Dear Good Letters community, You know, sometimes you just have to phone it in. I’m sitting here on a hot sunny day in Jackson, Mississippi on vacation at my brother’s, and am just about to visit my hometown of Yazoo City for the first time in three years. I anticipate that there will be a…

Yesterday morning I woke up laughing, thinking of a phrase my mother used to use but which I hadn’t heard in years, “Big Baptists.” “He was a big Baptist,” she’d say, commenting on something she’d read in the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, or even in The Baptist Record, the in-state newspaper of the Mississippi Baptist Convention,…

The biggest snowstorm in fourteen years was bearing down on the East Coast, and I was scared that I was pregnant again. Thursday at my part-time job, I’d fielded the e-mailed news bulletins that had called for some two feet of snow falling by the next afternoon, and asked my boss if I could take…

Lent is upon us. If you want to make an Orthodox Christian commit the sin of pride (and thus, in theory at least, to have to go to Confession), then mention how hard it is to remember your decision to “give up” chocolate, or to complain about having to eat fish on Fridays during Lent.…

Lent is upon us. If you want to make an Orthodox Christian commit the sin of pride (and thus, in theory at least, to have to go to Confession), then mention how hard it is to remember your decision to “give up” chocolate, or to complain about having to eat fish on Fridays during Lent.…

There’s one thing these days that it seems you can get everyone to agree on, whatever their political or cultural stripe: They all hate Washington, DC. One of my brothers is a stockbroker and a free-market conservative; the other is a reliably Democratic art director (who has donated to the local ACLU auction), and yet…

There’s a reason I’m not a journalist: It is quite possible that I have the worst “news judgment” ever. More than once, during those periods that I’ve actually done a few essays or reviews for news organizations, an editor has gently had to explain to me that you can’t really write about something once its…

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” is more or less what I told my husband when he proposed creating me an account on Facebook. If you have even less experience than I with the now ubiquitous “social networking utility,” Facebook is a website where you can add brief diary entries, family and party pictures to…

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…

When I was an eighth grader at a private academy in Mississippi (established 1969) and in the process of applying to a worldly, very progressive boarding school up North, I wrote my application essay on “the positive benefits of watching television for children.” As best as I can remember, my argument centered on television’s capacity…