By Erika Grumet When I was a kid, I would occasionally encounter people with numbers tattooed on their arms. I don’t remember a time when Nazis and what they had done to Jews (and by extension, my own family) weren’t a part of my consciousness. I heard the stories first hand from the survivors, in…
Tag: Erika
You Don’t Look a Day Over 200
By Erika Grumet It’s birthday time here. Mine is this week, although I am nowhere near 200, but we’ll also be celebrating Walt Whitman’s 202nd birthday with this weekend’s episode of The Ivory Tower Boiler Room. I think it’s hard to grow up where I did on Long Island and not have at least a …
Erika’s Big Think #1:
Coming out of the Poetry Closet By Erika Grumet It’s a little ironic, I was the one who proposed that the topic for this month’s Big Think… should be “writing about ourselves as writers.” Of all the members of the Ivory Tower team, I’m the one who really struggles to self-identify as “a writer” and…
Sunday is for Swearing
By Adam Katz So. Erika and I were talking about the difference between a fanny-pack and a bum-bag. I didn’t know until a few days ago that, what in the United States, call a ‘fanny pack,’ in Britain is called a “bum bag,” apparently because in England (and elsewhere) “fanny” is a euphemism for “vagina.”…