Skip to content

Log Out

×

When Publishers or the Public Reject You

By Peggy RosenthalNovember 26, 2018

“Van Gogh did not sell a single painting during his lifetime, became increasingly unhinged, and shot himself at the age of thirty-seven.” So writes poet Jeanne Murray Walker in her engaging essay in the current issue of Image (#98), “Sandals on the Ground: My Pilgrimage with the Sonnet.” Walker’s sentence about Van Gogh reminds me…

Read More

Climbers and Conquerors: Reading The Ghosts of K2 and Into Thin Air on Thanksgiving

By Christiana N. PetersonNovember 21, 2018

One night after rifling through my tilting mountain of bedside books and coming up short, I sifted through my husband’s stash. I pilfered The Ghosts of K2, the library book he’d been reading about the first decades of expeditions to climb the second highest mountain in the world. While I attempted K2, my husband moved…

Read More

Which Body?

By Kaya OakesNovember 5, 2018

There are three large cysts growing in my ovaries. The doctor says “oh my,” before asking if I’d like to take a look. I would not like to take a look. This feels like a parody of pregnancy, something my body would not let me do, because errant uterine cells began spreading across my inner…

Read More

Bikram Yoga Kicked My Ass

By Bryan BlissOctober 29, 2018

The first time I walked into a Bikram (hot) yoga studio, I was met by a tough-looking man in his late fifties. He had the air of a mechanic, or perhaps a truck driver—the sort of person who innately knew how to fix things. I wasn’t that far off. Steve had been a police officer…

Read More

200 Posts in a Decade of Blogging: Part 2

By Peggy RosenthalOctober 24, 2018

I was invited to write for the Good Letters blog at its inception over ten years ago because of my long-time interest in writing about the experience of reading poetry: how the poetry I read becomes intertwined with my life, and vice versa. One such post, “This Solitude We Learn to Bear,” that reaches for…

Read More

200 Posts in a Decade of Blogging: Part 1

By Peggy RosenthalOctober 22, 2018

This is my 200th post for Good Letters. There’s something about round-number occasions, isn’t there? They move us to reflection, which is what this anniversary has done for me. I’m recalling how Good Letters got started, and how our blog has developed since then. Late in 2008, several of us who’d been connected with Image…

Read More

Waiting for Nothing to Happen

By Caroline LangstonOctober 17, 2018

When I was in my twenties, toward the end of a not-especially-dissolute but nonetheless untethered youth, there was a period of a few months when I spent a lot of time with a man who had been the big local rock DJ when I was in high school. He had moved into my threadbare downtown…

Read More

Morning in a Forgotten Neighborhood

By Morgan MeisOctober 15, 2018

The other day it was raining. The clouds were impossibly low, skimming the tops of buildings as they scuttled across eastern Michigan on their way to somewhere nice. The rain fell not so much as drops but as a fine, coating mist that moistened rather than drenched. A pack of stray dogs picked their way…

Read More

Why Wouldn’t I Be Fine?

By Lindsey CrittendenOctober 4, 2018

“You OK?” my husband Craig touches my hand, looks at me. We’re in the car, Sunday evening, driving home. Something shifts inside me, like sand. This experience of having him check in with me is new. After almost fifty years of practice, I’m so used to saying fine that I don’t always feel what I’m…

Read More

The Lost Goodbye

By Christiana N. PetersonOctober 3, 2018

You’ve been gone for only hours In a casket made of wood When no one else could save you I thought maybe I still could —“Goodbye” by Sister Sinjin The song catches me off-guard. It is nudged between other songs on an album of ethereal harmonies. Sister Sinjin sounds either like a trio of cloistered…

Read More

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required