A Tradition Without Tryptophan

Last updated on: November 9, 2017 at 6:18 pm By Tania Runyan

November is always an interesting time for a family of vegetarians. While my three children have never lifted turkey to their lips, they’ve come home from school with a multitude of smiling birds cut out in the shapes of their hands, illustrated plates labeled peas, potatoes, and turkey, and all manner of pilgrims and Indians sitting before bulbous, crayoned drumsticks. My children have also studied the confusingly whimsical psychology of turkeys facing certain death, a standard subject in contemporary childhood cinema and song.... Read more

Fargo: The True Story

Last updated on: November 22, 2017 at 7:40 am By A. G. Harmon

This is a true story. Those are the words that have begun every episode of the television series, Fargo, for the past three seasons. The events that took place occurred in Minnesota and the Dakotas during 2006, 1979, and 2010—or so the writers say. The names have been changed in deference to the living, but all else is presented just as it happened—out of respect for the dead. Of course, in a literal sense, not one word of that is... Read more

The Night I Read Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal

Last updated on: November 16, 2017 at 10:49 am By Image

I am. This is not pure conceit. My tea (Irish Breakfast, decaf, as it’s nearly 9 p.m.) is still warm, thankfully—I’d left it in the kitchen to steep, knowing full well I’d forget it once I checked my phone, remember it once I’d scrolled through apps long enough to be disgusted with myself, and wonder how much I might have done with my life had Twitter never been invented. I must pray. I attribute everything I have done to prayer.... Read more

St. Anna of the Walking Dead

Last updated on: November 20, 2017 at 9:23 am By Guest Contributor

Plures efficimur, quoties metimur a vobis (We multiply whenever we are mown down by you) —Tertullian, Apologeticus A few years ago, I became obsessed with a dead Russian woman. I never had the chance to meet her—she was murdered before I even knew her name—but sometimes I imagine she and I are having conversations. This has been facilitated, I suppose, by my part-Ukrainian Orthodox upbringing, one in which the communion of saints was treated as a matter of fact. In... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Flying Letters”

Last updated on: November 17, 2017 at 8:07 am By Image

I admire the way this poem speaks indirectly to the incomprehensible loss of military life through direct imagery from the natural and domestic worlds. The speaker’s civilian perspective here is captured in a swirl of motion and silence made audible: the mouths of flowers are not real mouths, and yet their blooming right in the beginning of this poem creates a picture of the spectator’s sense of meaninglessness and helplessness in absorbing a casualty report. What can one possibly say?... Read more

A Feminine Corollary To Machismo? Part 2

Last updated on: November 14, 2017 at 10:54 am By Image

My companions and I had overstayed our moment in the bishop’s suite, which was by now devoid of beer, wine, tequila, and perhaps wisdom. We decided to meet outside the hotel for a cigarette. On the way down, the bishop’s assistant, a young man in his twenties, asked about my music. My ensemble was going to perform the following night. I was pleasant, because I knew cursorily that he also played guitar and claimed to be a fan of my... Read more

A Feminine Corollary to Machismo? Part 1

Last updated on: November 16, 2017 at 10:17 am By Image

After the keynote speaker at the conference, everyone in my immediate vicinity wanted a drink, including the bishop. Location was an issue. It needed to be discreet for his sake. It needed to be cheap for our sake. It needed to be comfortable for the sake of the pregnant woman with swollen ankles along for the conversation. After disclosing that I had a cooler in my car filled with beer and six bottles of discount wine, the bishop rather sparingly... Read more

Remembering Father George

Last updated on: November 14, 2017 at 9:02 am By Caroline Langston

My priest has died. Or rather, in Eastern Orthodox terminology, he has reposed. He has fallen asleep. It’s funny how this death both echoes, and completes, the death of my biological father forty years ago. Throughout my childhood, for years after my father died, nothing irked me like people’s vague references to somebody “passing away.” They died, I wanted to complain, as hard-nosed as a nineteenth century freethinker. Just say the word. I wasn’t a Christian then, aside from the... Read more

Letter from an Underground Karamazov to His Couple’s Therapist

Last updated on: November 7, 2017 at 1:46 pm By Brad Fruhauff

Dear Dr. E, My, but you’re a clever one, aren’t you? You sit there looking so kind and compassionate, smiling and nodding, affirming and encouraging us, and so on, but I’m onto your little game. I’m a clever one, myself. Therapy, I know, is not really about feeling heard and receiving good relationship advice. It’s a battle of wills. I’ve seen the movies. If you can break me down, make me cry, and admit my vulnerabilities, you win. If I... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Camp Meeting”

Last updated on: October 31, 2017 at 10:39 am By Peggy Rosenthal

We’re familiar with the genre called “historical fiction.” But in “Camp Meeting: Old Saybrook, Connecticut, April 1827,” Marilyn Nelson has created what we could call “historical poetry.” She invents a narrator who attended this mammoth camp meeting with her evidently upper class girlfriends, and describes the meeting through the narrator’s eyes. The narrator is a bit scornful of the crowd “swarm[ing] like ants taking breadcrumbs home.” She notices, without emotion, people inside the tents “their hands in the air, / or... Read more