Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…

If you’re like me, you like listening to music all the time. And if you’re like me, you are also now in a graduate program in language and literacy education, which means you do not have time to do anything except read incomprehensible books about sociocultural theories of language. Perhaps you are not exactly like…

Philosophers don’t usually make good rock ’n rollers. Philosophers write dense, convoluted, esoteric arguments about highly theoretical concepts; a prospect that typically doesn’t elicit much wild abandon out on the dance floor. So you have to tip your scholar’s cap to Tonio K. The 70s rocker was as deeply indebted to twentieth-century existentialist art and…

Back from an unannounced (and unforeseen) hiatus in blogging, I have so many ideas accumulated that I don’t know which to focus on. So here are brief mentions of various articles that have piled up over the last few weeks, all of which deal with artists who have worked within the “pile up” as Annie…

As I write this, my father is busy with lumber, saws, and measuring tape. He’s making alterations to three dusty panels out of a backyard storage shed—pieces my grandfather once cut, painted, and linked together with hinges and pins. Dad’s doing this because I recently watched director Katsuhito Ishii’s 2004 film The Taste of Tea.…

It began during one of those amazingly passionate times in my life when the past and the present collide like great movements of water, merging, sweeping me off. —Joe Enzweiler, on the origins of his poem cycle, A Curb in Eden It’s a writer’s grace or good fortune to find a community of supportive fellow…

For seven months, I passed through a season of voices, visitations, strange votes from a memory that would have me believe this friend had touched my hand, that one had risen from the dead. I woke most mornings parched and oddly drunk on whatever I had dreamed, my body full of pain. I finally went…

Since birth, the rhythm of my week has been set by church. Both my parents have held leadership positions in the varied churches we have attended over the years. In one of the many commonplaces of the evangelical testimony, I could easily say that I was indeed trained to be in church “every time the…

Since birth, the rhythm of my week has been set by church. Both my parents have held leadership positions in the varied churches we have attended over the years. In one of the many commonplaces of the evangelical testimony, I could easily say that I was indeed trained to be in church “every time the…

Note: After four and a half years working as Image’s Program Director (and, prior to that, a year as a student intern), Julie Mullins is heading off to grad school. She wrote today’s post as something of a farewell note. We’re pleased to be able to share it with you. It’s just the sort of…