Guest Post One of the first official symptoms of pregnancy is an out of character desire to work story problems. If Eve is forty-one when she discovers she is pregnant, how old will she be at the infant’s birth, and when baby starts kindergarten, and when baby leaves for college? If Eve is sixty when youngest child flies the coop, how much time does she have to pursue the career she always thought she might have when kids left home?... Read more
A show about Russian spies living in D.C. during the Cold War easily brings to mind our present-day episode of America-Russia relations. Read more
Like the biblical psalms, Nicholas Samaras’s “Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With” speaks for the human condition. And, like many of the biblical psalms, Samaras’s psalm finds the human condition one of being thrust between opposite experiences. “I feel [God’s]presence only to lose it, / lose his presence only to feel it return.” And so it goes throughout the poem: presence becomes absence becomes presence; I see, then don’t see, then see again. But there’s a constant throughout all... Read more
The first time I encountered Guns N’ Roses, it was a flag hanging on the bedroom wall of a kid I barely knew. You’ve likely seen the image—a cross, adorned with representative skulls for each member of the band. I hadn’t heard Appetite for Destruction at that point, but I knew this was something to avoid. Because that flag was dangerous. At the time, my favorite tape was Placido Domingo’s Perhaps Love, specifically his cover of the Beatle’s song “Yesterday.”... Read more
It refused to rain during the hot, middling July weeks the summer I turned fifteen. The clouds hung low over the Plains. My mother and I fought nearly every day during that dry month, even if our fighting was mostly silent, threats drawn from taut eyes and skin. I pushed always, every day, against an atmosphere full to bursting. She and her doctors tried to find a perfect storm of antipsychotics and antidepressants, but the voices telling her to break... Read more
This post originally appeared on “Good Letters” on October 14, 2014. Continued from yesterday. The Way of Saint James—El Camino de Santiago—is a pilgrimage that began in the Middle Ages and remains popular today. Each year pilgrims from all around the world walk from points throughout Europe to reach the tomb of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Some do it for sport, others for contemplation, others to pray for miracles. (more…) Read more
This post originally appeared on “Good Letters” on October 13, 2014. I didn’t know Julia well. The first time I saw her, she was sitting at the far end of the table around which our language class met. Although I knew the instructor, Chiara, it was my first day with this group of students who for years had gathered in Chiara’s dining room to discuss classic books in Italian. That day I was the last one to arrive, and when... Read more
In Dolin’s poem we wake up abruptly inside the walls of an ancient temple. Walls are all we have to orient ourselves here in this place, which is without roof or pillars. “I don’t know how” this transformation took place, the unnamed speaker confesses almost shyly, but suddenly she seems to have so much space inside. I love the care and attention of the speaker’s observant eye that draws my own eye down the page. This eye is able to... Read more
This post originally appeared on “Good Letters” on October 15, 2014. About a year ago I felt an overpowering urge to say the “Our Father.” I’m still not sure why. I never knew my biological father, so I’ve always been indifferent to this prayer, the only prayer Jesus taught us. In the back of my mind I’d think: He’s not my father. I don’t have a father. And my heart would be empty even as my mouth said the words. Until that moment... Read more
Once, in high school, a guy in the trombone section brought a Playboy to band practice and passed it around the horns section. I was on tympani and could see over their shoulders the airbrushed bodies, the unnatural poses, the phony backdrops. Even as a hormonal adolescent I could see the images were crass, gaudy in their artificiality. The transgression was more thrilling than its object. Then I discovered the late-night previews at the upper reaches of the cable channels.... Read more
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