Early in director John Curran’s film Stone, parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert DeNiro) sits behind his desk and listens to longtime prisoner Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton) plead for parole. The corn-rowed Stone, doing time for a crime that caused his grandparents’ death, dares to tell Jack, “I’m clean as you.” “Maybe, maybe not,” growls…

The recorded version of “Seven Swans” on Sufjan Stevens’ album of the same name always seemed a bit too subdued for the apocalyptic revelation it presents. Stevens opened his recent show at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC (and all the shows on his recent tour) with that song, alone, spotlighted, scraping timidly at…

We’re in the six-month slump. I remember it well from the first baby. The euphoria wanes, the hormones settle, and the delightful newborn grows into an impatient dictator, waking ten times a night to nurse, ready to move and play but unable to do so unassisted, unhappy unless making direct eye contact with another human.…

Every Saturday morning in fall I wake up and feel a tinge of disappointment that I have not woken up in a dorm room in South Bend, Indiana; that my Notre Dame marching band uniform does not hang in the closet at the foot of my bed. I’m disappointed because I’m not eighteen, nineteen, twenty,…

As one of the billions who watched the Chilean miners being brought to the surface from a subterranean tomb, I listened as journalists warned of awful physical and mental breakdowns that could occur at any moment. Horrors were afoot, and teams of specialists were on hand, as they would surely be needed. But one by…

The day before yesterday, my eighteen-month-old daughter grabbed the bent-pull handle of a kids’ plastic wagon more than twice her size, then ran down the sidewalk next to our house, the wagon bumping wildly behind her. It was a perfect breezy, sunny Indian Summer afternoon. I ran along beside her, both to protect her from…

I join Good Letters with excitement, gratitude, and not a little bit of self-doubt. In the days when I was an unpublished aspirant—before I learned that becoming a better writer was far more important than nailing the perfect query letter—I heard from the experts that you should never advertise your lack of qualifications when contacting…

You can call it a miracle or a legend or whatever you want to. I just know that on that day, Brett Favre was larger than life. —Coach Gene Stallings, on the 1990 comeback victory of Southern Mississippi over Alabama America, I have two words to say to you about Mississippi: Brett Favre. Brett Favre,…

I’m sitting at my home-office desk, unable to concentrate because the men painting the outside of my house are scraping the wall exactly two feet from my ears. It isn’t the scraping sounds that distract me, but their conversation, which I can hear every word of through the wall. The older man—I’ll call him Evan—is…

“Still waters run, run deep in me.” —Jim White “I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that’s in me should set hell on fire.” —Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor Water: we think of it all the time. This is perhaps especially true of me, born a Baptist, an…