The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities. —D.J. Waldie, Holy Land During the time I spent completing my MFA, I worked for months on a single essay about the south suburbs of Chicago, where I spent my youth and young adulthood. I had just moved to Michigan, and…

A lighthouse. Numerous out-stretched hands. A kite soaring above a beach. Many prodigal embraces. Cages. Crabs. Serpents. Masks. Faithful reproductions of The Last Supper. And, of course, numerous depictions of Jesus trudging toward Golgotha, and the iconic end result, bloody crucifixions. This is a rough inventory of the prison art exhibit “Art From the Inside”…

“Since dullness is the chief enemy of art,” wrote John Gardner in On Moral Fiction, “each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.” I love how Gardner did that. He could have said it more simply. “Each generation of artists must be more creative than the last,” is how…

I once saw a man genuflect in front of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. He looked skyward, crossed himself, then picked up a half-smoked cigarette—still glowing—from the asphalt and put the butt in his mouth. He was still young, though with a drawn, worn-out look that came from the way he was apparently living.…

Back in June, on the feast of Pentecost, in the chapel at the Bishop’s Ranch, instead of a Psalm, we read a poem called “tongues-talk,” based on Acts 2:1-35. The poem placed recognizable, familiar words placed together in a way that created more of wash of sensation than clear meaning. What to do with a…

Deadlines? Don’t get me started. The past few years, I’ve tested my friends’ patience by complaining about deadlines for essays, novels, interviews, marketing assignments, and film reviews. Sometimes I tell myself that I’d become a decent writer if only I’d break free from deadlines. But the fact is that I designed this cage. And if…

The old red brick convent rises two big ghost-floors above the larger, L-shaped main level. It is not a romantic building in the classic, sprawling sense of what the word “convent” might connote, like the Sisters of St. Joseph’s giant Mt. Saint Mary Convent in Wichita, or the Poor Clares’ walled and flamboyant nineteenth-century complex…

In my Father’s house are many mansions. Also, there’s a pretty neat treehouse out in the yard. I built it myself. I don’t have a lot of DIY skills and it shows. It’s made mostly of pieces I’ve scavenged here and there: driftwood, planks “borrowed” from nearby yards, and, frankly, a few remnants better left…

Oddly or not, it was exactly a year ago (to the day) that I paid tribute to one of my students from that summer’s Screenwriting/Playwriting seminar at the Glen Workshop. As I wrote in that post regarding my class: “All had come ready to put their work on the line. But one came willing to put…

“It was only love we were looking for….” —Patty Griffin Part of my task at Good Letters, for myself, is to work on my first book. With the ways that daily life squashes my writing time, I’m trying to see these posts as ways into my memoir. The book that I’ve wanted to write, and…