Vincent O’Keefe is the author of “The Niagara River Gorge: A Church Full of Joy,” which appears in the current issue of Great Lakes Review, a literary magazine devoted to celebrating the Great Lakes region in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and photography.
O’Keefe recalls how as a boy growing up in the DeVeaux neighborhood of Niagara Falls, he explored “the gorge” first with family and later with classmates, and he describes the pleasure he feels today when he revisits it in the company of old friends:
“A hike down the gorge today makes us question Heraclitus’s dictum that “you can’t enter the same river twice.” For when we visit the gorge, our adult eyes love to see many of the same sights from the past—the sections of the path where old rockslides and tree roots still impact the route, the similar look of the wooded sides of the gorge, the same green-and-white color combinations of the river and its rapids.”
O’Keefe graduated from Canisius in 1991, as a member of all-college honors with a major in English. He earned an MA in English from Temple University and a PhD in American literature from Loyola University Chicago. His freelance writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Parents, Business Insider, Next Avenue, City Dads, Your Teen, The Plain Dealer ,and The Huffington Post.
You can read “The Niagara River Gorge: A Church Full of Joy” here:
https://greatlakesreview.org/the-niagara-river-gorge-a-church-full-of-joy/
You can learn more about Vincent O’Keefe and his work here:
Submitted by: Mick Cochrane, Professor
