Katherine Dalton
Katherine Dalton has worked as a magazine editor, freelance feature writer and book editor. She started in journalism in college, working at The Yale Literary Magazine during most of its controversial few years as a national magazine of opinion based at Yale. She then worked briefly at Harper’s magazine in New York, and more extensively at Chronicles magazine in Illinois, where she was a contributing editor for many years. She has has written for various publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the University Bookman, and was a contributor to Wendell Berry: Life and Work and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto. She lives in her native Kentucky.
Articles by Katherine Dalton
An Apology to Our Readers
I must apologize to all our readers and my fellow contributors here for the intrusion of my cousin Cassie Pigeon in a recent post under my byline. I had my extended…
Talking Chicken
New Castle, Kentucky. "Simplify, simplify," said Henry David Thoreau in one of his more peaceable moments, and I repeat it through gritted teeth as I watch the layered complexity that is Mr. Obama's solution…
Workaday Morals
Henry County, Ky. Those of us foolish enough to call ourselves “conservative” are forced to admit that culturally and politically at least we live amidst less and less worth conserving. …
Root Hog or Die
Henry County, Kentucky. Every Memorial Day my husband takes our children to visit three cemeteries in our county. We take grass from the family farm for a great-grandfather, rhubarb for…
The Immoral Life of Children
A few weeks ago a friend's ten-year-old daughter came home from school, turned to her mother with a frown, and speaking low, so as to stay out of earshot of…
Canon Fodder I: Uncle Remus
New Castle, Kentucky. We can't talk about the economy all the time, or anyway I can't. Today instead I want to sing a song of the literature of place--and my refrain is,…
The Thee-ater of the Bozarts
Louisville, Ky. “Rural dwellers may have boundless tolerance for exaltations of the wonders and mysteries of the natural world, but the urban spirit begins to rebel. By the time this…
The Cincinnatus of Thrift
Russell Arben Fox remembers well his thrifty grandmother, and so do I, and so do you, perhaps. For the rest of the nation there is Amy Dacyczyn of Leeds, Maine,…
An Elegy for Tobacco
Henry County, Kentucky. What holds a community together? Or rather, what holds my community together, as I'll have to leave you to worry about yours? I think about it some because…
Friends Abroad: Vandana Shiva
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY. One of the structural evils of our two-party system and our editorial pages is the inherent bias of both towards two. If not A, then B. If not…
Bernard Madoff, the Novel
Those of you who didn't lose your life savings with Mr. Madoff, and who can think about him with equanimity, may be interested in a very fine novel about his…
Back to the Land Economy
Well, we are all localists here, watching our national economy stagger and moan. Is there any room for a conversation about local economies? What would a local economy mean? One of…