Augustine’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers
By Essay Issue 82
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…
Read MoreHomage to a Philosopher of History as a Small Child
By Poetry Issue 81
When he was only four, his mother spoke to him in Latin and a sacrament of Greek, the music of the dead tongues raised up to speak for the root of all. How proud they were, mother and son, bound by rule and the game it made, the bread they broke, word by word, on…
Read MorePrayer
By Poetry Issue 81
Bathrooms are the best locale. All that waste and water and getting clean. Or trains. The nearly equal passengers. A phone rings in the kitchen but no one picks it up. Milk goes bad at room temp. You don’t check your email anymore. Could only scrawl a message: “I____you with all my harm.” Each day…
Read MoreBetween Prayer
By Poetry Issue 84
Do not make me one of the trees bowing in soft wind, not the heavy branches at sway or the murmuring leaves. But let me be a molecule of water flowing in the veins, the inner blood pressured through the rings. Nothing so grand as ocean waves crumbling on a beach, or the river running…
Read MoreVerbum: A Rhapsody
By Poetry Issue 84
Word lived in solitude. Walked the dog before dawn. Coffee on the patio. The air was thin. There were no stars. Silence drifted from the river with the mist. Word wandered through the house, looked out the window. Could the darkness speak, what would it say? What would Word answer? Word took a deep breath,…
Read MoreBread
By Essay Issue 84
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…
Read MoreA Conversation with Bruce Cockburn
By Interview Issue 84
Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…
Read MoreTiny Fish
By Poetry Issue 84
The children fish off the dock where the minnow-sized ones hover oblivious to the hook jutting from the badly threaded worm. The water’s clear enough to watch victims gather at the bait. One after the other, hauled in, tallied up, tossed back. When the hook goes deep into the throat, they give the tiny fish…
Read MoreThe Spif
By Short Story Issue 84
SINCE ACCIDENTALLY BEING LOCKED inside Carmody’s Used Books, I’ve slept badly. In the mornings I manage a bright if groggy farewell as my husband gives his suit pockets a preflight pat and the kids shrug into school backpacks. Alone, I pour myself more coffee and read—the newspaper, catalogues, reviews in the alternative weekly, passages of…
Read MoreThe Avant-Garde and Sacred Discontent: Contemporary Performance Artists Meet Ancient Jewish Prophets
By Essay Issue 83
I RECALL A SUNDAY MORNING when the church lectionary readings included a passage from the prophet Isaiah. The lay reader that morning was a thoughtful, older man dressed in a tasteful gray suit. Standing at the lectern, he opened the Bible and read: At that time Yahweh had spoken through Isaiah son of Amoz. He…
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