Memorare
Not a Poem
For My Mother
By Gail Vida Hamburg
“Soft steady
flame
of mustard gold,
you reside
where my third eye folds,
burning
away
dross and shards,
lighting all the dreaded paths.”
Copyright Gail Vida Hamburg
Mé·nage à trois: The Writer in Bed with Fiction and Politics by Gail Vida Hamburg
Menage a trois: The Writer in Bed with Fiction and Politics by Gail Vida Hamburg Graduate Lecture Bennington Writers 2004, Writer in Society Conference 2007. Political fiction is a subversive venture, an aesthetic challenge, a historical responsibility, a writer's revenge…a kinky affair. Nadine Gordimer Writing and Being All fiction is political, people say. I don't agree, but I will grant that the tilt and pitch of our thoughts and obsessions can give hyper political meaning to a work. After 9/11, America understood something never understood before in an Auden poem. And one may find a parallel to the current misadventure in Iraq in Gulliver's Travels, in which Jonathan Swift describes the waging of war over doctrinal differences as,"the cracking of eggs." I have often called myself a recovering journalist, and people have asked me if that's the reason I write politically inspired fiction. I think not. My first encounter with the political was when I
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