Category Archives: Writing

Book Review: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

By Richard Levangie | Published November 16, 2014

None of us will get out of here alive. We will all be beaten and battered by a callous world filled with unthinking, unfeeling people who care little for our suffering, except as it affects their own. I used to think that I was singular, that my suffering was singularly intense and devastating. Now I […]

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Book Review: Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

By Richard Levangie | Published October 26, 2014

I’m wondering if the First World Problems meme owes its genesis to Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers — Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. Within two chapters, I was immersed in this teeming world, lying awake at night, sifting through the contrasts. Here I am, bitching because I’m scrambling like a madman […]

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Flight of the Griffons — by Kate Inglis

By Richard Levangie | Published August 17, 2014

Kate Inglis has destroyed my street credibility in the rough and tumble Dartmouth neighborhood where I live. Three times in the last fortnight, while waiting for the bus to whisk me away to my writing residency at the University of King’s College’s MFA in creative nonfiction program, Flight of the Griffons made me cry. That’s […]

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Author Jennifer Zobair Answers 25 Questions

By Richard Levangie | Published June 12, 2013

I want to tell you about Jennifer Zobair, the author of Painted Hands, but first I’d like to talk about Andika. Andika was a student in the kid’s karate class at that I taught at the University of King’s College ISKF for a decade. His parents were Muslims from Indonesia, and always treated me with […]

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Bound for the University of King’s College

By Richard Levangie | Published June 9, 2013

EDITOR’S NOTE: I was recently accepted to the Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction program at King’s. This is the essay I submitted with my application. If the fates are kind, I’ll have another degree and a nonfiction book in two years. In 1990, King’s College President Dr. Marion Fry presented me with the […]

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Author Melanie Hooyenga Answers 25 Questions

By Richard Levangie | Published December 9, 2012

As I grow older, I find myself seeking out kindness. That’s how I first met Melanie Hooyenga. In the funny way that social media works, our paths had crossed for years, but we never really connected. It’s like we had been to a few parties at the houses of friends we had in common, but […]

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Bittersweet

By Richard Levangie | Published September 5, 2012

Circumstances being what they were, I didn’t see my baby sister in person until Canada Day. Almost seven months after we’d last held hands and cried together. I knew immediately that her life was measured in weeks and days and hours and minutes. And I was pissed at the cancer clinic in Arizona that took […]

Also posted in Life | 3 Comments

Prince Charming

By Richard Levangie | Published October 25, 2011

She called me Prince Charming. Who really understands why kids think the way they do? Kristina had just landed a job as a governess for a precocious two-and-a-half year old, and she had locked herself out of the family’s home. She needed to borrow my car but, since it held no car seat, her new […]

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Steve Jobs – A Legacy of Storytelling

By Richard Levangie | Published October 6, 2011

Artists are our storytellers. Since our ancestors’ earliest days, we’ve told stories about our dreams, our heroes and villains, our struggles. About how we live and how we die. If we are to find peace and understand our commonalities, we must have stories. Over the last 25 years, creation has been reborn and democratized by […]

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Conflict and Storytelling

By Richard Levangie | Published September 5, 2011

The characters in the Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve were a sweet gift. I woke from the long nightmare that was 14 years of daily migraines, and found an idea for a late-middle reader swimming around in my recently-unaddled brain. Interestingly, the story swirled around characters created by Kristina for a picture book that she […]

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