Continued from yesterday. Read Part 1 here. GW: Religion and worship played a large role in the British public schools in the 1920s and St. Stephen’s is no exception. I suppose it’s easy to observe most of the characters ignoring Christianity, but it was a time when faith could still speak to a certain sensibility and…

George Scialabba retired from his job this October. He had worked at Harvard University for thirty-five years. But not as a professor. Scialabba was a clerical worker and building manager. A piece in the Chronicle Review about Scialabba’s career as a writer and book critic described his day job as “low level.” Scialabba has, more…

Continued from yesterday. Hank Stuever’s 2005 collection of essays Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere may not be the Good Book—as I said in the first part of this post—but you might be forgiven for thinking that I have treated it as such: My copy of the paperback edition’s spine was long…

Recently, I spent a good part of three weeks promoting an event that my parish was sponsoring: sending out email blasts, networking, posting the event on Facebook. I’m on the committee that arranged the event, and I volunteered to do the advertising. As I did this tedious task, I tried to remind myself: Every moment…

Dearest Cal: Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I’ve been re-reading Emerson) for several days. — Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, July 27, 1960 Dearest Elizabeth: I think of you daily and feel anxious lest we lose our old backward and forward flow that always…

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…

Continued from yesterday. Catholic imagery appears throughout Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, the posthumous selected stories that has brought her singular fiction out of obscurity. The magnificent “El Tim,” a story about a charismatic adolescent Mexican-American boy who disrupts a Catholic school with his sly behavior, begins: “A nun stood in each classroom…

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…

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,…