Full Disclosure:  If I wasn’t a Christian, organization would probably be my religion, and I’d spend the high holy days at the Container Store—honoring (not purchasing) the holy vessels. Nonetheless, when I read Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a little over two years ago, I found that her method went far…

“Tell me of despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” I was in college when I first encountered Mary Oliver. It was in a daily email sent out by one of my philosophy professors. I don’t remember what we had been talking about; maybe we were reading Plato, or Parker Palmer, who said once…

The stories in Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection, What We Do With the Wreckage, are about what happens when life doesn’t look like it was supposed to, when all we’ve been working toward suddenly seems meaningless or broken. And yet they aren’t nihilistic. Lunstrum lets the personal disasters linger in the background while her characters…

Image from the National Archives Without the bodies hanging from the trees, it’s the onlookers that come into focus. A recent exhibit at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, “UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light,” examines the lack and misrepresentation of people of color in American portraiture and historical artwork. But for a portion…

When I was a child, I had a Band-Aid phobia. According to my mom, this fear reached its pinnacle when I stubbornly refused to keep the Band-Aid on that she’d applied to the oozing blisters on my feet, caused by those infernal plastic jelly shoes from the 1980s. She didn’t understand why I would rather…

It’s New Year’s Day. For those of us on the calendar inherited from the Romans, it’s a day that looks both backward and forward with the two faces of Janus. It’s a day loaded with expectation, possibility, and contradiction. For what, after all has changed? As always, we have grown a day older, the sun…

Oftentimes in my teaching of creative writing, I include on the syllabus this passage from the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s book The Life of Poetry:  “Faith is found here, not in a destiny raiding and parceling out knowledge and the earth, but in a people who, person by person, believes itself. Do you accept your own…

This womb of mine will not know the pangs of pregnancy. My skin will not tighten when another body becomes part of my flesh. My inner organs will not shift to make room; my ankles will not swell; my appetite will not increase because my body is making another person. This womb is empty, creased.…

I could see the glowing nativity from my bedroom window, the whole set in molded plastic: Mary, Joseph, three wise men, two sleeping sheep, a donkey with a saddle, Baby Jesus in the manger. My dad arranged them reverently in the front yard and lit them with a long orange extension cord plugged into a…

It’s November, and I am forty-seven, a newly single mother, driving home to North Carolina from a conference in Pittsburgh, where I spoke with other women writers on a panel called “A Wilderness of Her Own.” It’s drizzling in West Virginia, and I’m gazing at the fog and branches around me almost to my peril…