Our son Eric was four years old. My husband George, after teaching all day at Tufts University, would walk over to Tufts Day Care Center, pick Eric up, and walk home with him, Eric riding in the carrier on George’s back. As soon as they’d get in the house, they’d both plop down in front…

I always privately hated the psalms. Most of them, anyway. As a teenager, I’d leaf through the Bible’s songbook quite often and feel it was full of self-pity and self-righteousness, often launching into bombastic praise of God and two lines later wishing curses on enemies. I didn’t understand why Christians still used the psalms, and…

The sonnet, of course, is the gold standard of form, the first one most people identify. That’s why I decided to wait several months before working on sonnets during my Year of Forms. There’s just so much pressure surrounding The One. I mean, come on: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is…

I spent elementary school in a Mexican neighborhood in Austin, Texas. I attended birthday parties with piñatas and ate in a school cafeteria that served home-style enchiladas, tamales, and beans made with lard. And because of my dark hair I truly didn’t realize a difference between the other students and me until fourth grade, when…

My husband and I took a spring break trip to the central coast of California, and we included a stop at the Hearst Castle—William Randolph Hearst’s 90,000 square foot, 61-bathroom home on 127 acres at the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Hearst was still expanding it when he died in 1951. It…

Jaws is released the summer I turn fourteen, and my friends and I spend every afternoon bodysurfing and reenacting the young woman’s death scene at the beginning of the movie. We yell, kick, jerk, wave, scream, pretending a great white has hold, dragging us down for the kill. We sputter, shriek, and wait for a…

Did you know that you’re meant to be a saint? So says Pope Francis, in his latest Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad). An Apostolic Exhortation is a communication to Catholics throughout the world; but this one speaks to all Christians. Gaudete et Exsultate‘s very first paragraph announces: “The Lord… wants us…

Hank’s trembling confession that he’d be killing God if he killed another inmate had charged the small jail visitation cell where I sat discussing the image of God with three men from the infirmary. I pulled out the last of three “icons” and passed it around. It was a color printout of the crumbling Sphinx…

The jail staff asked if I would meet with some of the guys in the infirmary. I sat down at the small, bare table in a cramped lawyer visitation cell, and three men in red scrubs squeezed by each other to take their seats with me. One of them was Hank, an old man with…

Recently, I was wandering around some of the less travelled corners of Tuscany with a copy of Goethe’s Italian Journey when I found myself struck, powerfully and without precedent, by something Goethe had written.   But I have to touch first upon W. H. Auden, the great English poet, who, for reasons not explained anywhere…