More on: community

1. AUNT MORAVIA SAID that she had swallowed a glass piano. She was my father’s aunt, a stitch of an old woman. She’d come to live with us when I was seven and my brother Robbie fifteen. Mother had been bedfast for a month before the birth of my sister. In the meantime Aunt Moravia saw to…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014.   IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez (Viking, 2013) White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s, 2013) Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, 2013) THE DUSK OF A SUMMER EVENING in London’s Hyde Park, years ago. Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, is misidentified by a woman he’s passing on the street. She smiles. “Arabie?” The author…

I chanted Lord’s river during Matins. The psalmist had written Lord’s forever. My mistake, of course, but I like my version better. Christ’s body of skinny, flowing, noisy water reminds me of the creek behind our house in Virginia. I felt him, playing as a boy in the woods. My brothers and I built forts, caught crawdads under…

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I had two dreams. One of those dreams was to be a preacher. I wanted to preach because I loved public speaking, and because I loved memorization, and also because I grew up in the Church of Christ, which taught that baptism was the only way to get into heaven, but…

The following is excerpted from Lauren Winner’s new book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, published this spring by HarperOne. Each chapter explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay.   IT WOULD NOT BE a gross exaggeration to say…

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?         by Dave Eggers (Knopf, 2014) High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire (Henry Holt and Co, 2014)   THE WORLD HAS TURNED SMALL in our hands.…

In Pierre Bonnard’s The Open Window the artist looks outward from his modest living room. It is summer, the heat baking the orange on the grill-like wall. To the right, a woman is resting in a chair, escaping as she can the sizzling midday air in which even her quizzical black cat blurs in the…

Do you want to go back inside? the neighbor asks his small dun dog. Beauty, do you want to go inside? A long look at the tiny fluff, as if speech is imminent. As if anything is imminent. What would help you unpack the boxes? my therapist asks. Love. And I want an authentic relationship…