Guest post by Cathy Warner I have circled around this story several times, trying to write my way into it. I begin with an inciting event: An eighty-nine year-old man lies unconscious, unresponsive in intensive care in a California hospital. His name is Vince and he was hit by a car in the town he’s lived in near forty years, the same town that was my home for twenty-five. I am now nine hundred miles north, but in my mind... Read more
On some spring mornings, even nine years later, a remnant returns: red-winged blackbirds wake me before dawn, panic cinches my throat, and adrenalin pulses in my fingertips. I still don’t know whether the sleeplessness caused the depression or if it was the other way around. By the time we checked out of the hospital, because of a sleepless night before the birth and a litany of distractions (mostly a blood-pressure cuff accidentally set to squeeze my arm every sixty seconds),... Read more
Last Sunday my wife decided to celebrate the end of our semester by taking a drive on a scenic stretch of Route 151, a two-lane road that winds along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains between Lynchburg and Charlottesville. Often on this road, you find yourself sliding through a flashing green canopy of leaves. More than once, a climbing series of hairpin turns will open onto sweeping green valleys. The mountains roll soft as the curves of a human... Read more
How many of our triumphs in a long and confusing life are accountable not to the things that we do, but to the things that we ultimately cannot do? How much larger is a soul for the many unmarked feats, the unnoticed evidence of furious battles fought against the self, just to hold back, to tamp down, to remain and endure when all would warrant otherwise? Medals, trophies are given for action, not inaction. But it seems a terrible injustice... Read more
My lovely mother, God bless her, is cursed. And having just spent a weekend with her brother, I can safely claim that he’s cursed, too. Maybe “cursed” is too soft a diagnosis, as my siblings and I have often jokingly wondered if with Mom it’s actually a case of outright demonic possession: does she have a demon who attacks her facility with all things technological? Computers, cellphones, printers and TVs—you name it. Entertainment systems and the remote controls that come... Read more
To recap: my cup of Awake is half empty. What’s left is cooler now than when I poured the water from the kettle over the tea bag dangling at the end of its string about twenty minutes ago. Next to the mailbox, the trash in its thick plastic green container stands ready to be forked into the garbage truck any time now. It’s Tuesday morning. It’s the last full week of classes. Finals begin next week, but I’m leaving town... Read more
Many years ago, my husband took a job in Rochester, New York, four hundred miles from our Boston home. Neither of us had ever been to Rochester, and we were apprehensive about the move. Our ten-year-old son was more than apprehensive: he was devastated. When we told him about the move, he burst into tears—because Rochester didn’t have a major league baseball team. The move was scheduled for the end of the summer. Sometime mid-summer, I decided I needed to... Read more
Guest Post By Dyana Herron Image has just published its 25th anniversary issue (#80). We’re pleased today to run an excerpt from a symposium in that issue entitled “The Road Ahead: Voices for the Next Twenty-Five Years,” consisting of reflections by a group of writers under the age of 35. Although I don’t consider myself to have a finger on the pulse of culture (I’m not a journalist or a critic or an academic, but someone who writes mostly from... Read more
Guest Post By Scott Cairns Image has just published its 25th anniversary issue (#80). We’re pleased today to run an excerpt from a symposium in that issue entitled “The Road Behind Us: Image’s Founding Generation,” in which we asked several writers and artists who have been part of Image’s community from its beginnings what they see as having changed over the years, whether there’s still a need for a venue like Image, and what our new calling might be. Yes, the... Read more
“Good Letters” is pleased today to welcome D.G. Myers as a regular contributor. In early April the MIT physicist and novelist Alan Lightman pitched his tent between an atheism that speaks in science’s name and a scientifically informed faith in God. Reviewing Amir D. Aczel’s new book Why Science Does Not Disprove God for the Washington Post, Lightman distanced himself from the “religious fervor” of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Sam Harris—he agreed they are “staining the... Read more
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