Paul Kingsnorth, an essayist and novelist who lives on a small homestead in Northern Ireland, joined me in a conversation yesterday about the need for silence and truth telling in the stories humans construct. We contine our exchange today. Ragan Sutterfield for Image: In the face of the environmental crisis, which you described yesterday as spiritual,…

In twenty years (maybe fewer?) will people still be reading what we’ve come to call the “literary” novel? Considering how fast technology is changing the imaginative landscape, is it really preposterous to say that the serious novel as we know it will have receded into a connoisseur culture, an affectation indulged in by a respectable…

I’ve clearly missed some important cultural boat, for people love so many things that I just simply don’t get. Beer, Star Wars, zombies, body piercings. While my friends devote themselves to these phenomena with cultish fervor, I look on with confusion, if not a little disgust. But the item that used to top my list? (Allow…

On a November evening last year, I walked to my rosemaling class and sat around a table of women. We represented a wide range of ages and backgrounds, but we were all raised with rosemaling—breadboards and spoons and carved horses and Välkommen plaques all made of basswood. We were all trying to invoke the people…

The picture you see to the left is of a bookshelf in a local Starbucks. This is no regular Starbucks, but the fancy kind you find in big cities, where they have long bars at which people can sit upon artisan-crafted stools and have artisan-made coffee served to them in pottery out of Bunsen and…

Five hundred years from now our present political confusions, conflicts, and outrages will become the stuff of high melodrama. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would look back on this period of American history as entertainment, but they’re bound to, I expect. Not Singin’ in the Rain entertainment, but certainly something like Wall Street or…

A political season is upon us. I’m guessing that whatever your party affiliation or philosophical persuasion, right about now you are frustrated and anxious about the political process. Yes, democracy is messy, but the amount of anger, fear-mongering, and divisiveness out there is leading many to cynicism and despair. Millions of votes have been cast,…

Detroit is the only major city in America, people will tell you (even if you haven’t asked), where you drive south to get to Canada. The southerly orientation of our otherwise-northern neighbor is due to an odd strip of Canada that squeezes in between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. That strip extends all the way…

I couldn’t record it in my Flava journal app because the transformation happened slowly, like any great change of being. The epiphany, if that’s what it was, only marked my awareness of what had been accomplished through the myriad invisible operations of life. There is mystery yet. I remember one day at church, a friend…

This one’s for Carin Ruff, and by way of answering my niece Kate’s question. A little more than twenty years ago, I spent a summer traveling around India under the auspices of the Fulbright-Hays program, a summer fellowship grant program for teachers. Over the course of about six weeks, we traveled to some twelve cities,…