After leaving a career in music (classical guitar) because of a hand injury, David Linebarger earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Davis. Currently a Professor of Humanities at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, his publications include scholarly articles on Wallace Stevens and Modern Music, poetry in over 25 journals, and two chapbooks of poems: “War Stories” (Pudding House) and “Bed of Light” (Finishing Line Press). Recent works of creative nonfiction appear in Cagibi and Another Chicago Magazine. A nationally ranked tennis player in his age group, his current book project is a collection of nonfiction prose poems on famous tennis players.
Note: Though some version of each dream below might be dreamed by anyone in America, each dream is based on the life of R. Norris Williams. He lived in a country where dreams are exchanged, where anyone might dream another’s reality. One night a dream is an acceptance letter from Harvard. One night Ben Franklin […]
The first Aussie to do everything in tennis: Wimbledon and Davis Cup champ, #1 player in the world. A cunning, nasty lefty with a cunning, nasty lefty serve. A long-serving, powerful administrator of all things Aussie tennis. Every year it takes 800 hours to shape a sheet of sterling silver into the Norman Brookes Challenge […]
“If I’m not winning, I’m every kind of monkey, gorilla, black bitch, nigger, choke-artist, man . . . The online abuse is constant.” (Sloane Stephens, 2021). I wanted to write about Sloane Stephens’ wings. Those wings on her feet like Mercury’s, the god of speed, messages, travel, boundaries. Laver thought one key to tennis was […]
January in Brisbane holding a Koala. Melbourne in a long black dress. February is Dubai’s white sands in a pink bikini and shades. Behind her in the distance, echoing her curves, is the Burj Al Arab, the most luxurious hotel on earth. Its sail shape soars upwards as Federer’s forehands and Tiger Woods’ tee shots […]
Angel, Madonna, Mother, Wife, Starlet, Actress: the one looking over all the dead, or the one Tony Wilding was about to marry. Child in arm. Barbed wire in the background. Troubetzkoy sculpted this angel, this monument to WWI. A decade earlier he sculpted Wilding hitting a forehand drive. “Physical Energy,” he called it. Women swooned […]
Death marches and concentration camps. Forced starvation and forced Islamization. Rapes and rapes and rapes and rapes and more than a million dead. Maybe that’s not the best place to start. My teenage daughter is recording Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto for the National Trumpet Competition. Gypsy lyrical. Exciting, too, with plenty of showy trumpet techniques. We […]
After Agassi’s Open “Please let this be over.” “I don’t want it to be over.” That’s what I whispered that day and night like thousands of times before. You told me about your posters of me in your rooms of adolescence. You kept touching your long dark hair of youth. Time to walk out into […]
A mashup of a female contemporary artist and tennis player from Japan. To break new ground, do what you’re told. If you’re left-handed like Kimiko, play right-handed. Nonconformity equals shame. Don’t take big swings. Go old school. Hit your forehand as flat as a pancake. Run faster and faster around the court till you reach […]
Kay designed her own dresses. Four inches above the knee. Is that why JFK dated her? She thought he was “spoilt by women. I think he could snap his fingers and they’d come running.” A Wimbledon finalist with a big lefty forehand in 1939, Kay was the second best player in the world till the […]
Her histrionics mark her as a descendant of the goddess Ishtar: women as forces of nature who create destruction when life does not go their way. Helen even mocked her opponent’s bad shots on court. “I hate losing to Kelesi,” one player said. “No one’s going to treat me like an ass,” said another. “Tennis […]