Articles

Doesn’t a fire, good and hot, burn back into a wound until there’s nothing left for it to do but heal?

Our solitude turns out to be crowded. The writer’s tiny hut is filled with ghosts; the painter’s chilly studio is populated by unseen rivals; in the poet’s hard-won hideaway, invisible influences lurk. Others are always already there. So much for the romantic myth.

Issue 99 includes short stories about people who have emerged from religious subcultures—Andrew Graff’s story about a woman who was raised fundamentalist Christian and Miriam Cohen’s about a woman who was raised Orthodox Jewish. We asked Graff and Cohen to interview each other. Graff: So many of your lines demonstrate an extraordinary ability to observe…

Night at the Fiestas: Stories Kirstin Valdez Quade W.W. Norton & Company, 2015 The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead: Stories Chanelle Benz Ecco: HarperCollins, 2017 The Whole Beautiful World: Stories Melissa Kuipers Brindle & Glass, 2017 HOW DO YOU IMAGINE GOD? I ask my students, and they say, as a father, a…

WINSTON-SALEM NORTH CAROLINA, 1972. My mother has left me at the edge of the property my father’s mother shares with kin whose exact relations I’ve never sorted out. My father, in mustache and bellbottoms, is walking the path between my grandmother’s trailer and the house of a woman I call my aunt. He crouches and…

THERE IS A PLACE that does not exist yet. It may be black, or a color we cannot imagine, or no color at all. It goes on forever in every direction. In the center (can there be a center?) is a golden egg, gilded and burning. The egg is wrapped in nothingness like a royal…

POSSIBLY THE EARLIEST visual representation of Jesus of Nazareth is a crude drawing scratched on the wall of a Roman house, dubbed by scholars the “Alexamenos graffito.” It shows a man in profile gesturing toward a donkey-headed figure on a cross. Beneath it, the anonymous artist has written, “Alexamenos worships his god.” Around 200 AD…

JONATHAN ANDERSON THINKS ABOUT his paintings in construction terms: to him, they are buildings. They regularly depict architectural structures—façades, doorways, hallways, stairways, chapels, homes, and so on—structures in which people live, move, and interact. But his paintings are not only images of built structures; they also are themselves built structures, material constructions that create space…

Linford Detweiler is one half of the band Over the Rhine, which he formed with Karin Bergquist. Since 1989, Over the Rhine (named for a working-class German immigrant neighborhood in Cincinnati) has released over a dozen albums, including Good Dog Bad Dog, Ohio, Drunkard’s Prayer, The Trumpet Child, The Long Surrender, and Meet Me at…

You must not say I saw the sunrise. In bed past the time of the rippling light, lying in piles of sheets, dreaming what was dearest, the charm of a word waking me with a grid that’s never as occupied as worry and hours. What if undone my mind is resting the burdens of need?…