-
Wiki-Culture
It’s not often that I have conversations about where creativity and inspiration come from. I used to love hashing out these issues, especially as a grad student, usually late at night after too much to drink. But now (call me superstitious) I need some mystery, some romance, and talking about where “it” comes from, defining what “it” is, driving “it” into a corner, just....
Tags
-
A Boy Named Day
On Thursday May 7th at 2:15 am, my wife gave birth to a boy: Alexander Day Griffith, 8 lbs. 8 oz. Alexander is my middle name, so that requires no explanation, but “Day” is unusual, I guess, and so I’ve had many awkward phone calls with family and friends where at some point the person says, “now, ‘Day,’ is that a family name?” Well, kind of. “Day” is the....
Tags
-
The “S” Word
All my life I have had fantasies of freeing slaves. I believe I have this fantasy more than most because I was raised in Illinois—Land of Lincoln, home to the Great Emancipator—and came of age in a house with numerous Civil War books, including the ubiquitous Time-Life series of hard back, faux-leather-bound books (though they sure did smell....
Tags
-
A Sense of the Stakes
When I was in my twenties, my greatest regret was never having learned to play the piano, so much so that when merely walking by a piano I was overcome with a sense of anxiety and frustration. The sight of those eighty-eight keys was like catching just a glimpse of the ocean between buildings from a fast-moving car. Since the birth of our....
Tags
-
The Patron and the Crocus
Virginia Woolf begins her essay “The Patron and the Crocus”: “[T]he writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in Kensington Garden has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best.” Woolf likens the work of a patron to that of an “instigator” who “cajoles the best out of the....
Tags
Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
Tag Search
