As you may have noticed, I have been posting old videos of poetry recitations for several months now, mainly because I was pregnant again with my second baby.

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying   

Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where…

Thumbnail titled "The Truly Great" featuring a portrait of Stephen Spender, representing a reading and discussion of his poem The Truly Great and its themes of greatness, courage, sacrifice, and enduring human achievement.

Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair,

And gaze upon her smile;…

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer…

"Yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace,…

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,…

Still being a listener of the Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, I again take issue with their current stance on politics.

If I had one wish, what would I wish for? I would wish for a chip with all the world’s knowledge on it to be inserted into and understood by my brain.

In all likelihood, I have been inundated with messages about the good versus evil since I was born—from my Protestant upbringing to Disney movies with heroes and villains to schoolbooks with simple stories about such dichotomies. My love for literature began to take hold when our middle school classes began to focus more on understanding what a text was trying to say, uncovering the themes and meaning behind chosen words, thoughts, and ideas.

The Ayn Rand Institute was my Charlie Kirk. They were a bastion of fresh air in my suffocating college experience. I have said this multiple times, but here I am saying it again: The Marxist rhetoric emanating from American University was palpable. American University, ironically, was the most anti-American place I had ever been. I was taught that everything I knew was wrong and that the world was upside down. I went from A is A to A is B there.

Now that the government has created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), I would like to reexamine other domains of public life that need some cutting too. While it may be my husband’s job to take on the American Library Association (ALA) and the United States military, I feel responsible for exposing the current publishing industry’s goals. I typed into the Manuscript Wishlist website “literary fiction” and the twenty-odd suggestions for literary agents to connect with made me awfully depressed with the descriptions of what they were seeking in an author to represent to the larger publishing companies.