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…

My second favorite movie (my first is Gone with the Wind, which is embarrassing, but my tastes run to the lowbrow/popular) is The Third Miracle, a 1999 film starring Ed Harris. Its opening scene occurs during World War II, in an Eastern European country whose geography has been drawn and redrawn by the “will of…

I’m planning a party for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15. I always wanted my home to revolve around the liturgical year, if for no better or holier reason than to enchant my children and give life a rhythm that’s more inspiring than the endless tick of deadlines and doctor appointments. But it…

As a child, I made a child’s sense of the Trinity: God was an old man with a long white beard who controlled and saw everything (ick!); Jesus a confusing blend of baby, carpenter, and robed king on a cross; and the Holy Ghost a deeper-voiced, more powerful version of Casper. Some forty years later,…

Note: The following is the text of the commencement address given for the graduates of the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing program, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 1, 2009. On behalf of the staff and faculty of the SPU MFA program, I’d like to offer a warm welcome to all the friends…