Reconciliation
By Photo Essay Issue 104
As a queer woman raised Catholic, I have had a complex relationship to the church—making these photographs was part confession, part reconciliation.
Read MoreKinsman-Redeemers
By Essay Issue 100
In the Avett Brothers, we share in life’s ups and downs even without blood kinship, and by offering one another redemption born of the generosity of forgiveness, the gift of collaboration, and the freedom to pursue our ideas, our musical family blossoms with creativity.
Read MoreEcstatic Dislocation: The Art of Sedrick Huckaby
By Essay Issue 90
IN 2016, SAINT PATRICK’S DAY falls on a Thursday, bringing with it an early weekend. In the aftermath of apocalyptic north-central Texas thunderstorms, a sultry heat settles on the quiet residential street in Fort Worth where artist Sedrick Huckaby is hard at work preparing for his next exhibition. Huckaby is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker…
Read MoreCamp Meeting
By Poetry Issue 89
Old Saybrook, Connecticut, April 1827 Wealthy Ann, Ruhama, Othelia, Harriet, Hipsey, and I took the ferry to the big camp meeting in Old Saybrook, where ten famous preachers took turns exhorting us to find Jesus and to serve him by serving each other. The crowd swarmed like ants taking breadcrumbs home. Wealthy Ann said smelling…
Read MoreUncomfortable Things
By Poetry Issue 89
e.g. Abolition, Prudence Crandall, the Amistad, Nat Turner, Indian Removal, Female Complaints: First Congregational Church, Lyme, Connecticut, ca. 1816 Even the pulpit Bible was consumed in the fire that turned the meeting-house to ash. An architect planned the new meeting-house, a steeple equipped with a lightning-rod, a belfry, and a golden weathervane; Ionic columns supporting…
Read MoreMeeting-House Fire
By Poetry Issue 89
_________Lyme, Connecticut, 3 July 1815 Nor’easter and calm shine, high tide and neap, combined lives shuttled between births and deaths, from baptisms to funerals, amen. Mehitabel, Uriah, Moses, John. Robert, Elihu, Azanaha, Love. Wakes, marriages, fallings-out and laughter, arguments, broken hearts, betrayals, guilt: thus time shaped a community of faith. Jerusha, Wealthy, Esther, Hepzibah. Moses,…
Read MoreAuthorized Versions
By Issue 35
AT the height of the recent sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, a writer friend of mine told me that the whole sorry situation had her in a “white rage.” I knew exactly what she meant: like most people who have lived through these interminable revelations, I have found myself speechless with fury against…
Read MoreMixed Company
By Poetry Issue 86
Mark 2 Meaning, not the fey name of a coffee shop cheekily named, but me and the sinners (not “mixed” as in unlike things commingling, but rather the “meh” of our behaviors or consistent confusions, contradictions like breaking news ongoing, over and over with little new to report…) as I was saying, me and sinners…
Read MoreSister Storm
By Poetry Issue 53
Sister storm, hurling your javelins too near our window, don’t you care if in darkness, we splinter like a bright waterfall, if we catch fire from the sparks you send flying from the grindstone of night? You have cracked our sky with lightning; you have made glass pitchers of our bodies and poured our spirits…
Read MoreParsonage with Two Maples
By Poetry Issue 60
I. In unvarnished foreground, a cat offers his paw in a dingy splint to children who bend over it, one in a red, zipped-up jacket so the whole scene is drawn away from the fields, the church where someone’s arranging flowers in deep, dented vases (we can’t see any of this but her parked car,…
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