More on: Interviews

I wanted to break down part of the Gospel story. As I see it, it’s not just about the son sacrificing himself and all those dynamics that inform the biography. I wanted to look at the messages in the Gospels that haunt our lives. What would we do in this world with someone who could perform miracles—verifiable, right-in-front-of-your-eyes miracles? It would just blow the top off the joint. But at the same time, I’m sure we’d find some way to commodify it.

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she taught Native American literature and creative writing.She has published more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as screenplays and plays—and increasingly, as in her new book, Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job (Turtle Point, 2020),…

Laughter is one way in which I experience God, and so I want to write about the ways in which I am sometimes lucky to experience the divine, as friend. A friend who makes you laugh out loud, and who makes you weep. I’m a weeper, and that too is a gift from God.

I’m lucky to know a lot of really good, generous people, but they don’t fall into any of those standard narratives of saintly lives. They’re people who just keep on trucking and being good in the face of a lot of injustice and ingratitude.

Objects, rituals, and sites make the spiritual present, function as witness or proof of the miraculous, and turn individual perceptions into collective convictions.

I used to ask myself why humans go through sacrifices and insist on creating things that no one asked for or cares about. But not anymore. I realize that, in my case at least, it is simply an instinctive drive to do, and that’s my way of being.

Aside from my children and wife, literature has been the intensest delight of my life.

You can read something spoken or written by somebody from a very different place or time or background or state of being—and it can feel true anyway.