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 MoreA Conversation with Jeanne Murray Walker
By Interview Issue 68
Jeanne Murray Walker is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently A Deed to the Light (University of Illinois Press) and New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Image, and Best American Poetry. She is also an accomplished playwright, whose scripts have been performed in theaters…
Read MoreReligious but Not Spiritual
By Essay Issue 68
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…
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 MoreA Conversation with Gina Ochsner
By Interview Issue 72
Gina Ochsner is the author of the short story collections The Necessary Grace to Fall (Georgia) and People I Wanted to Be (Mariner), as well as a novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Portobello/Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt). Her awards include the Flannery O’Connor Award, Oregon Book Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and fellowships from the National…
Read MoreGlorybound
By Short Story Issue 72
The following excerpts are from the novel Glorybound, forthcoming from WordFarm Press in 2012. Aimee THE LEMLEY SISTERS had decided they would drive to the prison on the first Monday in August, but on that morning, Aimee woke with bad pain. It was still dark, not yet five. She peeled off her blanket and…
Read MoreA Bookwright’s Tale
By Essay Issue 71
MY BROTHER SAID that I was a lazy dreamer when I was a kid. In a letter he wrote to me shortly before he died he said that all I did was sit around drawing pictures and reading books while he cut the grass, cleaned out the gutters, and painted the trim on the house. Well,…
Read MoreA Spade is Not a Spade: The Art of Fabian Debora and the Mystery of Los Angeles
By Essay Issue 71
THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…
Read More