A Change of Plans

I am not a believer of circumstance. I was supposed to be attending a mult-journal off-site AWP reading in Chicago this evening. Instead, my flight having been cancelled, I was pleased to attend Rochester native and 2008 Pulitzer prize winner Philip Schultz's reading at the University of Rochester. Schultz, whose work spans his youth growing up here in Living in the Past (Harcourt, 2004) and moves through multi-faceted Failures in his notable book of the same name (Harcourt, 2008) addresses recurring themes related to the imigrant experience and mind-set. His reading immediately connected several audience members to that past time and place so often now only found in foggy memory and vacant lots where the quaint but serviceable homes of families once stood. As the imigrant neighborhoods of his generation are re-shaped, a driving cultural amalgamation of the 20th. century in the United States diminishes and will all but disappear but for the efforts of artists such as Schultz.