What does it mean if a fourteen-year-old member of an affectionate, loyal, and at least "three-quarters cultured" family has bad dreams about the Gestapo? What are our fourteen-year-olds having nightmares about today?

Here is memoir––not fiction—about a wartime Christmas in Duluth, l944. Young Carol has two weeks home from boarding school. Her mother has been dead two years, and of her three brothers, all in uniform, two are away at war. The father sends weekly carbons to his four children––word of each and news of the war in general. Carol arranges the crèche and admires the tree all right, but she also likes writing medium bad sonnets and plans to kiss "that boy in someone’s rumpus room if he was the same one I thought he was." Underneath all that, she dreams about Germans, and genocide.

Recalling her own adolescent thinking, and thinking of what adolescents experience now, Carol Bly comes to some astonishing conclusions.

Carol Bly was born in Duluth and educated at Abbot Academy, Wellesley College, and the University of Minnesota. She has written several books of essays and short stories. Her most recent publications are Changing the Bully Who Rules the World (Milkweed Editions, 1996) and "Chuck’s Money" (TriQuarterly, May 1999). Forthcoming works include My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories (Milkweed Editions, 2000) and a book on new ways to learn and teach creative writing (Anchor, 2001). She is presently the1998–99 Edelstein-Keller Author of Distinction at the University of Minnesota.

Front cover: Author Carol Bly, early 1940s

Back to Holiday Collection