Imagine you paid someone to build a house for your child, and imagine one night you get a call. The house has collapsed. Your child is dead. A year after you bury your child, a letter arrives. It is from your builder. Get out of the house, it says. There may be some defects. You learn that other houses have collapsed, other people have died. The builder knew of the danger for years. So you get a lawyer, you go... Read more
The first ominous sign that the Relisha Rudd case was slipping from the local Washington, D.C. imagination was when the police alert signs posted on the roads into the city had their messages changed, or were removed entirely. For weeks after the news that the little eight-year-old girl was missing broke on March 19, the digital display boards had broadcast the Amber alert in their amber lettering, its grim message truncated in a style all too appropriate for the digital... Read more
Congratulations to Jessica Mesman Griffith and Amy Andrews, who won a 2014 Christopher Award for their book Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters (Loyola Press). Launched in 1949, The Christopher Awards are presented to writers, producers, directors and illustrators whose work affirms the highest values of the human spirit. There has always been something unappealingly puritanical to me about getting up early. It’s so Midwestern. But I’m glad my husband is an early riser. He’s from Illinois,... Read more
Guest Post By Jen Hinst-White “I have this mystical-schmystical idea,” one of my writing teachers once said, “that stories exist outside of us somewhere, and it’s our job to get them down properly.” He was a hard-nosed editor and a robust skeptic, and he confessed this notion five minutes before workshop’s end, as if not to give his own idea too much credence. I suspect, though, that most of us knew what he meant. And if we can be mystical-schmystical... Read more
I’ve never really been into crosses. Like fire hydrants or Starbucks, there are so many, I don’t even see them. Sermons or songs that ask me to meditate on the cross might as well ask me to meditate on the church snack table because that’s where my mind wanders as I wait for the cross, cross, cross (say the word enough, and it deflates to a hiss) to go back on its Precious Moments shelf. When we traveled to southern... Read more
My wife and I are always behind on television shows because we wait for them to come out on Netflix. We have only gotten through the end of the third season of Game of Thrones and have therefore not watched the scene that has raised such a kerfuffle these past few days, the scene in which Jaime rapes his twin sister Cercei over the corpse of their son. When we were watching the third season of Game of Thrones though,... Read more
Spring in the Methow Valley of Northeastern Washington comes quietly, a gradual warming, winter grass rustling with the breezes carrying promise of new life. I am here for my first spring, though I’ve been here often winters, occasional summers and falls. I’ve never seen the opening here, the uncovering of so much asleep, the pale yellow winter grass so thick it seems nothing green will come again, that all is lost. I head out for a hike along Virginia Ridge... Read more
Guest post by Natalie Vestin In Judith Kitchen’s essay “Direction,” she writes of traveling with a friend in Greece and being asked to step out of her cab on a dark road by a driver she doesn’t trust. She and her friend refuse to get out, not by saying no, but by huddling in the back seat and crying thalassa, thalassa. Ocean, ocean. Crying direction and saving themselves. I split this past summer between residencies in Minnesota and Nebraska, writing,... Read more
No doubt Walt Whitman would have sounded his barbaric yawp from the steaming rooftop pool of Spa Castle in Queens, had the multi-level Korean day spa been around the corner from his Brooklyn stomping grounds as it is today. I’m not saying he would have retitled “Song of Myself” to “Song of Ourselves,” but I like to think that he might have been so inclined upon entering the ground-level indoor spa for the first time, onto a wondrous tiled cavern... Read more
Among the variety of strange notions that we get into our heads, one of the most common is the sensation that we’re being watched. For no apparent reason, we begin to glance around us, not really expecting to find anything, and yet compelled to look anyway. “It’s nothing,” we say, and turn our attentions back to the task at hand. It’s also one of the tell tale signs of a transient madness, to believe that something is stalking us—lurking near,... Read more
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