion with your hands a man Out of clay, Strong man-hands Pressing, your forward knee catching your Balance, at rest, at your Work, your war, I see The sinews in your arms and your strong Weighted brow. No womanly woman you Hold your chisel, your […]
Ten Moments When Words Struck Home
10for2020
…there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. – Mary Oliver, Upstream ~ No hurt I did not feel, no death That was not mine; […]
As much as I enjoy them, there's something missing from Hallmark Christmas movies...
The screen brightens as the camera pans down. The sound of strings, pianissimo, brightly, in a major key. Snowy hills, treetops, a perfect, tiny village nestled in a cozy mountain valley. The strings crescendo into any given Christmas Carol, and the Hallmark Christmas movie is on. The only question is whether the next scene, where […]
A story about marriage, childbirth, the medical profession, George MacDonald, the Danse Macabre, and what it means to be a woman.
“There was so much blood!” The urologist is downright gleeful. “The nurses were totally freaked out!” This is in hindsight, and he wasn’t even there. He heard the story second-hand, after being called in. I am lying on an ultrasound table seven weeks after my first daughter was born, and the doctor seems to be […]
Scenes from a Bookstore
“Come join the shopping spree!” With this exhortation, the woman at a table near mine greets her friend who is approaching the cafe area of the bookstore, the third friend in the group to arrive. The bridge players meet at 11am, several times a week, and comprise four; their table is always reserved with a […]
How can I wake from the dream—or is it nightmare?—I’ve inherited, a citizen of this mixed nation, if I won’t listen to stories that bite and sting?
In the 1960s, child psychologist Robert Coles treated Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old black girl integrating a white elementary school in New Orleans. Coles would hate my use of the word “treated.” Rather, he listened to Ruby’s story as he counseled her through the massive life disruption that was the Civil Rights movement. Later, he would […]
Chimneys Dark & Spirits Bright
It might be said that Dickens’s fiction—holiday and otherwise—plumbs the blackened, sooty depths of human depravity to ultimately offer hope in visions bright as a blazing hearth.
On Nikki Giovanni’s 1994 essay collection, Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on Star Trek, conversations about race, and slowly learning to empathize with our neighbor’s burdens…
Why We Need the Olympics in Brazil
Watching the opening ceremony, Rebecca Martin reflects on why the United States, in desperate need of empathy and self-reflection, should heed the way Brazil has presented itself to the world.
A Halfway Review of a Sometime Farmer
On reading and loving the work Noel Perrin, a Vermont essayist
“…whatever you might do elsewhere,
In the time remaining, you might do here
If you can resolve, at last, to pay attention.” – Carl Dennis, “Drugstore”
We build our lives, it seems, on the narrowest speculation of possibility; we make our homes on the edge of an island on the verge of erosion.
We will love each other best when we learn to hold each other in imagination.
There’s nothing wrong with you if you hate talking on the phone.
In Praise of Nursery Tale Anthropomorphism
“…in Animal Land, it is everything-and.”
Try Again: On Follow-up Attempts
When J.K. Rowling published her latest novel, The Casual Vacancy, back in September, many of her devoted readers wanted to know where the magic—overt or otherwise—had gone. The expectation was understandable. She had done Middle Grades fantasy so well before. Why wouldn’t she produce the same again? We had been told she was working on […]
Like Frodo on that first and only night in his Crickhollow house, I look around this temporary place and say with some effort, “This does look like home.” I try to mean it.
We all know which child wizard first grabbed his Elementary Spells textbook and walked the castle hallways to Magical History 101, right?
The Bearable Lightness of Letting Go
At this moment, watching people walking away from our yard with our old electronics in their arms and smiles on their faces, I think, “Our belongings could all go up in smoke.” I’d still be me.
It was a revelation: Action-packed, prime time adventure television could be really, really good.
It’s the experience I climbed those steps looking for. It’s the kind of authenticity I can’t get enough of.
All that We Can't Leave Behind
I sometimes cast a glance around our house and wonder what it means that some of our furniture was crafted by skilled Mennonite hands decades ago, and some of it comes from Grand Home Furnishings.
Can a quiet, neighborly life intersect with a desire to help the oppressed, the afflicted, the hungry? Is brotherly love sufficient if it starts small, inside the walls of my house, on our short street?
Yes, I may want to read The Catcher in the Rye sometime, but not right now, and not in December. Don’t you know December is for dark fantasy and Victorian novels?
Once I moved to Appalachia, and my soul, it has stayed there. Now the cracks in my heart seal up a little bit whenever I travel through.
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