Graduation season has come to a close now, and the above-said words have welcomed the last audience to the final pomp and circumstance. I went through the yearly routine, yet again, both on the bestowing end, at my school, and on the spectating end, watching one of my nieces. I saw and heard mostly what I expected to see and hear. Somebody should write a satire on this day alone; it would likely spawn a rash of movie sequels: “Mortar... Read more
For the past nine months, I feel like I’ve been at a standstill. A place in which I have no words, nothing to describe what is happening to me, and in me. In six weeks, I am due to give birth to my first child, a son, and although I have had flashes of deep joy and extreme fear (often occurring in the same day), what has marked my life as an expectant mother the most is this sense of... Read more
At “Good Letters,” words are what we work with. Of course, this is true of all blogs, all writing. Yet consciousness of the craft of writing is key to our posts. No matter what our declared subject, our undeclared subject—our subtext—is always what are my words doing here? What can words do—anywhere? Words Made Flesh: it’s on our “Good Letters” logo. That short phrase reverberates with many meanings. The Christian connotation, yes: the Incarnation. But that’s a singular Word. Singular,... Read more
Immediately what had been said about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird. —Daniel 4:33 In the summer of 1999, I wore an anthropomorphic foam-rubber “Mr. Recycled Paint” costume in 104 degree heat in a parade that began at Chain of Rocks Bridge in St.... Read more
Here I am. Out of place. The computer terminal asks for my borrower’s card ID. I don’t have a borrower’s card for this library: Cherry Hill Public Library. Once, I did. But it’s gone now, burned in a fire at my parents’ house decades ago, or packed in some unlabeled box on a shelf in the furnace room of my house in Asheville. Here I am: in the library of my youth. Here, in my first years of discovering... Read more
Many years ago now, not long after I had been received into the Orthodox Church, I had a dream that has remained vivid: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, our chief celebration of the Eucharist and main Sunday service, is being celebrated right next to the escalators in a Neiman Marcus store. In the dream, there’s a square plot of carpet outlined by velvet ropes, and inside them two priests, long-haired and long-bearded, are doing some of the works... Read more
I recently ran into a good friend who’d been battling depression for years. She looked radiant. She smiled and said a therapist had healed her; he’d taught her to live wholly in the present, enjoy every flower she sees, block all but the here and now. I’m glad this philosophy works for my friend, but it wouldn’t be helpful to me. I too believe in cherishing the present—both in time and place—but I couldn’t live without remembering the past or... Read more
I accidentally read my way back to church in graduate school. I hadn’t been any kind of practicing Christian since early childhood, but I’d always been a reader, and in those three years, I read more widely and deeply than ever. I was in training, an MFA candidate preparing to write the story of me: the coming of age of a Louisiana girl trapped in a fringe group of far-out Christians. It was going to be cool and detached and... Read more
In the West we have forgotten how the world devours children because mostly when our children die they are defined as subhuman by the law, and so we don’t count their lives when we stop their hearts from beating. We have escaped an age when half the children born to us die before adulthood, and so we need not live—most of us—with the daily presence of death, prowling as it does like a wolf in tall grass. When death comes... Read more
Walking on the sidewalk of Spokane, I read an email that made me stop still. I’d just left a reading of North of Hope on my first trip away from my husband and two young children, when I checked my iPhone, compulsively, as I do, having no one to debrief with in person, looking for some kind of connection through cell signals and electrons. It was a warm spring evening, and I thought I’d find a good glass of wine... Read more
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