Ed Falco has been writing poetry, fiction, and plays for 30 years, but his story “Millat’s Orchids” in Image 102 is his first publication in Image. He took time out of his vacation on the East Coast to talk with Good Letters contributor Brad Fruhauff about his evolution as a person and as an author,…

In Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 debut novel Wise Blood, an itinerant World War II veteran named Hazel Motes is determined to live a life without belief. He’s a preacher, but he preaches the “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.”  Yet, for all Motes’s renouncing, Christ remains. He “moves from tree to tree in the back of…

Melissa Kuiper’s short story collection, The Whole Beautiful World, was published in 2017 with Brindle & Glass and reviewed in Image 99 by Samuel Martin. Melissa’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Puritan, Ryga, Joyland, The Rusty Toque and Qwerty. She has an MA in Creative Writing from University of Toronto. In addition to…

The Alexamenos Graffito In “Christ the Chimera: The Riddle of the Monster Jesus” (Image 99), art historian Katie Kresser traces the tradition of the monstrous in Christian iconography to AD 200 and the Alexamenos Graffito, which depicts Jesus as a donkey-headed figure on a cross.The Jesus of art history has been associated with the god…

Samuel Martin’s powerful review-essay in the current issue of Image (#99), “Piercing the Fog of God,” pulls me into areas of my Christian faith where I’d rather not go. Drawing on the short stories in three debut collections by contemporary writers, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Chanelle Benz, and Melissa Kuipers, Martin explores what Christian sacrifice, damnation,…

The stories in Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection, What We Do With the Wreckage, are about what happens when life doesn’t look like it was supposed to, when all we’ve been working toward suddenly seems meaningless or broken. And yet they aren’t nihilistic. Lunstrum lets the personal disasters linger in the background while her characters…

Ross told the kids to stare at the splotchy red and blue picture and wait. A dozen elementary-school students tried to sit still long enough to just look. The image could have been a representation of Claude Monet’s last sight of his breakfast nook. Color without definition, intensity without concreteness, depth without distance. For some…

I am. This is not pure conceit. My tea (Irish Breakfast, decaf, as it’s nearly 9 p.m.) is still warm, thankfully—I’d left it in the kitchen to steep, knowing full well I’d forget it once I checked my phone, remember it once I’d scrolled through apps long enough to be disgusted with myself, and wonder…

This post originally appeared at Good Letters on June 1, 2012. One of the toughest and most important jobs I have as an English professor at a small, women’s liberal arts college, is teaching students to write well. I would love to hold forth on Flannery O’Connor—my lifelong literary crush—but getting students to care about…