Part of the delight of preparing my new course on Poetry as a Spiritual Practice for the Glen Online has been returning to some favorite interviews with poets in past issues of Image. I enjoy reading what contemporary poets have to say about their art almost as much as I enjoy reading their poems. I love, for…

My wife and I have seven college degrees between us. We share more layoffs than that. All those degrees, minus the dubious M.B.A. I earned a few years back, are in liberal arts fields. This may also help to explain those layoffs, although I suppose that sheer workplace incompetence can never be ruled out entirely.…

It is darkest night, and it is the last night my four children will ever go to sleep thinking their mother and father will always be married. Tomorrow we tell them it’s not to be that way. My heart quails at the thought of what we have planned, how it would be better to slap…

Please note: This post contains plot spoilers for some of the films discussed.  We go to the movies to get out of here. To go somewhere else. And sometimes, that’s enough. But it’s best when we come back bearing treasure, like Bilbo Baggins returning to Bag End in The Hobbit—wiser for his adventures, richer for…

It was in grad school that I first heard mention of artistic “process.” “What’s your process?” was a favorite question posed by zealous grad students to famous writers paid thousands of dollars to read from their work for forty-five minutes in a musty auditorium. I always rolled my eyes when someone asked these kinds of…

As the latest political scandal broke over the past weeks, the same explanations and reflections were trotted out. “It’s never the indiscretion,” they always say, “it’s the cover-up. If you just come clean, people will forgive you; it’s lying about it that does you in.” I don’t know about that. I recall many a public…

In the fall of 2006, I enrolled in a class I’d thought about taking for years. This class—a four-year program called Education for Ministry, administered by the graduate theology school at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, and held in Episcopal parishes nationwide—demanded three hours of seminar each week during the academic year,…

A recent article (opinion piece, really, though not presented as such) in the Wall Street Journal asked the question, “Is contemporary young adult fiction too dark?” Well, it didn’t so much ask it as answer it. In writer Meghan Cox Gurdon’s opinion: Yes. The essential complaint Gurdon has is with the dark subject matter of…

As my Good Letters colleague Jeffrey Overstreet did recently with his two-part post, “Something that I’m Supposed to Be,” one can adapt a longer talk into a blog post. In Jeffrey’s case, the talk was his plenary one at last year’s Glen Workshop, an occasion just as unforgettable in person as its recent written counterpart…

My father’s had one of those years—the ones people frequently compare metaphorically with the suffering of Job—one series of extraordinary hardships after the other—major career changes, my mother’s devastating illness, a new two-hour-per-day commute, a complete upheaval in all that was settled and familiar, even the recent death of our beloved 16-year old cat—all this…