Author Archives

by

Announcing 3QR 2

The Second Annual Issue of 3QR: The Three Quarter Review is LIVE!

Check it out at Three Quarter Review.

No Censorship. No Betrayal. Just great Poetry & Prose > 75  percent True.

This issue features nationally acclaimed poet Mary Jo Salter and a cadre of fantastic writers.

 

by

Egg Freezing: Putting Motherhood On Ice

By J. Cavanaugh Simpson

Kathleen wants her own children, but hasn’t yet found a life partner—just after her 40th birthday she had her ovarian eggs frozen in hopes of preserving her fertility.

Brigitte heard about egg freezing but discovered scarce info online—so, after undergoing the procedure, she launched a national advocacy website last year called Eggsurance.com.

And Carolyn, who got married at 39, suffered two miscarriages before using eggs she had frozen. At 41, she got pregnant with twins—one of a handful of such pregnancies over-40 nationwide.

These women are early adopters of a newly improved fertility technology known as oocyte vitrification, a flash-freezing of ovarian eggs. An experimental label for the procedure was recently lifted, making the banking of women’s eggs increasingly viable and popular.

Yet the social experiment of delaying motherhood via egg freezing has prompted some to ask: Will women in their 20s and 30s put motherhood on ice, purchasing costly fertility plans while pursuing careers or avoiding marriage?

That’s the 2.0 version of the Amazonian myth, these women say. And noise from critics wouldn’t stop them from freezing their eggs, anyway, because the sound of the biological clock ticking is much, much louder.

See the full story in this month’s issue of Style Magazine. 

by

“Boy, do I like to run up here!”

We were watching a documentary the other day called For All Mankind, about the missions to the moon. The video from Apollo 16 was amazing. Sharp digital-like images from hand-held cameras and a prototype buggy cam.

On the 1972 mission, astronauts John W. Young and Charlie M. Duke, Jr., were driving up to the crater, Descartes. You can hear their exchanges, captured but not released at the time.

“This is going to be SPECTACULAR!” Charlie yells. “YoooHoooo!”

After picking up crystalline rocks* and marveling at their own footprints, they begin the bounce-walking that marked all of the astronauts’ explorations on the moon. Only this time, they broke into song.

“I was strolling on the moon one day… in the very, merry month of . . .December..”

“No. May!” one  says. “May!” sings the other.

…”When to my surprise, a pair of lovely eyes…”

“Dum, de dum, dum, dum de dum, dum, dum. . . .”

Later, one reflects, “Houston, as I stand here in the wonders of the unknown, I realize there’s a fundamental truth to our nature. Man must explore.”

Another wonderful truth these astronauts discover: Humans, by our intrinsic nature, can be downright joyous and silly while doing it.

* p.s. Just this past week, some of those gee-whiz rocks prompted a new discovery in the source of ancient water on the moon: comets. A new bit of science forty years after the wild rumpus.

by

Points of View

“From here that looks like a bucket of water,” he said, pointing to a bucket of water, “but from an ant’s point of view it’s a vast ocean, from an elephant’s just a cool drink, and to a fish, of course, it’s home. So, you see, the way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.”

Alec Bings, the boy who grew down from the air, in The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster.

by

Taming the Literary Animal

Poet Matthea Harvey, keynote speaker at the Conversations & Connections Conference, Washington, D. C., April 13, 2013:

Writing is not a career. It’s a way of being in the world that can be both painful and beautiful.

Writing is like a wild animal. You will never tame it. Some days it eats out of your hand, other days there’s not even a glimpse of a tail in the shrubbery.