The Harboring Silence
By Essay Issue 86
The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 8, 2015. The great poet does not completely fill out the space of his theme with his words. He leaves a space clear, into which another and higher poet can speak.…
Read MoreThe Yoke of Sympathy
By Essay Issue 53
The Yoke of Sympathy: The Fiction Writer and Her Characters Although the general tone of your [story] “Kirilka” is well maintained, it is spoiled by the character of the land captain. Keep away from depicting land captains. Nothing is easier than to describe unsympathetic officialdom, and although there are readers who will lap it…
Read MoreThe Reader’s Prayer
By Poetry Issue 53
The road takes you from there to here. Here is where you are. Time takes you from then to now. Now is what you have. Language takes you from what you have to what you have to say. When we meet, this is your gift. And writing takes you from what you have to say…
Read MoreThe Persistence of Faith
By Essay Issue 55
Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…
Read MoreA Conversation with Ron Hansen
By Interview Issue 57
Ron Hansen’s novels are Desperadoes, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (both from Knopf), Mariette in Ecstasy, Atticus, Hitler’s Niece, and Isn’t It Romantic? (all from HarperCollins). Atticus was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hansen is also the author of the story collection Nebraska…
Read MoreMy Nineveh
By Poetry Issue 57
Reel rolling from the spliced-together lot of my past, this time around: senior year of high school, singsong voiceover of girls bowing to whatever she said, Yes, Sister/ No, Sister as still shots are superimposed on our faces: lone crow on a fencepost, cow silhouetted against late afternoon. Byron, Keats, Shelley—lining up to wander line…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Melissa Pritchard
By Interview Issue 61
The spring issue of Image includes Melissa Pritchard’s story of the peculiar and incendiary real-life historical figure Pelagia Ivanovna Serebrennikova, born in 1807 in Arzamass, Russia, one of the eastern churches’ Holy Fools, figures whose wild behavior embodied Saint Paul’s description of the early Christians: “we are made a spectacle unto the world…. We are…
Read MoreSecond Attempt at Elegy for Anthony Piccione
By Poetry Issue 62
Last night I climbed once more the narrow ladder of my poems. I took my fine pen and turned paper into ash. What were you turned into? What did you become, after? Once you said that to write a poem is to touch the unseen. If I have touched the unseen, it has not been…
Read MoreThoughts from Port Royal, Kentucky
By Short Story Issue 61
1. MY LIFE HAS GOTTEN so unpleasant that I have to write it down. I’ve learned that nothing makes a bit of sense to me unless I write about it, like I’m getting old and can’t remember things or can’t see straight until it’s all spelled out in front of me. But that’s ridiculous; I’m…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with John Terpstra
By Interview Issue 63
John Terpstra has been in church since before he was born. “I have heard everything there is to say about the place, for and against; both its necessity and its redundancy. Have felt it all, in my bones,” he writes. The fall issue of Image includes his essay about church, titled “Skin Boat: Acts of…
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