The pile appeared on Monday on his bedroom floor, just beside his dresser. Normally, such a sight would make me crazy: how many times must I say it? “Put your clean clothes away; put the dirty ones in the laundry.” What means this pile of clothing, languishing here, purposeless? But I could see that something […]
Read moreNineteen months. This is a phrase I likely knew before I could talk. I probably heard it before I was born when, my mother balancing baby girl over burgeoning stomach, people asked. My mother and father both probably said it countless times at the playground, at the church, in the grocery store. “How far apart […]
Read morebiblechurch.org I play the violin. I do not play it well, and I never have. This fact is not terribly problematic for me– not in terms of ego, anyway. I don’t expect myself to be good at it because, well, I have never been good at it. Not even when, in high school, I daily […]
Read moreSeven Stanzas at EasterMake no mistake: if He rose at allit was as His body;if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the moleculesreknit, the amino acids rekindle,the Church will fall.It was not as the flowers,each soft Spring recurrent;it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddledeyes of the eleven apostles;it was as His […]
Read moreSometimes I’m pretty lonely. I mean, being a writer is lonesome. It just is. It’s a lonely business.One reason for this is obvious: I have to be alone when I write. Or silent, anyway. It’s an uncommunicative business, communicating via the page. I sit (or stand) alone for hours at a time, unspooling thought in […]
Read moreIt started last Sunday, the first Sunday in March, as it always does and has since 1973. “The Last Great Race,” they call it. The Iditarod. You’ve heard of it, I think: a sled-dog race. Not the only one there is, mind you, but the one best known. A race among sled dogs and their […]
Read more“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction….” — Virginia Woolf A long, lazy drive to Charlottesville, taking nearly all back roads and finding myself (I recognized it before I read the sign) at the entrance to Somerset Farm. It wasn’t where I was going, but I headed up […]
Read moreEvery morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos […]
Read more[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/39439897 w=400&h=300] I have never felt that his was my story to tell. I had the privilege of being his teacher for only a few short months, you see, and that is nowhere near long enough to discover anyone, let alone this bright-eyed boy, this sometimes seven-year-old-wonder in a fourteen-year-old body. Like anyone else, […]
Read moreYou have been at work for some time when he gets home. It’s the sort of day that has found you in the work and then necessarily away from it and then back at it again, exhilarated and discouraged by turns. This is good work; this is bad; this is god-awful in a way that […]
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