"Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology"

One of my birthday gifts from my generous friend M. was "Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology" (University of Michigan Press, 2005), edited by Laurence Goldstein. M. has lived in Ann Arbor most of her adult life, and she of course knows that I lived in the Ann Arbor area for my last two years of high school, and have visited it often since then; also, my own 2009 book ("Interrogating Privilege: Reflections of a Second Language Educator") was published by the University of Michigan Press; so, for many reasons, this book was a welcome gift. Ann Arbor is known as a beautiful and progressive college town and a great place to live. This anthology contains essays, histories, memoirs, stories, and poems from the mid-nineteenth century through the present. Some of the contributors are or were famous University of Michigan alumni or faculty (e.g., philosopher/education theorist John Dewey, playwright Arthur Miller, political activist and later politician Tom Hayden, poet Frank O'Hara, feminist poet and novelist Marge Piercy, food editor and critic Ruth Reichl, novelist Charles Baxter, and poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, who were married to each other), and some are less known. One of my favorite pieces is author/editor Sven Birkerts' story of working for a couple of years at an offshoot of the original Ann Arbor Borders Bookstore (long before Borders became a sprawling empire); in particular, he tells the story of his meeting and trying to impress the Nobel Prize winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was then a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, and who came into the shop. "Writing Ann Arbor" is a special pleasure to dip into for anyone who has a connection with or interest in Ann Arbor, or with the writers represented in the book, but any reader will find much to enjoy in the book.