Lewis Nordan Quote
Alice leaned first one way and then the other, down the line of children. She said, Is everybody understanding this?One child said, The misuse of power is the root of all evil?Alice said, Well....Another child said, There is no justice on the earth?Alice said, Well...Another child said, We are all alone in the world?Alice said, Well...Another child said, The greatest depth of our loss is the beginning of true freedom?Alice said, Well...Another child said, The disposal of human waste is the responsibility of the brokenhearted?These were all phrases Alice had put on the chalkboard after other field trips. It occurred to Alice, hearing these phrases now, that she might have attempted to do too much with a class of fourth graders. She was willing to admit to some excesses.Alice said, Just listen.
Alice leaned first one way and then the other, down the line of children. She said, Is everybody understanding this?One child said, The misuse of power is the root of all evil?Alice said, Well....Another child said, There is no justice on the earth?Alice said, Well...Another child said, We are all alone in the world?Alice said, Well...Another child said, The greatest depth of our loss is the beginning of true freedom?Alice said, Well...Another child said, The disposal of human waste is the responsibility of the brokenhearted?These were all phrases Alice had put on the chalkboard after other field trips. It occurred to Alice, hearing these phrases now, that she might have attempted to do too much with a class of fourth graders. She was willing to admit to some excesses.Alice said, Just listen.
Related Quotes
About Lewis Nordan
Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi and grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He received his B.A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M.A. in 1966 from Mississippi State University, and his PhD in 1973 from Auburn University in Alabama. After holding faculty positions at the University of Georgia and the University of Arkansas, he became in 1983 an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. It also established a place for Nordan's fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan's hometown of Itta Bena.
After the short-story collection The All-Girl Football Team (1986) followed Music of the Swamp (1991), a novel/short-story cycle featuring Nordan's spiritual alter ego, the young Sugar Mecklin, as the protagonist. The book features aspects of magic realism that would become one of Nordan's trademarks, along with a peculiar mix of the tragic and the hilarious.
Wolf Whistle (1993), Nordan's second novel, was both a critical and public success. It won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience. The book deals with one of the most notorious racial incidents in recent Southern history: the murder of Emmett Till.
The novel The Sharpshooter Blues (1995) is a lyrical meditation on America's gun culture, as well a depiction of grotesque lives in Itta Bena. With the coming-of-age novel Lightning Song (1997), Nordan moved from Itta Bena to the hill country of Mississippi. The novel still features Nordan's magic Mississippi realism, complete with singing llamas and poetic lightning strikes.
In 2000, Nordan published a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun.
Before retiring in 2005, Lewis Nordan lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
He lived in Hudson, Ohio until his death.