I arrived at the advanced screening for Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence, in the worst possible frame of mind. For one thing, I was running late after seeing to some errands. Also, I was starving. My only option for getting some food in time was a fancy burger joint near the entrance to the multiplex.…

I am reading a biography of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged in 1945 for his role in the plot to kill Hitler. Suddenly the door opens and my two-year-old grandson, Alex, bounces in. Seeing the book, he attempts to climb into my lap so I can read to him as well. I put…

Continued from yesterday. The following editorial statement from issue 86 of Image is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 8, 2015. Denise Levertov’s poems nearly always contain vivid reminders of the oral nature of poetry, of poetry as speech addressed…

The following editorial statement from issue 86 of Image is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 8, 2015.   “The great poet does not completely fill out the space of his theme with his words. He leaves a space clear,…

Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her? —Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” Last Wednesday, my grandmother, my father’s mother, died. She had been fighting lung cancer…

“I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness / Keep all our bad ideas / Keep all our hope / It’s here in the smallest bones / the feet and the inner ear / It’s such an enormous thing to walk and to listen” —The Weakerthans, “My Favourite Chords” I need to be…

In A Book of Silence, writer Sara Maitland begins her journey into the different kinds of silence by following the example of the desert fathers and the anchorites—she leased a remote cottage on the isle of Skye, she traveled to the Sinai desert to sit in solitude for days (and a few nights), she forced…