Web Exclusive: A Love Supreme: The Surprising Art of Sedrick Huckaby
By Essay Issue 90
Homely, decorative, domestic—that’s how most of us think of quilting: something a sweet grandmother does while humming an old tune and waiting for a pie to cool on the rack. It’s a comfy-seeming practice we associate with homemaking and mothering—vocations mostly overlooked and never accorded the worldly esteem we give to the artist, composer, intellectual,…
Read MoreAtheist Bodies
By Book Review Issue 90
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf Press, 2015) A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain by Christina Crosby (New York University Press, 2016) SON,” HE BEGINS. “LAST SUNDAY the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to…
Read MoreRoman Charity
By Essay Issue 90
THE LAST TIME YOU SAW your mother alive, she helped you heal from your C-section. It wasn’t what you planned, with your careful study of the benefits of natural childbirth, your doula, your pelvic carriage the midwife called beautiful. Your own mother’s births had been natural, her milk abundant. She always said that being a mother…
Read MoreThe Charged World
By Essay Issue 90
WHEN MY FATHER finished seminary at Vanderbilt, he served his first small church in Beech Bluff, Tennessee. He was single and drove a little moped. He took disco dancing lessons to stave off loneliness and survived on church ladies’ casseroles. That summer he was working as a counselor at a church summer camp when he…
Read MoreThe Thorn and the Heart: Anxiety, Irony, and Faith
By Essay Issue 90
Ø IT WAS ONE OF THOSE OVERCAST October mornings in College Station that look like they ought to be much colder than they are. I walked back to my south-side dorm from the Zachry Center in shirtsleeves, sweating, a zippy mock-turtleneck sweater over my arm. Zachry was an engineering building at the far northeast corner…
Read MoreA Conversation with Rudy Wiebe
By Interview Issue 90
Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 in Speedwell, a small Mennonite community in northern Saskatchewan. His parents had fled Russia in 1930 and became part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian West. In 1947 Wiebe’s family moved to southern Alberta. Wiebe studied literature at the University of Alberta and the University…
Read MoreThe Empty Bed: Tracey Emin and the Persistent Self
By Essay Issue 90
THIS ALL HAPPENED IN 1998. A youngish woman, an artist, was at home in her council flat in the Waterloo neighborhood of central London. Council flats, you should know, are basically a British version of public housing. The woman’s name was Tracey Emin. She was having a lousy week. A relationship had gone sour. More…
Read MoreEcstatic Dislocation: The Art of Sedrick Huckaby
By Essay Issue 90
IN 2016, SAINT PATRICK’S DAY falls on a Thursday, bringing with it an early weekend. In the aftermath of apocalyptic north-central Texas thunderstorms, a sultry heat settles on the quiet residential street in Fort Worth where artist Sedrick Huckaby is hard at work preparing for his next exhibition. Huckaby is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker…
Read MoreManual for the Would-Be Saint
By Poetry Issue 90
The first principle: Do no harm. The second: The air calls us home. Third, we must fill the bowls of others before we drain our own wells dry. The fourth is the dark night; the fifth a subtle scent of smoke and pine. The sixth is awareness of our duties, the burnt offering of our…
Read MoreThe Wolf of Gubbio
By Poetry Issue 90
Imagine yourself an old wolf: lean and ragged, belly shrunken beneath a ribcage as bowed as a galleon’s undercarriage, shoulders broader than your painful hips, and paws the size of a lion’s. You terrify each living thing you encounter, voles and rats ducking into holes, rabbits humping their soft backs, propelled under bushes by back…
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