Hymning & Hawing About America is a collection of essays by Frank Trippett, who has been called one of the really mind-blowing talents of his generation as a journalist, essayist, and story teller. The subjects of his essays range from politics and personalities to social conditions and psychological phenomena. It is a brilliant look in the rear view mirror at the American scene during the Twentieth Century. The book begins with the timeless reverie of A Season For Hymning And Hawing. So autumn is a blatantly vital season, contrary to the allegations of sorrowful poets who misconstrue the message of dying leavesYet almost everybody recognizes that the season's character transcends those familiar bracing days, crystal nights, bigger stars, vaulted skies, fluted twilights, harvest moons, frosted pumpkins and that riotous foliage that impels whole traffic jams of leaf freaks up into New EnglandNo hymningor hawingin behalf of autumn should neglect to note that the coming season is a self-contained climactic cycle. It offers every weatherat its end, days icy enough for any sane person, and along the way, those indefinite Indian summers that put the real ones to shame The Ordeal Of Fun explores our obsessive quest for fun. We are conceived in a moment of profound fun. This fact may not fix our destiny, but it strongly insinuates our complicity in some cosmic carnival. Fun becomes us. Born out of fun, we are born into it tooThe infant is hurled into the air: He opens grinning gums to the skies and issues an ecstatic gasp as he plummets. To be? To be is to be in disequilibrium, visually, physically, aurally, internally. Life comes thus, and the infant is in love with itLater, when he comes as close as an adult can to recapturing the dizzy totality of it all, he will speak of falling in loveAn axiom emerges: For man, fun is not only scratching where he itches, it is itching where he scratches. Fun takes such myriad forms it smacks of illusion. This is appropriate. Illusion means literally in-play.You may find fun elsewherebut only the fun you bring with you. For that, as every child knows, is where it is at In Louisiana: Jazzman's Last Ride is an elegy to a rich New Orleans tradition. Boom! A second shot signals the stricken cadence of a dirge. The white gloves of the pallbearers flash in the morning sun as they float their burden to the silver-gray Cadillac hearseA jazz funeral is beginning in New Orleans. Though hardly disrespectful, the underlying temper is festive. The reason lies in tradition: when the funeral is done, the streets will explode with jubilant jazz and antic celebrationA young woman in frayed jeans curves backward, in an affront to gravity, all the while clapping her hands, rending the air with throaty singing Oh, when the saints The Suckers explains the inner world of compulsive gamblers. They talked about gambling, and deep into the night I listened to voices that scarcely mentioned such things as cards and dice and horses. Gambling seemed an abstract rite, as they spoke of it, severed from apparatus, remote from any habitatMy gamblers seemed to get their special feeling, the compelling thing, not at the resolution of a bet, not at the winning or losing, but while the bet was pending. While the gamble was pending resolution they knew those special sensations, almost indescribable. The feelings vanish when the gamble is resolved, but they want them again, and so they bet again, and again...In action, he was living, lost child alive, running, ever running behind horses, clinging to the tingling reins, two wild horses, one Yes and one No, one Win and one Lose, one Love and one Loveless, running on, running on The Scient

THE STORY BEHIND THE DOCUMENTARY MY NAME IS PAULI MURRAY A prophetic memoir by the activist who “articulated the intellectual foundations” (The New Yorker) of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other distinctions. Yet Murray’s name and extraordinary influence receded from view in the intervening years; now they are once again entering the public discourse. At last, with the republication of this “beautifully crafted” memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century. In a voice that is energetic, wry, and direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents. Orphaned at age four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline, who, while strict, was liberal-minded in accepting the tomboy Pauli as “my little boy-girl.” In fact, throughout her life, Murray would struggle with feelings of sexual “in-betweenness”—she tried unsuccessfully to get her doctors to give her testosterone—that today we would recognize as a transgendered identity. We then follow Murray north at the age of seventeen to New York City’s Hunter College, to her embrace of Gandhi’s Satyagraha—nonviolent resistance—and south again, where she experienced Jim Crow firsthand. An early Freedom Rider, she was arrested in 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks’ disobedience, for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus. Murray’s activism led to relationships with Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt—who respectfully referred to Murray as a “firebrand”—and propelled her to a Howard University law degree and a lifelong fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. We also read Betty Friedan’s enthusiastic response to Murray’s call for an NAACP for Women—the origins of NOW. Murray sets these thrilling high-water marks against the backdrop of uncertain finances, chronic fatigue, and tragic losses both private and public, as Patricia Bell-Scott’s engaging introduction brings to life. Now, more than thirty years after her death in 1985, Murray—poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist, and Episcopal priest—gains long-deserved recognition through a rediscovered memoir that serves as a “powerful witness” (Brittney Cooper) to a pivotal era in the American twentieth century.

"The Jesuit review of faith and culture," Nov. 13, 2017-

"The modern regulations and pervading attitudes that control native rights in the Americas may appear unrelated to the European colonial rule, but traces of the colonizers' cultural, religious, and economic agendas remain. Patricia Seed likens this situation to a pentimento - a painting in which traces of older compositions become visible over time -and shows how the exploitation begun centuries ago continues today. Seed examines how the goals of European colonialist in the Americas. The English appropriated land, while the Spanish and Portuguese attempted to eliminate "barbarous" religious behavior and used indigenous labor to take mineral resources. Ultimately, each approach denied native people distinct aspects of their heritage. Seed argues that their differing effects persist, with natives in former English colonies fighting for land rights, while those in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies fight for human dignity." -- Book jacket.

Volume 19 of the May Swenson Poetry Award Series, 2016 Throughout this haunting first collection, Patricia Colleen Murphy shows how familial mental illness, addiction, and grief can render even the most courageous person helpless. With depth of feeling, clarity of voice, and artful conflation of surrealist image and experience, she delivers vivid descriptions of soul-shaking events with objective narration, creating psychological portraits contained in sharp, bright language and image. With Plathian relentlessness, Hemming Flames explores the deepest reaches of family dysfunction through highly imaginative language and lines that carry even more emotional weight because they surprise and delight. In landscapes as varied as an Ohio back road, a Russian mental institution, a Korean national landmark, and the summit of Kilimanjaro, each poem sews a new stitch on the dark tapestry of a disturbed suburban family’s world. The May Swenson Poetry Award is an annual competition named for May Swenson, one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.