Amy Sterling Casil

Back when I was writing with my friends Ron Collins, Lisa Silverthorne, and Brian Plante (we called ourselves “The gang of four”), one day Ron and I got to talking about poetry. He mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay. I told him I’d never read her work, as I’d had a negative impression of her based on nothing except her formal and old-fashioned sounding name. Also based on the fact she wasn’t assigned in school. And so, I did. Ron was right. Edna St. Vincent Millay is a smoking hot, blazing poet.

MOVING FORWARD The revolution is inside each of us and it’s exactly like recovery from abuse My upbringing was idyllic for my first few years of life, but that’s because I didn’t know that after my mother died, my grandmother Nana who raised me had kidnapped me from my father’s house. After we’d helped Nana to move to an Alzheimer’s care home, my aunt Donna and I were cleaning out Nana’s place and found letters in the old cedar hope chest that had come from Nana’s mother, Nallie.

MEN Our culture destroys the best of us — the worst never had a chance in the first place I used to ask students to read “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. The narrative attempts to depict the wrongness of British colonialism from the perspective of a young “lower-upper-middle class,” well-educated junior British officer assigned to a lesser British colony: Burma (today, Myanmar).