What is it about words that so moves those of us who are writers? We take the most common of media—language—and can’t resist caressing it, playing with it, taking it apart and putting it together again in some new shape. Why do I love to write, even need to write? I’ve been pondering this question…

I first encountered C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, then quickly consumed The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Abolition of Man before feeling like we’d hit a good place in our relationship. I tend to be cautious like that with authors. I don’t want to lose the (perhaps childish) affection that first obsessed me.…

For William Carlos Williams I work best alone. In an empty house. When I’m ready to work, I take down the sun-faded poster of the Miro museum from my Barcelona honeymoon twenty-six years ago. I pull the pilled sweaters down from the shelf in the closet—the sweater Nana Sarah knitted for me decades ago, the…

I snuck into a chair while a friend was describing how growing up under a repressive regime infects and perverts children. He wasn’t talking about his own life; he was commenting on the selection for our graphic novel reading group—a program of our wonderful Evanston Public Library. I was late, and I hate showing up…

I am grateful for deadlines, even when I have little time, or only brief windows of it, which I often manage to fill with reading the Internet. I know my cannons will fire, because they must, but lately I’ve experienced a sort of brain-fatigue, or perhaps it’s peace (I don’t really know the difference), that’s…

Yesterday I was running around the park in a T-shirt with a birthday party full of seven-year-olds. Today, I walked downtown through a flurry of hard, tiny pellets of snow that I couldn’t escape from. It was a little like the experience of going to bed a happy, underpaid writer and waking up the next…

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” —William Butler Yeats Reading Yeats’s line, I think vaguely incarnational thoughts: heaven enters earth with Christ’s Incarnation; God dwells within our world, not separated from it; and so on. I believe these statements. Yet these formulations give me nothing to grasp onto, nothing to engage…

The poet James Tate died last year. It happened in July. He was seventy-one years old. This, then, is the first Lent and Easter season we’ve been without him. Pity, that. Back some years ago, The Paris Review published a lovely conversation between Charles Simic and James Tate. Simic opens up the conversation by noting…

In my sophomore year of college, I wrote a poem. Though I had no idea how to go about doing this, I composed a page and half of hifalutin mumbo jumbo that I was quite proud of and eager to show one of my teachers. He asked me to read the poem out loud to…

Two Poets Laureate On Grief, Detachment, and Finding New Ways to Live, Part 1   In my role as the curator of three literary guides to prayer for Paraclete Press (At the Still Point, Light Upon Light, and the newly-released Between Midnight and Dawn), I have the coolest job. Not only do I get to…