Writing About Reading – Kathy Boles-Turner

For The Wanderers Who Walk The Line Between And Know When To Take A Boat Ride

Dearest westward lights, nighttime fires, fellow wanderers who walk the line between and know when to take a boat ride. We, the few, clever enough to know better than to ask for a sign. Signs can be so ambiguous; interpretations can be dangerously loose. In times of trouble we need a snug fit and sturdy […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

The Witch Elm by Tana French and Do You Really Know Yourself At All

Truth is there’s darkness lurking. The unmeasured capacity for pain and shame, selflessness, self-preservation, and great voids of unanswerable questions. Or, answers that might be better left alone. People are mysteries, even unto themselves. I’ve always marveled over that old phrase usually employed with a sheepish or dumbfounded tone: “I lost my temper”. Well, maybe the more truthful […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Reading In My Future Haven

Imagine a room with pine plank floors and inset shelves painted a lush white, nine feet tall, three feet wide, six inches apart, running the length of a room on either side of a broad picture window. On each shelf there are of course well used books from every era of modern literature, spines of […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Reading Everything: Butler, Bradbury, Didion

The air has been sweet, breezy, and clear, the mornings cool and the afternoons bright but not the hot wet blanket that can happen this time of year in this part of the country. We’re in June’s sweet spot right now, a pleasurable time that can’t really be predicted from year to year but it […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Reading Octavia Butler

Like many good things, I came to Octavia Butler’s writing late in life. Two weeks ago as a matter of fact. Two glorious weeks ago. Of course, I had heard about her work, heard her mentioned by feminist writers and scifi aficionados. Taking so long to seek out her books can only be attributed to […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

There There, by Tommy Orange

So many reviews call this book shattering, I would call it just the opposite. This story picks up the broken shards of lost stories and puts together a contemporary explanation of what happens when the past is forgotten just enough to haunt. With multiple characters speaking across the city of Oakland, Tommy Orange weaves together […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Here’s how to save yourself, your beautiful self.

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison Once the decision has been made to read a certain book based on whatever criteria or recommendation has inspired the choice, I avoid reading blurbs and forewords until the end. More often than not, it is satisfying to completely consume the story within before reading other readers’ opinions or the […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

See The Pretty Girl. The Pretty Girl Has Blue Eyes. The Pretty Girl Is Happy. See How She Smiles And Smiles.

Originally posted March 20, 2018 The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison They say that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. If the beholder is born into a world that has forcibly narrowed the definition of beauty down to a handful of irrefutable criteria, what then? Like all trends, the definition of beauty is […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

An Exploration of Richard Wilbur’s Work And How Poetry Is An Inevitable Expression Of Religious Assertions, Part One

We have lost a lot of greats since 2016. The most recent great who touched my poet’s soul and was among my list of favorite writers left us on October 14th. Upon hearing the news, I reached for the one book of his I own. Later on, I remembered this—a piece written for a poetry […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Read To Me – Day Eleven

Tulips, by Sylvia Plath And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them […]