More on: Essays

IN LATE OCTOBER I started painting the trim around the outside of the windows white. I finished the east and south sides of the house and moved my ladder to the west. The red leaves were falling from the sugar maple and the buckeyes from the buckeye tree, and the squirrels were making their strangely…

GROWING UP AS I DID amidst the dazzling lights of New York City, it is strange that even as a small child I was madly in love with the stars. The city’s glare effectively canceled out the night sky, admitting only the rare glimpse of the brightest heavenly orbs. Beyond the moon and Venus, you’d…

What…had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscapelike formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and hard as rock…. They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was…

IF THEY ARE HONEST, most art historians will cop to a youthful encounter that launched them into studying art professionally. The experiences that got me started were both religious and artistic. Preparing for confirmation as a Lutheran teen, I was struck by the heroic illustrations of Martin Luther in our class materials. I thrilled to…

ONE OF THE THREE NARRATIVES woven through American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang’s debut graphic novel, opens with Danny, a blond, blue-eyed teen who seems to be on the cusp of moving forward in his relationship with his longtime crush. The also blonde, blue-eyed girl is blushing just when Danny’s mom calls from the other…

I’M AT A LAKE IN WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia. At least I think it’s a lake. It could be a sound, or an inlet, or a bay. In any case, it’s a body of water, and with the evergreens and sizable rocks lining the shore and covering the smaller land masses across from us, against…

An Introduction by Guest Editor Scott Teems The first issue of Image I read was Issue 31, in the summer of 2001; it was the first in a subscription gifted me by the Act One screenwriting program in Los Angeles, which I had just completed. Initially, I was intimidated by the journal’s focus on fine…

THE FAMILY-ROOM TELEVISION came to us through fire and smoke like in the old miracles. It was the mid-aughts, and my father was working at a building restoration company, which is one way to say he waded through disaster for a living. Fire, smoke, water—the words emblazoned on the side of his car read like…

The Forgotten War MY MOTHER INHERITED her father’s war letters before immigrating to America, and by the time she passed them on to me, after my daughter was born, much of the text was illegible, a language lost to a fragile medium, pencil marks on paper the weight of ash. The disintegration had begun at…

Terrence Malick (2012) THE FILMS OF TARENCE MALICK, or at least his most recent ones, are perhaps more admired than loved. I’ve struggled through the longueurs of late Malick, but at the same time I’m aware that my brain has been conditioned by Hollywood conventions. Malick takes running leaps off the high dive and sometimes…