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Author Archives: Doug Cumming
Saint Walker Percy, M.D.
I won’t ask what books you’d recommend for reading now, in this pandemic lockdown. The director of Washington & Lee’s alumni education office did that, thinking of all those alums sheltering in place. He asked the faculty what book would … Continue reading
Nuclear family breakdown
Our streets are quiet, houses hiding their sequestered stories. Single joggers, without running mates, claim the middle of the road. There are no real church services or huddlings at the local brew-pub. My classrooms are locked and dark, a packet … Continue reading
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Plague Notes
There’s a new kind of balance now between the local and the not-local. Global news is of dread interest to all, reliable and scary – “cases near 2 million” – but we are just as interested in what’s happening on … Continue reading
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On Atlanta’s northern border
[Published in website “Like the Dew,” October 6, 2019.] Fifty years after my graduation from North Fulton High School, the pages of my 1969 “Hi-Ways” yearbook fill gaps in my mind better than any real memories. I look at my … Continue reading
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The Arrival of Father Tuck
[This is a slightly edited draft of a profile I wrote for our local weekly, The News-Gazette, twice as long as the one I ended up sending to be published on Dec. 4, 2019.] The Rev. Ellis Tucker “Tuck” Bowerfind, … Continue reading
Five Lessons & Carols for Southern Liberals
(This essay first ran in the website “Like the Dew: A Progressive Journal of Southern Culture & Politics,” Dec. 8, 2019) The word has gone forth. Our historic Episcopal church has done what many thought was impossible – we got … Continue reading
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Down to the entryway of higher education
For millions of Americans, community college is the gateway to higher education, job skills and a better life. Last fall, for me, community college was a gateway in the other direction. It led me, temporarily, out of the bubble of … Continue reading
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Tagged community college, Education, Surry County, Writing instruction
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Michael Cohen’s Lesson
They’re cheering Trump in Atlanta, cheering him in Monroe, La. This is the world of TV that Neil Postman warned about in Amusing Ourselves to Death, now taken over the whole American brain and nervous system, our national politics. The … Continue reading
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Tagged Catch-22, Michael Cohen, Rep. Elijah Cummings
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Review of ‘Deep South Dispatches’
Herbers, John N., with Anne Farris Rosen. Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist.Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. 260 pp. $28. Look up John N. Herbers’s byline in the New York Times Historical database and you find … Continue reading
Glimpses of Buckhead, 1930-40
Something I learned about the cultural and economic life in parts of north Atlanta in the 1930s and ‘40s, from online U.S. Census data. I looked up a 1930 page that includes my uncle John Kiser, when he was 2 … Continue reading
