The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. —Mark Twain in a letter to George Bainton, 1888 In the 1980s, NPR’s Morning Edition regularly included a short segment, “On Words,” featuring poet and translator, John Ciardi. In his…

“You are the universal fugitive / Escapist as we say.” —From The Masque of Mercy, by Robert Frost Some years ago, I attended a wedding reception at an elegant B&B. We danced to the light of fairy bulbs strung high in the trees. The gentle currents of a lake lapped against the lawn’s long incline.…

Jerusalem, I say quietly. Jerusalem. The alter of evening starting to spread its black cloth In the eastern apse of things The soul that desires to return home Desires its own destruction. We know, which never stopped anyone, The fear of it and the dread of it on every inch of earth, Though light’s still…

Every Thursday afternoon for several months in 1966, my mother dressed me in a white dress with a big bow and puffy short sleeves, a Peter Pan collar and blue smocking, and drove me into the Haight-Ashbury. I wore socks that folded down and black patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother had pulled my hair straight…

I tried to write about Shotgun Stories without mentioning you-know-who. It’s become such a cliché. A talented new artist captures a sense of the sacred and the profane in the American South, and before you can say “Christ-haunted” or “Southern Gothic,” there she is! It’s almost as if the standard-bearer of the genre created the…

Jeremiah Rose. I wish I could give him a pseudonym, but no other name can properly conjure his image: skinny, six feet tall; a thick beard and ponytail, and pale, roving eyes like holes cut in a mask. He wears casteless ripped jeans and T-shirts, but his backpack, with a hardhat clipped and dangling from…

There’s never a good reason to do a bad thing, but it’s possible, and regrettable, to do a good thing for a bad reason. Reading a novel (a good thing) for sociological content, for moral or ethical norms, or even simply for the jokes or titillating parts is a little bit like only eating the…

Last Tuesday night, there was no dinner in the house, but at the bottom of the refrigerator drawer was a bag of middling-sized potatoes that I had bought at the local farmers market, and which, if I waited any longer, would sprout. After considering for a moment, I went to work. I rinsed and scrubbed…

I grew up in a home with a map of Narnia on one living room wall and a map of Middle Earth on the wall facing it. As a child, I knew the difference between a nymph and a satyr, between a centaur and a faun. I knew Gollum and goblins and orcs and Aslan.…

“People who lived on the dark side…thanked God for their dark past, because it had deepened their soul, made a larger place for the love of God with which they were now on fire….” —from Circling My Mother, by Mary Gordon I read Brideshead Revisited for the first time recently and loved it. I also…