My Frankenstein is first and foremost a novel. A custard-colored Pound Classic published by Penguin UK, to be exact. Though I’ve taught from several editions, as the novel turns two hundred it’s to that tiny, flimsy volume with which I first made contact that my thoughts turn. My wife and I were in Oxford, England, for six months, during which time we saved what we earned each week for travel on the weekends. That meant many nights in the Borders... Read more
My annual family Christmas letter swelled from a single paragraph into a sixteen-page spread before I finally admitted at age thirty-seven—to myself, more than anyone else—that I wanted to be a writer, a desire that’d been brewing during a decade as a fulltime wife, mother, and dedicated church volunteer. I hadn’t always wanted to write. As a teen in the seventies I wanted to be a senator, so I majored in political science and went to work in local government,... Read more
“Something Just Like This” was one of the biggest hits of 2017. It reached number three on Billboard’s top 100. It was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category. The single has sold millions all over the world. “Something Just Like This” is a collaboration between Coldplay and the more recent EDM (Electronic Dance Music) duo The Chainsmokers. It was written collaboratively at a recording session. Five members of both bands are credited as songwriters. The... Read more
Anyone blessed enough to receive a good classical education is somewhere along the way warned that he must not oversimplify—must not reduce everything to allegory or elevate it to archetype. The world is a complicated place, after all, and there are usually multiple causes and manifold effects. Phenomena do not fit forms so neatly. Nevertheless, the patterns and characteristics that have been discerned over the ages provide the basis of recognition, the building blocks of understanding. Without them, we would... Read more
Robert Cording’s prose poem reminds me of my late Aunt Mary, who, at roughly the same age as the poem’s narrator, chose her gravesite for the sightlines it offered—in her case, a clear view of the horizon where the sun rises and where, she believed, Jesus would return on Resurrection Day. She visited regularly, each time noting details that delighted her senses and comforted her soul, in Cording’s words, “a kind of practice for [her] end.” Cording somewhat casually describes... Read more
Near the end of 2017, I rewatched Oliver Assayas’s ghost story film Personal Shopper not long after my wife asked if I had any New Year’s resolutions. It occurred to me that Personal Shopper may be an interesting film to frame the answer to that question. For all its apparent ambiguity, Personal Shopper seems clear about at least one thing: We are all mediums. Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a personal shopper in Paris for a celebrity named Kyra. Maureen buys... Read more
The sun rises over the ocean where I live, two miles from the Atlantic. You can watch it set over the bay too if you’re lucky enough, at sundown, to be on the thin barrier island that separates the mainland from the sea. The water here in the mid-Atlantic region isn’t the spectacular aqua, teal, or turquoise of our southern and western shores. It’s grey-green, tinged with brown when clouds obscure the sun or rough seas churn up sand and... Read more
The day of Pepper Smith’s funeral, it was a stiff fifteen degrees—ironic weather for a boy from Gulfport, Mississippi. Pepper was my dear old friend for twenty-three years; we had traversed some odd and complicated decades and had ended up living not far from one another in the D.C. area. We talked all the time, but saw each other only a few times a year. We wanted to get our families together, but that is hard to do in a... Read more
A week before Christmas my husband and I hired professionals to install a wood stove in the fireplace of the 150-year-old house we just bought. All seemed well at the initial inspection, but when they began the job they found a chimney full of rusted nails, crumbling tiles, and a funny flue. They sent a grinder down the middle to shake the tiles loose and the whole house rattled as if the entire foundation was crumbling around us. The foundation... Read more
On my first reading of this poem, I felt disoriented by all the non sequiturs, all the disconnected images leaping here and there. But then I thought: isn’t this how my own attention works (or doesn’t work)? The poem skips in a breath from winter snow to the red line train to the speaker’s sins “of digression.” Later the speaker moves—in the space of a period—from the mirror in which “I cannot recollect / my face” to an artichoke and... Read more
Good Letters
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