Book Review: Another Perspective on Phil’s Siren Song
Aug04

Book Review: Another Perspective on Phil’s Siren Song

Following East Village Magazine contributing writer Jan Worth-Nelson’s review of Phil’s Siren Song by local author Tim Lane, writer Bob Campbell shares a personal perspective on the novel set in 1980s Flint. By Bob Campbell The wonderful thing about reading fiction, in this case literary realism, is the door it opens to a different world – one that allows you to immerse yourself in the lives of the story’s characters. The...

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Flint Book Review: Phil’s Siren Song
May15

Flint Book Review: Phil’s Siren Song

By Jan Worth-Nelson Just to get it on the table right up front, I’m pretty crazy about Flint native Tim Lane’s new novel, “Phil’s Siren Song.”   I know, I know: another book about a tribe of 20-something blue-collar Flint underachievers — this time in the 80s — straggling from one beloved downtown hangout to another, coming and going from attempted romances and the halls of academe, getting drunk and sometimes drugged up on Flint’s...

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Review:  “That’s My Moon Over Court Street — Dispatches from a Life in Flint” resonates with “improbable happiness” and moving beyond ghosts
Nov21

Review: “That’s My Moon Over Court Street — Dispatches from a Life in Flint” resonates with “improbable happiness” and moving beyond ghosts

By Robert Thomas That’s My Moon Over Court Street: Dispatches from a life in Flint  is an intimate time capsule of a life in Flint composed of Jan Worth-Nelson’s collected columns from East Village Magazine, 2007- 2022. “My adult life in Flint,” she writes in her Introduction, “has had some dark times, and I haven’t been spared from hard and stupid things. These essays describe the improbable happiness I have found so often here. How...

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Commentary:  Are YOU being represented?  Flint council members are elected to take a stand.  Abstaining shirks their duty
Nov05

Commentary: Are YOU being represented? Flint council members are elected to take a stand. Abstaining shirks their duty

  By Christopher Frye Editor of Flint: Our Community, Our Voice Election Day 2022 is upon us.  It is the day that We The People make our choices known on various ballot issues and elect Representatives to diverse legislative bodies from local school boards to our representatives in Congress.  Allow me to repeat…we are voting for people to represent us at diverse levels of government. Therefore, if elected, it is incumbent upon...

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A Review: Starry Messenger – Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization (2022) 
Nov02

A Review: Starry Messenger – Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization (2022) 

By Bob Thomas To gain a fresher perspective on the state of our current human beingness, I stepped into space with astrophysicist/educator Neil DeGrasse Tyson as my starry messenger. His book opens with an astronaut’s perspective:  You develop instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.  From out there on the moon, International...

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Book review: Persona, place, and poetics in Sarah Carson’s “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan”
Oct29

Book review: Persona, place, and poetics in Sarah Carson’s “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan”

By William Barillas Born and bred, as the expression goes, in Flint, Michigan, poet Sarah Carson has previously published three chapbooks and two full-length books. The provocatively titled book Poems in Which You Die (2014) consists of surrealistic prose poems, narratives for the most part, that provoke speculation on what mundane yet consequential situations they might symbolize. Perhaps they represent the psychic backdrop to the...

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