It’s hard to believe, but Peter Hatch didn’t have gardening in his blood. Now 32 years into his work restoring the gardens at Monticello, a task that his former boss says makes him “known to every historical gardener in America,” Hatch’s early aspiration was to be a poet. And in a sense—a living, dirt-under-your-nails, sticky-stuff-on-your-forearms […]

There’s no question that the title of the latest Virginia Quarterly Review, “The End of Ice,” is meant to be taken literally. In travelogues that chronicle experiences as divergent as ice hunters blasting away at errant icebergs in Newfoundland’s White Bay to adolescents following the chaddar, or frozen river-highway, out of a village in the […]

When I was a Fulbright Fellow in Saint Petersburg, Russia in early 2003, there to write a book of poetry in Russia’s most literary city, the American consulate decided to throw a free “public” event to introduce the Fellows to a select crowd of Russian citizens. So there we stood, all in a row, while […]

The experience of reading the new issue of the VQR is a little like traveling across the world, if the reader could move through recent time along with space: The Winter 2009 issue is titled “Fidel’s Cuba (and the Legacy of the Cold War)” and its three central essays range from travel narrative to a […]

On a bright, chilly Monday morning two days before Election Day, Edward Thomas and I stand at the perimeter of the bamboo forest at the corner of Cherry and Ridge in Fifeville, not far from where the 35-year-old painter lives. For 10 minutes, we’ve been tracing the sidewalk, searching for a buried path into the […]

Scrooge, Tiny Tim—in some ways we know these characters better than our own family, a phenomenon that presents potential hazards and rewards for any director attempting to