More on: Essays

IN ONE OF HIS MONOLOGUES about the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon on the Prairie Home Companion radio show, Garrison Keillor relates: It’s a good time, winter, for all of us. It’s a time when all the things that we’ve been postponing for months can now be put off for a good while longer.…

ONE RADIANT FALL MORNING about eight years ago, I needed to revise some poems before I sent them to editors. I approached my desk armed with questions I ask my students: Is the language alive? Check out the metaphor. Does the poem make an argument or take the reader on a journey? I am a…

DEAR JAMES: If you ever wondered who burned out the motor on the art department’s jigsaw, it was me. I hope you weren’t forced to pay for that. You’ve paid too much for the sins of others. I was using the jigsaw to cut up the triptych I’d made for my final undergrad art show.…

PAINTER SHAI AZOULAY recently moved into a new studio in Jerusalem, a city where he has lived and worked throughout his artistic career. His studio, however, is far from the domed sacred spaces and stony streets associated with the Holy City. I took a meandering bus to the western edge of town to visit his…

The following is adapted from the plenary address given at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe in August, 2018, on the conference theme of “Telling Truths: Art, Honesty, and Community.” I HAVE WRITTEN THIS TALK as a partial alphabet: it starts with A (for art) and goes through T (for telling truths). For alphabetic languages,…

IN FALL OF 2016 I RETURNED TO THE CLASSROOM, filling in for a friend who was on sabbatical. The course was a seminar for art students, one that I had taught many times before I retired. My friend had used Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev as one of the texts, just as I…

IMAGE HAS ALWAYS embraced the idea that art often speaks better than argument, and that seems especially true in times of grief. For this issue, we’ve chosen to print a poem rather than a traditional editorial. As the Image board and staff search for a new editor, we and our community are in a state…

YOU WERE HOLDING THE BEEF DIP you had brought to the vegetarian potluck when I met you. The potluck was the lunch hour of the day-long birthing class at our midwife’s cabin. Through the large window behind the kitchen sink I saw the snow falling heavy and wet on the woods behind her home. I…

WE WATCHED DAVID make his way slowly down the middle of the street, dragging his right leg, his right arm limp at his side. With his left hand, he reached forward with his cane and lurched after it. A plastic grocery bag hung from his left wrist. Step and drag, forward and pause, all effort…

CLAIRE CURNEEN STARTS EACH of her sculptural ceramic works in the same way, with a small piece of clay. Squeezing it between her fingers, pushing and pressing it into the palm of her hand, she flattens it into a small disc. These discs are the building blocks of her figures. By pressing and squeezing them…