More on: editorial statement

THE ROYAL SOAP OPERA that is the life and reign of Henry VIII evokes endless fascination both in the realms of scholarship and the popular imagination. Erudite tomes heavy with footnotes, racy novels the size of toaster ovens, and sumptuously staged television miniseries pour forth in a steady stream. And what’s not to like? For…

IN THE FIRST DAYS of May, 1610, the renowned Confucian scholar Li Madou lay dying in his home in Beijing. Hundreds of the leading citizens of the Chinese capital came to pay their respects to the man whose books on ethics, mathematics, friendship, and the mysteries of life and death had been read and circulated…

Already, like a disciplined scholar, I piece fragments together, past conjecture, Establishing true sequences of pain; For so it is proper to find value In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored: The long-lost words of choice and valediction. ————————————-— Geoffrey Hill, “The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz, I” Oxford University has a new Professor…

The following is adapted from the commencement address for the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing delivered on August 7, 2010. THIS PROGRAM IS blessed to have its intensive, ten-day residencies at two of the most beautiful places on the continent: the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and…

FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS I’ve been saving up the fiction of Anthony Trollope as a sort of mid-life treat. At least I hoped it would be a treat. Trollope is the kind of author who is often ridiculed as a literary lightweight: a Victorian lacking the range and energy of Dickens; a drawing-room chronicler…

HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the victors, so the saying goes. It would be pleasant to believe that the history of literature (or the arts in general) might prove an exception to this rule, that artistic merit will always be recognized in its own time, regardless of fashion or ideology. But we know that’s not true.…

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I wanted to be Christopher Hitchens. In a manner of speaking. I didn’t, in fact, learn who he was until I was in my thirties, but I can see in retrospect that Hitchens was the epitome of everything I hoped to be as a writer. My passions were political, philosophical,…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given for the Seattle Pacific University master of fine arts in creative writing on August 6, 2011.   I’D LIKE TO SHARE a few thoughts with you that I hope are appropriate for the occasion, words derived from two texts we’ve studied together, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets…

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. —————————————John 3:8 THE SUMMER OF 1968, though it mourned the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and shuddered at the murder…

IN  1994, THREE SPELUNKERS were looking for undiscovered caves in the Ardèche region of southeastern France. The region is named after the Ardèche River, which has cut through limestone for millennia and created hundreds of caves. On a summer weekend expedition they came across a place in a cliff wall where they sensed a draft…