Marina Budhos's Blog

I may be a latecomer to New Orleans, but it looks like I’m making up for lost time. Before my son Sasha chose Tulane, I’d never visited the city. I knew NOLA purely through the novel The Awakening and a vague sense of its great jazz. I had standard images that flickered across my lids: […]

The post NOLA: A Love Letter appeared first on Crossing Over.

“I don’t know if you’re really a writer.  I don’t know if you’re crazy enough.” These were the words said to me by a mentor in graduate school.  I had honestly forgotten them, until an old friend from graduate school mailed me back the long letters I had written her during a period I think […]

The post Writing Crazy appeared first on Crossing Over.

Seventy-two hours that included pipe bombs, an assassination of two African Americans, and a synagogue massacre.  What country do we live in? Strangely enough, I find myself thinking about Norman Rockwell–much the way people have been reflecting upon Mr. Rogers–who was from the very Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the Tree of Life Synagogue is located. […]

The post Freedom From Fear appeared first on Crossing Over.

At twelve or thirteen, I became suddenly obsessed with Norman Rockwell.  I believe there had been a retrospective of his work, perhaps at the Whitney, and my mother bought me the catalogue.  It was a slender book, but I would pore over those images, every detail, ever shoe lace and grimace and expression.  At the […]

This was the brief talk I gave before my interview with Sarah Lester at the Maplewood Literary Award event on March 24th, 2018.  It’s adapted from an earlier blog on writing in 9/12. I should like to tell a story.  It is a story of failure and motherhood.  It is a story of post- 9/11, […]

While it has been gratifying to have friends shower us for praise about our vacation-volunteering in Puerto Rico, it is also embarrassing.  What we are doing is a mere drop in an ocean of need, nothing compared to the river of help that so many others are offering.  And lest I give the wrong impression, […]

December, 2017–San Juan, Puerto Rico Corny as it sounds, as we’re touching down in Puerto Rico, there’s a rainbow arching over the land mass.  I can also see the vegetation has begun to spring back, though it’s hard not to notice the skeletal waste and bare branches.  San Juan itself looks stable but battered and […]

9/11 is our day of marking, our day of mourning.  At dinner last night, our older son told us about his school’s annual assembly, how affected he was by the grim sequence of images—the smothering dust, the tiny figures plunging to their death.  Every year at his school the president of the student council gives […]

2017 marks the 70th anniversary of the Magnum Photo Agency, founded by photography greats Robert Capa, Henri Cartier Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, William Vandervirt, and others right after World War II. Legend has it that Magnum was named after the magnum of champagne they drank to celebrate the agency, but with Capa one’s never […]

April 26, 2017 Two items caught my attention today: an undocumented Rutgers student, a Dreamer, asked by ICE to interview at their office and report about how much young undocumented immigrants contribute to the NJ economy–$66 million and it is estimated that they could contribute another $27 million if they could get on with their […]