The Day of Big Trouble
By Fiction Visual Art Issue 110
How a thing looked was important. Not just Is it useful, but Is it nice to look at. Trees made fruit, and fruit is useful, he’d said to Zeke. But before fruit comes flowers, and there’s not a thing to be done with them but look.
Read MoreA Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
By Interview Issue 65
Born in Nigeria in 1977, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in the university town of Nsukka, living for a time in a house once occupied by Chinua Achebe. After briefly studying medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, Adichie moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut…
Read MoreWriting with So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
By Essay Issue 69
LAST MONTH MY BEST FRIEND, Jeff Deal, and I made a road trip from Charleston, South Carolina, to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to visit my older son Zebulun, a cavalry scout with the 101st Airborne. Jeff’s son Russell is in the army as well, our two boys having made a pact while they were undergrads…
Read MoreOf Mind and Matter
By Essay Issue 75
Of Mind and Matter The Art of Terry Maker GALLERY-GOERS who stumbled unaware into Reckoning, a 2012 exhibition at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, could be forgiven for assuming that they were viewing a group show, not a retrospective of the work of Terry Maker. Nearly ten thousand feet of gallery space overflowed…
Read MoreMirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process
By Essay Issue 80
Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated…. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. —Mark Rothko, 1947 OUR ENCOUNTER with reality is endlessly generative. Both Subject and Object, the contemplative and the contemplated, are replete with a beautiful, orderly complexity. The authentic artwork—glittering, effulgent with metaphysical…
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