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Harmonic Resonance
I’m used to certain books haunting me long after reading them. Images surface in my mind like flotsam from a derelict ship, and I’m back in that other world, following trodden paths, returning to vistas enlarged by time and the heart’s slow, hidden work. I’m likewise reluctant to pass judgment on a film when leaving the theater; if it’s not still messing with me three months out, I missed something or it wasn’t there to start with....
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In Good Company
I nearly didn’t come to my first Glen Workshop eleven years ago, when it was held at the rustic and remote Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico. A week to work on my writing, however enticing, seemed impractical and self-indulgent. Why should I spend so much time—and money—away from home? My wife, Jill, who has always been wiser, insisted I go, that she would attend to everything in my absence. When my flight was canceled an hour before my scheduled departure, I nearly gave up. Jill insisted again, and once again I listened....
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What Will Pass for Mercy
Among the habits I’ve lately tried living without are reading online comment boxes (Good Letters being an exception) and making predictions. I bypass comments because I encounter enough wrath, ridicule, and unreason without wallowing in still more online. As for prophecy, my ability to predict the future isn’t what it used to be. Parents routinely ask me, a pediatrician, what’s in store for their children. I offer probabilities and guesses. Harder still to predict “the fate of the nation.” I don’t know where the United States, with an armada of oncoming problems and a conspicuous dearth of creative proposals in response, is heading. Maybe it’s just a passing foul mood, a temporary crisis of confidence....
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A Place Where We Can Talk
In my sophomore year of college, Professor Karanikolas took a semester to tear apart my writing—which until then I thought quite good—and rebuild it into something worth reading. He returned many of my early essays with marginal comments like, “Oh my God,” and “You’ve made the best of a very bad business here.” But the reeducation process was a painful necessity if I was ever to become a writer, and I’m grateful for those many hard lessons. One of my later essays that semester included a sentence (the content of which I’ve long ago forgotten) that, by itself, would have been embarrassingly trite....
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Wilbert
When I stepped out of the Arizona sun into your house, Wilbert, it took awhile for my eyes to adjust. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t notice at first how much older you’ve grown in the past year. You lean back, heavy-lidded, on your couch, while June’s soporific heat conjures a listless silence over the mesa, but the nuns from St. Jude’s told you to expect me, and you remember....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
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