E.B. White

Earth Day article

On Earth Day 2010, Life As A Human carried an engaging collection of new writing about our connections to nature and to our planet.  I contributed a piece that you might want to check out.  I am writing a couple articles a month for Life As A Human, and not all of them will be reposted on my own site, so I encourage you to check Life regularly, or subscribe to their updates.

Revised blog post*

Winding our way down into Maine from the Canadian Maritime provinces, we followed the twists and turns along the coast and its many inlets, sipping coffee and soaking up the mellow mood. We were looking for the home of the late E.B. White but, coffee being what it is, bathrooms became higher priority than roadsigns.

"What's to see?"

That's the question Calvin Trillin asked in a New Yorker article a number of years ago, about author's homes as tourist attractions. "The labor that makes a world-famous novelist worth writing about was almost certainly done while he was sitting all by himself in a small room. The raw material was probably invisible to everyone but him."

Trillin goes on to note that "a visitor to Herman Melville's study couldn't expect to find any whales."

I brought my E. B. White books home today, a tidy little stack that is now nestled on the shelf next to my in-home desk. Writings from The New Yorker, One Man’s Meat, his Collected Letters, a biography and, of course, The Elements of Style. The books had been at my downtown business office where they were a comfort as I built a respectable little consulting business based on words and ideas.