Issue 77

An Interview with Fred Bahnson Image: Soil and Sacrament took you around the country exploring the spiritual practice of agriculture, so to speak. What made you want to write the book? How did it take its shape? Fred Bahnson: The travel story I’ll describe shortly, but first I’ll say that the impetus to write the book came…

Visioning the Invisible Recent Artists’ Biographies Cézanne: A Life by Alex Danchev (Pantheon, 2012) Caspar David Friedrich by Johannes Grave (Prestel, 2012) Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King (Walker & Company, 2012) T HE BIOGRAPHY is, in many ways, the most conservative of popular literary forms. It is philosophically retrograde. It presumes many…

I WANTED TO LIGHT her a candle at the holy sanctuary at Chimayo. I chose a Saint Christopher candle: she had just died. Melinda may have died at forty-nine of a heart attack, though there was nothing wrong with her heart. Or she might have died by choking, following a week of seizures. Or it…

The following is excerpted from Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith by Fred Bahnson, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, Inc. The book tells the story of the author’s series of pilgrimages to communities that integrate religious practice, love for place, and the production of food, including Pentecostal coffee roasters in Washington…

An Apprenticeship in Affliction: Waiting with Simone Weil   I DOUBT there is a twentieth-century figure who has inspired more poetry than the French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil. Though her writings were few and fragmentary, their utterly unconventional, severely brilliant insights and her absolute fidelity in living out her own precepts have moved poets to produce…

IT SEEMS TO ME, who have never held a brush in my life except to dip it in a bucket of house paint, that a good reason to become a painter, aside from the enduring mystery of beauty, is to learn how to see. And painters do indeed spend an inordinate amount of time in…

I think it is beautiful to be justified (historically). ———Anselm Kiefer Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history. ———Hannah Arendt   ANSELM KIEFER is one of the few artists working today who have transcended the vicissitudes and fashions of the contemporary art world. His stature among artists working after World…

Dennis Covington is the author of five books, including the novel Lizard (Laurel Leaf) and the memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain (Perseus), a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award in nonfiction. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, Georgia Review, Oxford American, and many other…

“There’s been a bloody murder out there.” J. points to the flung ring of feathers in the snow between houses, a bluish semitransparent sunkenness in the middle, a surprisingly beautiful swimming-pool color. I think swimming pool because at my age, I’ve learned to swim a decent crawl (I watched five YouTube videos for technique, how…

You can’t get away from pain, or your sister in pain, or the terrible wide doors of the handicap room. It will break your heart, the way she walks in the easy hotel pool, and then takes up her cane, to shuffle from chair to bed. We’ve picked two days halfway between our towns, to…