More on: Essays

Departures: Journeys with Asian Filmmakers   I’M HALFWAY OVER the Atlantic on a 777, and I’ve just unfolded myself from my seat. It feels like needles are threading blood back down through my legs and feet. Teaching myself to walk again, I grimace up the aisle of the darkened plane. As I go, I scan…

Upon Listening to Biber’s Rosary Sonatas Scordatura: Abnormal tuning of a stringed instrument in order to obtain unusual chords, facilitate difficult passages, or change the tone color. —Harvard Dictionary of Music, second edition ALTHOUGH I AM a piano tuner who used to play a violin, I would not dream of referring to the violin as…

DUTCH-CANADIAN, of Midwestern Winnipeg, an ordinary follower of Jesus Christ. This is perhaps the most succinct way to situate the artist Gerald Folkerts. Readers may ask, “Can any artistic good come out of Winnipeg?” Come closer. Take a look. Winnipeg, Manitoba, is not like Bible-belt Alberta, but is hard-working Mennonite farming country. Under God-blue skies,…

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, A luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been…

For Armand and Ros de Mestral 1 Like many great cities Montreal is on a river. But the Saint Lawrence is not what divides it. We stay in the heights. I don’t have to leave the garret atop this three-story house on Thornhill in order to transcend. The view contains immensity, sun easy on the…

WHEN I first arrived at Oxford University in the early 1980s to pursue graduate work, I was all swagger on the outside, but that was to conceal the soft center of terror within. I had gone from being a big man on a small Midwestern campus situated between two cornfields to a nobody at an…

ARE YOU CONVINCED that everything is going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Or are you possessed of a more sanguinetemperament? Do you feel that life is getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What would the make and model of your handbasket happen to be?…

Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations The following essay is excerpted from a new book of the same title from Gaspereau Press (www.Gaspereau.com).   TODAY I believe in God. A visiting friend and I were listening to a jazz trio one Sunday morning in an Anglican church. The trio led off with a…

I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one ——————Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the First A SUPERHERO MOVIE is foremost an entertainment, often kitschy, sometimes trashy, but regardless, it is…

I TELL MY mother lies. Sometimes three or four times a day. I lie mostly about money. That I’ve sent it or that I’m just about to send it. Or that surely I will send it tomorrow. My mother waits for money like the bums waited for Godot. One day she called seventeen times. So…