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Glen Retief

Glen Retief grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era. He has published short stories and personal essays in the US and South Africa. He works as an assistant professor of Creative Nonfiction at the Writers’ Institute at Susquehanna University and is currently completing his first book-length memoir.

Author

The Jack Bank

Spring 2008 | Essays

No, there will never be any shortage of labels; but at core, these academic designations will always remain, for me, rather bloodless. They will dance around my mind, flimsy moth-shadows; from time to time they will make cameo appearances in my conceptual framework—handy epithets with which to classify and organize the experience. By they will never embody it. For that I must dig deeper into my recollections, into the sights and smells and tastes of them, the imagery, texture, and moods of John, his voice, his cricket bat, and, at the end of it all, his jack bank.