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 In the days when I was an unpublished aspirant—before I learned that becoming a better writer was far more important than nailing the perfect query letter—I heard from the experts that you should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…

If I speak in HTML, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of social networking, master Facebook’s privacy settings, and accept 5,000 friend requests, but have not love, I am nothing.                                                         —1 Corinthians 13:1 (paraphrase) In the prologue of David Fincher’s film…

In hindsight, Shooting Star might have been a more fitting title for the fall schedule’s breakout network drama, given the advance blaze of glory with which Lone Star appeared on FOX, only to promptly disappear after two episodes due to dismal ratings. Originally titled Midland for the small Texas town in which it was partially…

Two weeks ago I put on the moss agate ring my great-grandmother won selling magazines in the red dirt of her Oklahoma girlhood. I still wear a wedding band and it keeps the moss agate’s roomy rose-gold band from slipping off my finger. But the wedding band can’t keep the moss agate steady and the…