The Myth of Independent Film
By Essay Issue 66
IT STARTED with a phone call. “Sweet D, I’m coming to California. I want to interview you for my new book.” Nobody ever called me “Sweet” except my Davidson College roommate, John Marks. Evidently he was on the prowl, in search of his next story. I was intrigued. “Why me?” I asked him. “Because you…
Read MoreWine for Those Who Faint
By Essay Issue 68
I DECIDED that if I was going to read the Hebrew Bible, I was going to read the whole thing. Every word of it. No skipping over or skimming the genealogies, the instructions for building the temple, or the details of animal sacrifice. I bopped through the intricate plots of Genesis and Exodus, my rule…
Read MoreConversion
By Essay Issue 68
MY FIRST CONVERSION took place when I was five years old on a heaven-reaching swing in my cousin’s back yard. It was a bright summer day and we had just returned from vacation Bible school at the Baptist church. Red cherry Kool-Aid stained our lips. Kristy was giving me an underdog—and I was swinging high enough…
Read MoreDisciple’s Song
By Poetry Issue 68
Carpenter means Jesus—his hands to splinters, a bench to sand and rub smooth corners from the tree’s needle skin to build a boat. I want to follow Christ, but where? To a threshold—a place to marry, a pulpit where the preacher sweats, a precipice, the last land seen as others wave, that boat sails out,…
Read MoreRitual
By Essay Issue 72
I’M DOING A CLEANSE,” Odin says. “Me and Mara. Just broth all day.” We’re standing at the corner of Grant and Polk by city hall in San Francisco, waiting for our ride to the Headlands where we will meet DT and do the vernal equinox ritual—“I know of a sacred tree,” he’d said, “at Rodeo…
Read MoreMiddles
By Essay Issue 72
The following passages are excerpted from Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, a “non-memoir” by Lauren Winner. © 2012 by Lauren Winner. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Middles might be said to be under-theorized. There is an abundance of work on opening and closure, but very little discussion of…what…
Read MoreWhen I Meet You
By Poetry Issue 74
the forest will have broken open its green gates to allow me in and I’ll walk through the undergrowth as easily as if there had been a path there though there is nothing but bramble, briar, the scratching blackberry canes how long, I wonder, have you been waiting? I will not know you are there…
Read MoreGlosa
By Poetry Issue 74
On lines from “In Memory of the Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca” by Thomas Merton Where the white bridge rears up its stamping arches Proud as a colt across the clatter of the shallow river, The sharp guitars Have never forgotten your name. I stood up to my knees in the April river and the…
Read MoreTransit Alexander: A Round
By Essay Issue 78
The following is a chapter in Richard Rodriguez’s new memoir, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, forthcoming this October from Viking. GOD formed you of dust from the soil. I was a sort of an afterthought. A wishbone. He blew into our nostrils the breath of life and there we were. You were his Darling Boy…
Read MoreYa-Quddus
By Poetry Issue 79
Ya-Quddus One of the ninety-nine names of God Yours is the name of God that comes most easily to me— God holy, pure, perfect as geometry, that which is set apart. God to whom I pray, though I deserve no favors. And would you, Ya-Quddus, whom I simply call God, Lord, bargain with my heart…
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