Several months ago, I found myself struggling with my hair—namely, snapping off my split ends in an obsessive manner, calling back to my teenage battles with trichotillomania. On some days, a half hour would pass before I realized I’d been zoning out and picking at my hair at the expense of folding laundry, writing, or engaging with my kids. Months of incentives and redirection didn’t help. In order to reclaim my time and focus, I had to take drastic measures... Read more
The waiting room was filled with the kinds of people one sees in my town: an African-American mother on her iPad, an Asian-American father scrolling on his phone, a white mother finishing some work on her laptop, a grandfatherly man wearing a yarmulke reading a book. I was sitting with my kindergarten son while the older one was in session. I asked him how school went. “I’m not going to marry Aleisha anymore,” he told me. “I’m going to marry... Read more
Gene Luen Yang is the MacArthur genius grant–winning author of graphic novels including Boxers and Saints and American Born Chinese. He also writes graphic novels for kids (the Secret Coders series) and for major comic book publishers (Avatar, The New Super-Man). He is profiled in Image issue #95. Image: Your books have a strong thread of very fraught family relationships—rivalry, loyalty, disappointment—and I wondered where that comes from. Did you read the Bible a lot as a kid? Gene Luen... Read more
Gene Luen Yang is the MacArthur genius grant–winning author of graphic novels including Boxers and Saints and American Born Chinese. He also writes graphic novels for kids (the Secret Coders series) and for major comic book publishers (Avatar, The New Super-Man). He is profiled in Image issue #95. Image: In Boxers and Saints, the two central characters are wonderful because they’re flawed—their flaws are part of what make them so interesting to read about. Do you think it’s hard to... Read more
I once met a beer-guzzling goat like the one in Wiman’s poem. His name was Clay Henry, and he was elected the honorary mayor of Lajitas, Texas in 1986. But my deeper resonance with “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians” lies in my identity as a seminary dropout who backdoored his way into the preaching life. A first-person narration like this one shouldn’t be able to pull off such clarity and personality while freighted with such dense diction and imagery, but... Read more
I often rock my baby to sleep at the witching hour. These can be the hours when thoughts, either darkly vivid or hazily formed out of interrupted sleep, stray to mournful or anxious things. But on this night, my mind is pleasantly occupied with thoughts of my beloved grandmother who died a decade ago. My grandmother was the first person I knew who would read so late that it would often be early morning when she finally got to sleep.... Read more
The Buddhists have four stations of the heart: Metta (kindness), Mudita (compassion), Karuna (joy in the joy of others), and Upeka (equanimity). The Jews have four matriarchs: Sarah, a mother who laughs and who does not speak when her husband takes her son before dawn to offer him as a sacrifice in the place God will show him; Rivka, a mother who bears conflict and from whom is delivered two nations that will be at war with each other to... Read more
Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks. Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an A.C.L.S. Contemplative Practices Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, three honorary doctorates, and the Commander’s Award for Public Service from the Department of the Army. Nelson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut; founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small... Read more
The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman and a teacher, Marilyn Nelson was brought up primarily on military bases and started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1970) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1979). Her long teaching career included positions at Saint Olaf College and the Universities of Connecticut and Delaware, and brief stints at the US Military Academy at West... Read more
Literary reader of faith: I urge you now, as I’ve urged friends, students, and anyone who would listen for over a decade, toward the poetry of Adélia Prado. She is without question one of our greatest living poets, her inimitable voice at once earthy and mystical, unassuming and ecstatic. In her introduction to The Alphabet in the Park, Prado’s first book in English, translator Ellen Doré Watson tells the story of the “discovery” of Prado in the 1970s by Brazil’s... Read more
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