The parish party was a bust. As a member of the Parish Council, I had promised—yet not followed through—on calling the database of lapsed Catholics the Council had acquired by asking parishioners to fill out notecards during Sunday Mass, listing friends and family members who had fallen away. Of the targeted invitees, the lapsed…

Jessica Goudeau’s translations of the work of Adélia Prado, Brazil’s foremost living poet, appear in issue 91.  The night I met Dona Adélia, she told me my husband was the perfect man. She came to the University of Texas for a poetry reading with her longtime translator and editor, Ellen Doré Watson. At almost eighty,…

Have you ever felt that your own existence is being called into question? That you might be real but in the next moment disappear? Robert Cording explores this feeling in his poem “Erasure.” At first the poem’s speaker decides that his life is “too neatly drawn” and needs some erasure, some subtleness. So he goes…

Tension Isn’t Usually Pretty A Facebook video shows a deputy sheriff getting in the face of a young black protester attempting to access the courthouse lawn in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. The young man keeps his cool, insisting their intentions are merely to pray peacefully, but the deputy isn’t interested. He just wants them to…

The drummer in the rock band at my church bangs on his drum, living for the solo at the recessional where a small handful of fellow children of the sixties clap their hands and shake their hips in a way that seems, I don’t know, like everyone would rather be at the Whitesnake concert, but…

The other night, I got home from my writers’ group feeling jazzed. After struggling with a story revision, I’d decided to show them something different, twenty-five pages of new nonfiction. “I loved it,” they said, and “This is what you should be writing.” Comments and questions, too, but in general a big thumbs-up. I dropped…

The French filmmaker Claude Berri made some remarkable films during his long career. He directed two of my favorites—Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, which starred the young Emmanuelle Béart, Daniel Auteuil, and Gerard Depardieu. But he was more than just a director. He was an actor, and he served as producer on…

Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…