by Terese Svoboda Donald Sutherland was a connoisseur of poetry. In the 80s I knew poetry-quoting doyennes from the glittering parties the Academy of American Poets threw as well as the Sudanese who recited their histories in song, but mostly I knew poets obsessed with competing with dead ones, with an eye toward their next…

by Terese Svoboda Built in 1958, the father designed the house along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, with a flat roof, lots of full-length glass windows, old brick, patios instead of porches, and a sunken garden with a St. Francis birdbath surrounded by ivy beside the entrance. The door had a starburst handle in…

by Terese Svoboda The Slavs inspired the word “slave.” Abductions in Eastern Europe began in the ninth century AD conducted by Spanish Muslims, and the area is still plagued by human trafficking (especially children), with a million more victims per year than in the Americas. [1] My surname means freedom in Ukrainian, Russian and Czech.…

by Terese Svoboda The year 1909 was the first time George H. Cove vanished. He claimed he was kidnapped and threatened with death if he continued developing his patent on solar panels. One story has it that an investor arranged the kidnapping to discredit him, and that instead of death, he was offered a furnished…

by Terese Svoboda How plastic – really plastic – gelatin presents as a food. Not only in the “easily molded” sense of a pliable art material but also its transparency. Walnuts and celery, the “nuts and bolts” of gelatin desserts, defy gravity, floating amidst the cheerful jewel-like plastic-looking splendor of the 1950’s, when gelatin was…

by Terese Svoboda What says grief to you? Probably not a sunlit meadow. What about the scent of too many lilies, a blank stone, netting over the eyes, an all-black outfit? So chic, all that black – but nothing says dead better than pavement. The premier Parisian color, it practically insists Dig Here. On the…

by Terese Svoboda I never heard Henry Bull, my father-in-law, claim he invented the Whee-Lo, but his proud sons have on occasion. He manufactured and distributed the toy, and made it into a nationwide sensation in 1953, just before the hula hoop and Frisbee. A curved double metal track that held a spinning plastic wheel,…

by Terese Svoboda Last month I saw the Whitney exhibit “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria.” As you might remember, Maria was a Category 4 storm that hit Puerto Rico September 20, 2017. According to Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 4,645 Puerto Ricans died…

by Terese Svoboda In my last post, I focused on the 100,000 Loyalists who fled to Canada after the Revolutionary War, and hypothesized that they were fleeing an American war of terror. Otherwise, why move? Now I’m living in Canada as a permanent resident, though for only half the year at a time, wallowing in…

by Terese Svoboda We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. –Ben Franklin Watching the Oathkeepers cry during the federal court trials under the charge of sedition, I considered the fate of seditious Loyalists during the Revolutionary War whom they most closely resemble in the topsy-turvy world of contemporary politics. The Revolutionary…

by Terese Svoboda “My account omitted many very serious incidents,” writes Bertrand Roehner, the French historiographer whose analysis on statistics about violence in post-war Japan I used in my Graywolf Nonfiction Prize memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. He began emailing me at this September about a six-volume, two thousand page report concerning Japanese casualties…

by Terese Svoboda Hitler and My Mother-in-Law is a memoir I’m writing about Patricia Lochridge, the only female reporter at both WWII theaters who “identified” Hitler’s ashes. The book is all about those quotes, that is to say, what’s between propaganda, truth and lies in war and family. This excerpt reveals how she appropriated a Cranach.…