Alan Proctor is a poetry editor for Kansas City Voices and a former humor columnist, tree surgeon, fundraiser, and college administrator. He serves on the board of The Writers Placebased in Kansas City.
Draco Incendia Trychophyton. That’s the official name for the spore that causes fiery veins of Dragonscale to show up on the patient’s skin. Eventually, the infected people will spontaneously combust, burning down hospitals, laboratories, and killing entire families. What’s scarier than this plague, though, is the cult-like group of infected survivors holed up at Camp Wyndham. Enter the Fireman, who can control the Dragonscale and keep it from killing him, and Harper, a pregnant former nurse trying to survive until her delivery date. While this apocalyptic novel is
Caitlin Doughty’s memoir of her journey to becoming a licensed mortician is equal parts morbid, hilarious, inspiring and ruthlessly genuine. It’s also a memoir of her fight against the fear of death, a fight that almost destroys her. Much like the orange rot that sometimes trails our faces during death, we may never be ready to see it. But Caitlin stresses throughout Smoke Gets in Your Eyes that witnessing death is how we ready ourselves for it, and even embrace its terrible beauty.
As a children’s librarian, it’s uncommon that I recommend a book about a teenage runaway to parents looking for a book about relationship-building. But author Jennifer Mathieu has written an uncommon book. I just can’t recommend it highly enough.
In Laura Lippman's latest mystery, Wilde Lake, Luisa Brant is the newly-elected state's attorney for Howard County, Maryland, and she has some big shoes to fill. Her father held the position and was greatly admired (to the extent that any politician can be) during much of her childhood, and Luisa has just beaten out her mentor for the role in a hotly-contested election.
This isn’t Hogwarts or Narnia, exactly. It’s more like a dark reflection of those popular magical fantasy novels. In the first season of The Magicians, based on
Arlin Buyert is a local poet who was born and raised on an Iowa farm near Sioux Center where he graduated from high school. Arlin was formally educated at Macalester College and The University of Minnesota and worked as an admissions officer at Macalester before entering the Navy in 1966. Arlin was a Naval aviator, corporate executive, cattle rancher and is now retired and lives in Leawood, Kansas with his wife Kristen Kvam. Arlin has facilitated the poetry program at Lansing Prison for the past four years.
Many of you have heard of Marie Kondo and about her KonMari method of organizing your home, so you may already know that you’ve gone about it wrong. It isn’t that you need to improve your systems for storing and arranging stuff. It’s that you need to throw your things away. If they don’t bring you joy, yes, joy, they have no place in your life. Old paperwork – joyless – chuck it. Extra buttons – joyless and useless (according to Kondo!). Toss ’em. Clothes you don’t wear – allow them to illuminate your abhorrence of them. Then say goodbye.
The first time I read this I thought that it was much too wild for my taste. After spending the next year flipping through it every time it came through the library it was obvious that I was in love with this crazy book so I reread it and now we're besties.
This is a very interesting, hard-to-pin-down film. It's a Persian-language, American-produced and filmed, black-and-white vampire flick. The title itself, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, invokes our culturally-ingrained sense of danger at the concept of a woman being alone on the streets after dark. In this instance, since she's a vampire, it's the nameless girl of the title who is the danger lurking in the shadows.
