Katherine McNamara has lived as a writer for longish times in Paris, Alaska, New York, and Charlottesville, Virginia, and traveled frequently to Ireland. Although her academic work was in European intellectual history, she has always been more curious about how ideas work their way through the world. In 1997, she founded Archipelago, an international journal of literature, the arts, opinion, and politics. She is the author of Narrow Road to the Deep North, A Journey into the Interior of Alaska, and is at work on a book of memoirs about three persons now gone who were well-known in their parts of the world and also important to her.Website: web.me.com/katherinemcnamara. Email: katherinemcnamara.writer@gmail.com
by Katherine McNamara Thunder Soul A terrific documentary comes your way early this summer: Thunder Soul, about the legendary Kashmere Stage Band and its inspired leader, Conrad O. Johnson. The film's director is Mark Landsman, who is very good at catching energy on screen. Music, kids at risk, a black high school in Houston, a…
by Katherine McNamara the tragic vision “No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams; and about Lincoln: “the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor's baby, borrowed for the occasion, sleeping inside his cape upon his shoulder to give him stability…