Comprehension

When I was seventeen years old, my girlfriend dragged me to the a movie version of Othello. Only a week earlier I’d made her go to Billy Jack, so it might have been her way of getting back at me. The movie (Othello, not Billy Jack) was two and half hours long, and I...

A Wisconsin Top Ten

Last week I was putting together an early draft of a new essay, and I wrote, “In spite of my blind spot when it comes to Clare, I do not think that my daughter is the best thing to ever come out of Wisconsin.” The sentence was to be the lede for a description of the...

2025

I vaguely remember when my second grade teacher told our class that we would live into the 21st Century. That was in 1961, and my classmates and I could not project that far into the future. At age seven, the 21st Century was six more lifetimes away.* Last week I...

From the Chair in My Window

At a recent neighborhood Christmas party, a guy from down the street joked that he worries about me if I am not sitting at my living room window each morning when he heads off for work. Apparently I have become a local fixture, and something’s not quite right if I am...
Steven Simpson