More on: Essays

MY FIRST CONVERSION took place when I was five years old on a heaven-reaching swing in my cousin’s back yard. It was a bright summer day and we had just returned from vacation Bible school at the Baptist church. Red cherry Kool-Aid stained our lips. Kristy was giving me an underdog—and I was swinging high enough…

A number of recent events suggest a revival of interest in the work of Georges Rouault is underway. Three in particular are worth noting: In 2008 a major exhibition, Mystic Masque, curated by Stephen Schloesser, was held at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College; a year later a joint exhibition of work by…

Inherited but Never Inhabited Story and the Garden   MY GRANDMOTHER MARY ALICE kept her big, tissue-paged Bible beside her party-line telephone and flipped through it, reading here and there, as she listened in on the stories being told along the Edmond Road. Even now, many of my kin keep Bibles by them the way…

ART MAY BE CONCERNED with the creative manipulation of images, but words are always part of the picture. When we encounter a work of art, a load of labels and captions, categories and explanations always works to help or hinder our better understanding. Some are printed on the wall beside the work; others we carry inside…

THEY WILL ALL LEAVE, first my brother-in-law, who is frank about his tastes, and then the others, borne away on several tides of pretext—the bathroom, pots on the stove, the freshening of drinks—from which none return. Now it’s just me watching, lying belly down on the bed where I used to sleep with my wife.…

THERE WAS about him always, my great-great-grandmother Mathilde had written, a cloud of strange fragrance. She ticked off its elements in a diary entry made in the summer of 1885: sassafras grass, wool, raw leather, and a quick-sublimating sweat dense with some Hunkpapa condiment. In a different entry she added in the scents of the…

The following is adapted from the commencement address for the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing delivered on August 7, 2010. THIS PROGRAM IS blessed to have its intensive, ten-day residencies at two of the most beautiful places on the continent: the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and…

British artist Chris Ofili has long been a source of controversy. His detractors have included the mayor of New York as well as a man who threw white paint on one of his pieces at the Brooklyn Museum (the famous Virgin Mary piece with elephant dung). But despite the bombast and apparent sacrilege, Ofili’s work…

ONE SUMMER at the lake house, I forgot my swimming suit and found one of my grandmother’s—an old, plastic mold of a suit, perhaps unworn for twenty years—hanging like a replica of her younger body in the upstairs cedar closet. The suit smelled green and sweet, like the lake. When I pulled it onto my…

IN MAY 2001 I found myself at the Cannes Film Festival on a six-member ecumenical jury. Every year the festival hosts other accredited juries besides the star-studded official one, and since 1974 an ecumenical jury made up of Catholics and Protestants has given awards to films in Cannes’s competitive selection. Dutifully we attended all the…