I once saw a girl beaned in the head with a Bible. Her attacker was a well-muscled star of our middle school football team, so his throw was hard, accurate, and had a bit of a spiral. To be fair, the weapon wasn’t a full Bible, neither was it large. Someone in this guy’s group…

If I had a garden to kneel in to call out to God, it would be my mother’s yard. Lined on three sides by pasture, the ground is ribbed with roots from an oak tree that towers by the fence, and is patched with dirt from where the grass never properly went to seed.

I never thought I would be a smoker. When I was young—maybe five or six—I hid in a closet and sobbed after seeing my mom light a cigarette in the kitchen of a friend’s house.

When is the last time you’ve had to say goodbye to someone? I mean really had to say goodbye, the kind of goodbye that means, “I don’t know when we will see each other or talk to each other again on this earth.” Most likely it was when someone you knew was dying. Think about…

My first wedding took place on November 1st, 2003, All Saints’ Day, exactly two years after my fiancé proposed to me in a Waffle House parking lot, before we’d ever even kissed, and I said yes. I was twenty-one, old enough at least to legally have a glass of champagne at the reception. Where I’m from,…

Earlier this month, one of the best shows on television aired its final episode. A few friends and I huddled on a sofa to eat hamburgers and watch the series finale of Friday Night Lights—and I won’t lie, I grabbed a few extra napkins to use as tissue, just in case. Before the episode began…

Reading, as a means of entertainment, is gloriously and tragically solitary. Think about it. Watching a television show or a movie or a ball game is often done with others, preferably with snacks. Maybe your friends meet up each week to cheer their favorite contestant on Top Chef. Or you catch the new Indiana Jones…

“Still waters run, run deep in me.” —Jim White “I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that’s in me should set hell on fire.” —Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor Water: we think of it all the time. This is perhaps especially true of me, born a Baptist, an…

Letter writing, the kind with real ink and paper, has become something of a cultural anachronism, like rotary phones or washboards. Mention that you plan to spend the afternoon writing a letter, and be prepared to meet the same quick-blinking surprised faces you might receive if, pushing back from a restaurant table, you say, “Excuse…

David, my boyfriend, has a master’s degree in philosophy, but the job he held most recently was at Christmas, repackaging Nintendo DS accessories in an unheated warehouse an hour and a half bus ride from home. Before that, he made cold calls for the Muscular Dystrophy Association to local businesses, trying to get their executives…