We responded with deep sadness to the news out of Blacksburg on Monday—and with growing despair as the details have continued to emerge.

John T. Casteen IV, a member of our poetry board and a past contributor to VQR on the subject of gun control, has a piece on Slate that deserves everyone’s careful attention. We understand that John has been invited to appear tomorrow (April 19) on NPR’s “Here and Now.”

I rode down to Blacksburg yesterday with Waldo Jaquith, our web developer, who also happens to be a Virginia Tech alum. Waldo took some amazing photographs and shares his thoughts on his blog. Like Waldo, the moment I can’t seem to shake came as a small group of us sat around a television in Squires Student Center. While George W. Bush spoke, a half dozen students sat in their Hokies t-shirts, unspooling black ribbon, snipping it into even lengths, and twisting it into mourning lapel pins. Then others joined in, slowly filling a plain cardboard box. It was such a small gesture, but everybody wanted to be able to do something.

Cormac McCarthy and Natasha Trethewey, both recent VQR contributors, have been honored with the Pulitzer Prizes in Fiction and Poetry, respectively. These are great writers with great books; it’s always nice to see this kind of recognition for deserving books. The full list of letters and drama winners is:

Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry: Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)

Drama: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

History: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf)

Biography: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Alfred A. Knopf)

Self-portrait by Kurt Vonnegut.

If you had to be out and about as a hurricane was bearing down on New York City, there were worse places to be than in the back of a limousine with Kurt Vonnegut. Especially if you were twenty-three years old and wanted to be a writer.

It was September of 1985 and we were driving through midtown Manhattan during the prelude to Hurricane Gloria. Storefronts were covered with plywood. Rain blew horizontally over streets that Kurt and I seemingly had to ourselves. This was my first job out of college, working as a publicity assistant for his publisher and I was, understandably, unnerved. My boss was a hurricane-induced no-show that morning and there was a full slate of morning show appearances to make. Plus, I had never been alone with a literary icon before. I had never been in a hurricane before.

But Kurt could not have been more relaxed. And why not? What’s a little rain and wind after you’ve lived through the Great Depression, survived being a prisoner of war, and the firebombing of Dresden?

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David J. Morris, author of “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground” (in our Winter 2007 issue), was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for a story on the new US strategy in Iraq (he’s at the 10 minute mark). Morris also has an essay in our new issue, “The Image as History: Clint Eastwood’s Unmaking of an American Myth,” a look at the iconography of the Iraq War in light of recent films on past wars, including Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.

NPR’s “On the Media,” produced by WNYC and hosted by Brooke Gladstone, features an outstanding segment on Mark Twain’s unpublished faux letter to the editor “The Walt Whitman Controversy,” available for the first time in our new Spring 2007 issue. Gladstone interviews Ed Folsom, who co-edited and introduced the piece with Jerome Loving, and the segment also features a dramatic readings of passages from the Twain piece—delivered by a surprisingly convincing Twain impersonator! Check out the segment, then read Folsom and Loving’s intro. There’s also a nice summary of the story behind the essay in Newsday. Unfortunately, the University of California Press and the Twain Project have asked us not to make the Twain piece public, but it is available online to subscribers and can be found at these fine bookstores.

And if you just can’t get enough Twain and Whitman, then check out David Caplan’s essay contrasting their ideas of patriotism, also published in our current issue, and Ed Folsom’s excellent essay on Whitman and the presidency from our Spring 2005 special issue on the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass.