TWA for Monday, January 30, 2012

"Letter Home" by Ellen Steinbaum, from Container Gardening. © Custom Words, 2008. 

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2012

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Richard Gary Brautigan, born in Tacoma, Washington (1935). He moved to San Francisco, where he read his poetry at psychedelic rock concerts, helped produce underground newspapers, and became involved with the Beat Movement. He had long blond hair and granny glasses.

In the summer of 1961, he went camping with his wife and young daughter in Idaho's Stanley Basin. He spent his days hiking, and it was there, sitting next to trout streams with his portable typewriter, that he wrote his most famous work, Trout Fishing in America (1967).

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It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer Shirley Hazzard, born in Sydney, Australia (1931). She's best known for her novel The Transit of Venus (1980), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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It is the birthday of historian Barbara Tuchman, born in New York City (1912). She wrote The Guns of August (1962), a study of the events that led to the outbreak of World War I.

She said, "War is the unfolding of miscalculations."

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It was on this day in 1972 that British army parachutists shot 27 unarmed civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland — an event known as "Bloody Sunday." The protestors had been marching to oppose the new British policy of imprisoning people without a hearing.

The Northern Irish conflict stemmed from a peace treaty signed in 1923 after Ireland's successful war for independence from Britain. The treaty partitioned Ireland, designating the largely Catholic south as an independent nation, while leaving six counties of Northern Ireland, which had a Protestant majority, as part of the United Kingdom.

On this day, parachute troopers were given the okay to fire on the protestors. The first person killed was shot in the back. Thirteen people died — half of them were teenagers. All of the protesters were unarmed.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

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