Things that Could Have Killed Me
Posted by Robin Hemley on May 24, 2009 12:28 AM
I've been absent from this blog for the past several days because of the recent publication of my new book. It's kept me busy in various ways. Most recently, I was invited to write a guest opinion for The Wall Street Journal on childhood. After talking to my good friend Xu Xi about my sometimes raucous and dangerous childhood, I settled on the topic, "Things That Could Have Killed Me." The piece was a fairly light-hearted look at my often reckless behavior in my youth and it seems to have struck a chord with a number of people. What always amazes me after a national publication is that people from my deep past get in touch with me again. I love this - in fact, it's perhaps my favorite thing about publishing in a national newspaper or magazine. Who will get in touch with me this time? In this case, my older sister Nola's college roommate from Athens, Ohio emailed me - remarkable because my sister died in 1973 at the age of 25 and her roommate had never really known my sister's story. I've written about Nola in a previous memoir, so this was a kind of wonderful chance meeting between myself and Nola's roommate, something made possible only because of the Internet. Another person who read the article and contacted me was one of the best writers from the very first creative writing class I ever taught (at Roosevelt University in Chicago in the mid-eighties). If you'd like to read the WSJ piece, you can do so here.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124295450040645671.html
If you're a long-lost friend, please say hello!
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