Please welcome special guest Wendy Hornsby!

On an ordinary day in an ordinary year, I would find it difficult to single out just one favorite poem. But there is precious little about any day during the last year that could be called ordinary. So many times since the realities of life during this deadly pandemic descended on us, I have thought of John Donne’s “No Man Is an Island.” During Donne’s lifetime, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the British Isles and European continent would encompass his familiar world. I suspect that if he were around just a century later, his frame of reference might have been global instead. 

If we learned nothing else this year, it is that every one of us is connected to every other being on the planet. The outbreak of a new virus in one part of the world affects us all, just as the solutions belong to the world. Every illness, every death “diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind.”

When pandemic was declared and governments everywhere began closing their borders, shuttering businesses, and sending children and non-essential workers home, my husband and I were traveling abroad. Airlines cancelled all flights, restaurants and hotels closed. And there we were, potentially marooned. We got home, eventually, because we had abundant help from friends and strangers alike. We were not, and are not, alone. We are “A part of the main.”

No Man is an Island   

No man is an island,                                                                                                            Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent, 

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

by John Donne

An NPR interviewer aptly described Edgar-Award winning author Wendy Hornsby as “a genteel college professor by day, and by night a purveyor of murder most foul.” Now retired after teaching History for thirty-eight years, Wendy has abandoned all pretense of gentility in order to purvey her two great interests, History and writing, full time. Published internationally, she is the author of fifteen books and many short stories. A Bouquet of Rue, (Perseverance
Press, April 2019), her most recent Maggie MacGowen mystery, is available now. The story of her flight from Europe during the pandemic shutdown, “Best Laid Plans and the Virus: A Cautionary Tale” can be found in Stop the World: Snapshots from a Pandemic (Thalia Press, June 2020). 

For more about the author, or to contact Wendy go to www.wendyhornsby.com.