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A Letter to My Unborn Niece
My brother and his wife are about to have their first baby. This is my first letter to her. Emerson, by this point you are no doubt aware, even if it’s scary for you to admit, that all these adults crowding around you all the time do some things wrong. Maybe a lot of things wrong. But here’s a secret you will only know later. We are all a little afraid of you....
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And All Shall Be Well
The first paper I wrote in graduate school didn’t really work as an academic argument. I was trying to claim something about domestic imagery in the writing of Julian of Norwich, but even after months of attempting to formulate a thesis that worked, I just couldn’t wrangle a coherent meaning out of it. It just never coalesced. However lacking in focus it might have been, it did not prevent me from becoming utterly fascinated with Julian of Norwich....
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Mississippi Blues
I’ve never really thought to see if any other Mississippians feel this way, but whenever anyone not from here criticizes the South in general or Mississippi in particular, I tend to become not so much defensive as rabid and accusatory. Case in point, I recently sustained an hour-long argument (one-sided and imaginary, of course) with Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly in my head when he opened his otherwise brilliant review of The Help with the following line, “It’s often been noted that before the civil rights era, the American South, while more racist than the North, was in one way more enlightened...."
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Native Land
After a several year late-twenties lull, my last four summers have been dominated not just with weddings, but with the major weddings of family and intimate friends. I have not been able to make it through any of these weddings without the copious shedding of joyful tears. Age and experience have made me more, rather than less likely, to be sentimental and awe-struck as people ....
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A Stepping Stone in Rwanda
The first night I was in Rwanda, I was asked to facilitate group discussion among the thirteen students and five faculty members who were about to spend our ten days there. So I did what I usually do when I am asked to teach. I came up with fourteen questions that dealt with various abstract aspects of our time in Rwanda. I asked about....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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