Almost exactly two years ago, I made my Good Letters debut with a post titled “The Work Awaits,” in which I wrote about my vocational insecurities and obstacles, and how living out my life as a writer hasn’t felt the way I expected it to. This sequel is long in coming, and it’s my last post as a regular contributor. The two years that have marked my tenure here happened to coincide with one of the most difficult periods of my... Read more
“In the end, a story is never going to make a damn bit of difference to the dead.” —The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon When I’m gone, son, tell me the story of the day you collided with the opponent’s keeper, his knee to your temple, and collapsed, face down, on the pitch until the EMS crew rolled you off the field on a gurney. Tell me the story of how, during the month you waited to play again, you... Read more
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 foothills of the Blue Ridge, a bucolic place of towering trees and beautiful architecture, but also a place that was once home to nearly one... Read more
It’s time again. We’re just days from that sacred quadrennial ritual, wherein we profess outrage at the subversive vision propagated by the coven of elites running the other party, and agree with our comrades that despite his failings, our own party’s candidate is a far cry from the conniving, pandering, crypto-fascist, pathological liar leading the mob of ingrates and plutocrats on the other side. I’ve been doing a lot of late-night driving on backcountry roads, the kind that severs a... Read more
Living with leukemia, I naturally meditate often on our human mortality. No, often is the wrong word: the meditation is a constant undercurrent of my consciousness. We are all mortal, of course; yet (of course) we live most of our lives trying to distract ourselves from this undeniable, unpleasant fact. The gift of a life-threatening illness is that it trumps the desire for distraction. Advancing age can bring this same gift. Murray Bodo, now in his mid-seventies, wraps the gift... Read more
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others…” Whether you’re a moviegoer or a reader, I suspect you’ll recognize that passage. It opens A River Runs Through It, and Robert Redford reads it with appropriate reverence in the beloved big-screen adaptation he directed. It... Read more
It’s Monday morning as I write this post. Monday morning, with all that implies: back to work (or school), back to the grind, back to those five days we get through until the next weekend. Wednesday as hump day, TGIF, and all that. Not everyone lives this way—or needs to. When I started freelancing, I no longer needed to divide my days into weekday and weekend. I could write whenever I wanted, complete freelance editing jobs at two in the... Read more
With the fall season of primetime television underway, the knives are out and the chopping blocks ready as critics, network heads, and, most importantly, the general viewing public, collectively decide which new shows will survive and which will be buried. It’s always a bloody affair, one that can become as much a spectacle as the Roman amphitheater, fans waiting with bated breath to see which direction the ruling thumbs will point. Personally, it was never something I attended much from... Read more
Words. Made Flesh. An Evening With Gregory Wolfe and the Writers of Image journal’s “Good Letters” Blog November 14 / 6:30 pm The Jazz Bar Eighteenth Street Lounge 1212 18th Street Northwest Washington, DC 20036 Open Bar / Tapas For nearly five years, “Good Letters” has provided an oasis of deep personal reflection in an often cacophonous blogosphere. Reflecting the larger mission of Image journal, “Good Letters” believes that the language of faith is best communicated as a... Read more
My good friend Marcelo has decided to read Ayn Rand’s fiction, to “see what all the hype is about.” He has started with Fountainhead, the story of Howard Roark, the architect who heroically refuses to sacrifice his individual principles to the collective, no matter how they treat him. Marcelo is an artist, and he likes Roark’s pluck, his faith in his own artistic vision. Plus, Rand speaks with such conviction, it’s hard to resist. As many young people do—in my... Read more
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