Original Light: Post-Cancer Portraits
By Visual Art Issue 107
Cancer has allowed me to view myself as a canvas; my body has been primed, stretched, cut, and painted. My blood is paint, the needle is the brush, and my body is the canvas.
Read MoreDaring to Do the Good: The Knight and the Theologian
By Essay Issue 89
WRITING FROM HIS SMALL CELL in a German prison, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer advised his family and friends to read the lengthy novel Witiko by Adalbert Stifter—the book that gave him great comfort from the time of his arrest in 1943 until his execution in 1945 for his involvement in the plot to kill Hitler.…
Read MoreGarden of the Gods
By Short Story Issue 53
The following excerpt appears in Peery’s new novel, What the Thunder Said. Copyright 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. Available this spring wherever books are sold. YES, SHE KNEW THEM. They were her grown sons Sam and William and she loved them dearly but she wished…
Read MoreFaith, Hope, Charity
By Essay Issue 55
AMMA IS COMING to live in Richmond,” Mom announced one night at the dinner table. Elizabeth and I looked at each other quickly. Which of us would have to give up her bedroom? Immediately I began constructing an argument in my mind, listing the reasons why Elizabeth’s room would be more suitable for Amma—it was farther…
Read MoreDeath Seat
By Poetry Issue 55
Night before last I hit a deer as I sped meteor-like down a dark road—the thud of meeting bone beneath flesh. Last night it was a man, only he made no sound flying from the car’s bumper into blackness. Maybe it wasn’t me, but that shadowy figure behind the wheel, with me in the death…
Read MorePixelated Glories: The Graphic Excursions of Kathy T. Hettinga
By Essay Issue 66
DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…
Read MoreWriting in Invisible Ink
By Book Review Issue 72
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) The Man within My Head by Pico Iyer (Knopf, 2012) My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir by Meir Shalev (Schocken, 2011) …
Read MoreLord God Bird
By Essay Issue 72
THE LORD GOD BIRD fled its home on the Singer Tract in the bayou of Louisiana in 1944 and hasn’t been conclusively seen or heard from since. Its official name is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Campephilus principalis. The bird was the largest woodpecker in America until its purported demise. Great God, people were known to say.…
Read MoreImpromptu Novena in September
By Poetry Issue 71
Understand the light, then, and recognize it ————————–—Corpus Hermeticum ——————–Memory is a kind of accomplishment ————————William Carlos Williams I Birdsong on the book page, birdsong on the brown rug; fanfare of birdsong above the radio orchestra; birdsong in shafted light of the wooden blinds. In one moment I heard them—by which I mean they’d all…
Read MoreAshes
By Short Story Issue 71
CHARLOTTE HAD NO NOTION of blasting the top off Major Tidwell’s tall and elaborate Woodmen of the World monument. It was shaped like a tree with its limbs sawn off and, as anyone could see, it was an easy mark. Under normal circumstances, she would never have dreamed of it. The only reason she did…
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