Posts Tagged ‘Bradford Winters’
The Embarrassed Samaritan
September 2, 2015
On this matter, I am forever grateful to Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan friar and chaplain to the New York City Fire Department who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Commissioned to write a screenplay about the man who was every bit the legend in life that he was in death, one day in my research I listened to a friend of his describe the way Judge would give money to the homeless on the street in the most inconspicuous way. Without a break in his gait or conversation with the friend, Judge would habitually pass off bills left and right with the right hand hardly knowing what the left was doing.
Read MoreA Very Good Friday
April 6, 2012
Earlier this week, I was deep in the weeds at work when the shadow of a deadline for my next Good Letters post began creeping over me. “I’ve got you down for Good Friday,” our long-suffering editor, Greg Wolfe, noted in a friendly nudge on Monday, before I got around to asking him exactly when…
Read MoreShall We Overcome?
February 8, 2012
Originally, I was going to title this post, “Something Funny Happened on the Way Home to Watch the Golden Globes.” And it was funny, to be sure; but in the context of the day in question, only to a point. Let me explain. Earlier that day, I had gone to church in Hollywood. I had…
Read MoreOver the Rhine and Through the Woods
December 27, 2011
Perhaps it’s embarrassing of me to admit this here at one of the dedicated hubs of their overall fan base, but until I was a fellow faculty member two summers ago at the Glen West Workshop hosted by Image, I had never heard of Over the Rhine—the musical/marital duo of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist.…
Read MoreLike a Roaring (Nittany) Lion
December 6, 2011
For reasons both practical and spiritual, I’ve mostly resisted the consuming pull of the sexual abuse saga at Penn State. But with ubiquitous news feeds and family or friends always there to fill you in, not to mention my own curiosity, one tends to be better informed than one’s better intentions would have it. On…
Read MoreWorking Out the Stereotypes
November 15, 2011
In advance of turning forty this past summer, I decided that I wanted to greet the milestone by getting into shape in a way that I never had before. Having let my gym membership expire for financial and practical reasons, I decided that not only would I reinstate it, but also throw in a short-term…
Read MoreSteve Jobs, Calligraphy, and Digital Resurrection
October 24, 2011
In my last post, “Aftermath,” I described the before-and-after experience of a recent trip to Los Angeles to pitch a drama series for television. Among other instances of what felt like divine timing at the start of the trip despite the dispiriting outcome by the end of it, there was one such instance that could…
Read MoreAftermath
October 4, 2011
By no dint of my own doing, it couldn’t have been a more well-timed pitch for network television. Three weeks I’d been preparing for the trip to L.A., fleshing out the premise, characters, and pilot storyline for a show about the world of first responders to natural disasters. I’d even come up with a title…
Read MoreIn Memory (and Awe) of Gordon Williams
September 14, 2011
Oddly or not, it was exactly a year ago (to the day) that I paid tribute to one of my students from that summer’s Screenwriting/Playwriting seminar at the Glen Workshop. As I wrote in that post regarding my class: “All had come ready to put their work on the line. But one came willing to put…
Read MoreYour Attention, Please
June 28, 2011
As my Good Letters colleague Jeffrey Overstreet did recently with his two-part post, “Something that I’m Supposed to Be,” one can adapt a longer talk into a blog post. In Jeffrey’s case, the talk was his plenary one at last year’s Glen Workshop, an occasion just as unforgettable in person as its recent written counterpart…
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