Sassy wasn’t her real name, and she wasn’t “sassy” at all. But as happens with many grandparents, the oldest grandchild names her—and the name sticks. I was that oldest grandchild. Her name was Sarah, which is what I’d hear the grownups call her. But when I tried, at age one-and-a-half or so, to say “Sarah,”…

Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver passed away on Monday, August 6, in Macon, Georgia, at forty-nine. Image was honored to print a number of her poems over the years, and we are all grieving this loss. In the words of her friend, the poet Tania Runyan: Anya didn’t want to be a hero or a fighter.…

The sun rises over the ocean where I live, two miles from the Atlantic. You can watch it set over the bay too if you’re lucky enough, at sundown, to be on the thin barrier island that separates the mainland from the sea. The water here in the mid-Atlantic region isn’t the spectacular aqua, teal,…

The day of Pepper Smith’s funeral, it was a stiff fifteen degrees—ironic weather for a boy from Gulfport, Mississippi. Pepper was my dear old friend for twenty-three years; we had traversed some odd and complicated decades and had ended up living not far from one another in the D.C. area. We talked all the time,…

Last week, one of my favorite authors, William H. Gass, died at ninety-three. He was an elder statesman of postwar American fiction. His novels include the lauded Omensetter’s Luck, The Tunnel, and Middle C, and he also wrote a number of insightful essays on the craft of writing. His prose is difficult, brooding, and deeply…

My priest has died. Or rather, in Eastern Orthodox terminology, he has reposed. He has fallen asleep. It’s funny how this death both echoes, and completes, the death of my biological father forty years ago. Throughout my childhood, for years after my father died, nothing irked me like people’s vague references to somebody “passing away.”…

Richard Wilbur was always a formalist at heart, but one attuned to the rhythms of a living language. Like Frost and Stevens, he insisted on an underlying meter in his verse—most often a loose iambic pentameter line. In Williams’s free verse he often heard an underlying metrical beat which undergirded his poems. He grew up…

For Scott Simon, and for Bill Craven September 11, 2001 has been one of two signal public events of my adulthood. The other was the inauguration day of President Obama. The minutes and hours of each were suffused with a sense of historical moment: on one, I was a thirtyish new bride; on the other, I…

From my office window I can see the pale yellow plantation house, its sharply pitched roof peeking from behind a huge conifer, its two Italianate cupolas, one at either end of the house. Since 1901, Sweet Briar House has been the home of the president of Sweet Briar College, a small women’s college in the…

In September, Lucia Berlin’s posthumous collection of selected short stories A Manual for Cleaning Women hit the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction. Vice called Lucia Berlin “the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of.” Marie Claire predicted that this “highly semiautobiographical collection will catapult [Berlin] into a household name.” And John…