For my daughter, Evangeline Sofia, who celebrated her first birthday on the second day of October. “Can you build me a tent in the living room when you get home, Chad?” My wife Becki made this request via Google chat. “A tent?” I replied, laughing. “In the living room? What?” When we were children, my sister Alyssa and I built tents in our living room, draping sheets over strategically positioned chairs. But it had been years since I had roughed... Read more
By Rebecca A. Spears The few years I lived in Houston’s Menil neighborhood, right behind the University of St. Thomas, I felt like I’d been invited to live in a sacred garden, a nearly prelapsarian environment. It is a beautiful space, near the art museum known as the Menil Collection and its park, and bordered by several streets of Craftsman-style houses. Yet while I lived in my “Menil house,” I was forced to learn more about darkness and my faith... Read more
“Isaac’s being a jerk,” my seven year-old, Isaiah, says about his older brother. They have been sledding over new-fallen snow. “Why do you say that?” “Because he keeps knocking me off my sled.” “Why do you think he does that?” I ask. I’ve been trying to help my children consider how sometimes they incite one another. “Because he’s evil.” Well, then. “My sisters pregnant I can’t wait to find out if im gonna be an aunt or uncle,” is what the girl tweeted.... Read more
I get tingly with anticipation when I’m about to meet a new poet. I don’t mean the poet in person; I mean meeting the poems of someone whose work had been unknown to me. And so it was when I opened the new selection of poems by Dunstan Thompson, Here at Last is Love, just published by Slant. But this wasn’t to be my usual sort of first meeting, because first in the book comes Greg Wolfe’s rich biographical introduction. With gratitude,... Read more
My Uncle Jimmy died in September at the age of ninety. Born in Sicily, he immigrated to New York when young and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was the husband of my aunt for sixty-one years, the frolicsome father of my two cousins, a regular part of my life until I married and moved away. I can still see my uncle clearly as he was in January 1994. The way his brown eyes sparkled. The... Read more
The Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell died October 5, 2015. He was sixty-seven years old. Mankell was diagnosed with cancer a year ago during a trip to the orthopedic surgeon. Mankell thought he had a slipped disk. Turned out he had tumors in his neck and lung. The cancer had spread. Henning Mankell wrote plays, children’s books, and short stories. But he will always be known for crime fiction and for his detective Kurt Wallander. The Wallander books became a... Read more
The other day I got an email from a high-school boyfriend, which drove me headlong into remembrance of a time in my life I’ve tried to forget. My husband is the only person I know who enjoyed high school, so I don’t harbor any delusions that my unhappiness made me unique among teenagers. In fact, my misery found plenty of company. My mother died at the beginning of my freshman year, and while my dad reeled, I got mixed up... Read more
By Jenny Shank Continued from yesterday. Catholic imagery appears throughout Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, the posthumous selected stories that has brought her singular fiction out of obscurity. The magnificent “El Tim,” a story about a charismatic adolescent Mexican-American boy who disrupts a Catholic school with his sly behavior, begins: “A nun stood in each classroom door, black robes floating into the hall with the wind.” The grade school nuns keep perfect order, but the middle school ones... Read more
By Jenny Shank In September, Lucia Berlin’s posthumous collection of selected short stories A Manual for Cleaning Women hit the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction. Vice called Lucia Berlin “the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of.” Marie Claire predicted that this “highly semiautobiographical collection will catapult [Berlin] into a household name.” And John Williams wrote in the New York Times, “She put much of her roving, rowdy life onto the page in vivid stories that garnered the respect of a... Read more
Every Saturday morning in fall I wake up and feel a tinge of disappointment that I have not woken up in a dorm room in South Bend, Indiana; that my Notre Dame marching band uniform does not hang in the closet at the foot of my bed. I’m disappointed because I’m not eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. And I’m disappointed that instead of spending the entire day wrapped up in the tradition and pageantry that is college football, I... Read more
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