Path of the Pronghorn

Yesterday, our very own Mary Ellen Hannibal was featured on KPCW, Park City Utah’s NPR affiliate! Hannibal, author of  “The Slow Migration from Science to Policy”, in the current issue of High Country News, discusses the “Path of the Pronghorn,” which is the first (and only) animal migration to be protected by the government. Pronghorn date [...]

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

By Mary Ellen Hannibal Amazing how things turn out. Don Lattin‘s best seller, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, catches a group of remarkable individuals at that seminal crossroads known as the seventies. While maybe an onlooker could have predicted how things would turn out for the merry prankster himself-Timothy Leary-who could have seen the future Dr. [...]

From the Middle Woods

Neeli Cherkovski has been active in the Bay Area Poetry since the 1970′s.  His latest book, From the Middle Woods joins his many other published books of poetry, including Leaning Against Time (2004), Elegy for Bob Kaufman (1996), and Clear Wind (1984). Not only is Cherkovski an applauded poet, but he is also hosts popular [...]

Wild Thing

By Mary Ellen Hannibal For those of us sitting in coffee shops or behind desks most of the day, the furious controversy that rages across the West concerning wolves seems bizarre and esoteric. On the one side are some ranchers and hunters who would seemingly like to eliminate wolves from the face of the earth; [...]

Butt in Chair, Eyes on Page

By Mary Ellen Hannibal Well, there’s no requisite position for absorbing a sustained narrative, but sitting still helps.  Does nobody hunker down with a big, long book anymore?  Why have we turned into such grazers and twitchers and surface assessors? In The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, Los Angeles [...]

Our Furbearers

By Mary Ellen Hannibal American history has been looked at every which way, and the questions we ask about our past will no doubt continue to change as our sensibilities do.  Eric Jay Dolin has written a highly engaging chronology of European incursion through these parts in Fur, Fortune, and Empire–focusing on yes, the fur [...]

To See, To Say

By Mary Ellen Hannibal The word “graphic” has both Latin and Greek roots and also bridges the concepts of “writing” and “drawing.”  The graphic novel thus fulfills its etymology.  Belle Yang’s memoir, Forget Sorrow, likewise bridges two very different worlds – the past and the present—finding through lines not only of loss but also of [...]

Page-Stopper

By Mary Ellen Hannibal It’s kind of paradoxical, but sometimes when I really need to escape into fiction it isn’t the beach read or the legal thriller that really does it for me but something mandarin, puzzling, interior, a work that you must give yourself to in order to sit with it at all.  In [...]

Be Yourself, By Yourself

By Mary Ellen Hannibal Travel writing is one of literature’s great categories, opening up the world to readers through distinct sensibilities, delivering a time and a place along the trajectory of lived experience. Jeff Greenwald has been at this art for quite some years and many readers probably know his frequent journalism contributions to probably [...]

Virtual Polyvocality! Put that in your smoke and pipe it.

By Mary Ellen Hannibal Like all art forms, including history and science, poetry is ultimately a long conversation.  Current practitioners take on inherited formats, respond to them, answer them, contradict them, and so on, usually. As we are singular in so many ways, it is fitting that Bay Area host one of the most vital [...]