The Benevolent Season

Last updated on: November 21, 2014 at 12:15 pm By D.L. Mayfield

“Good Letters” is pleased today to welcome D.L. Mayfield to our team of bloggers. “That day we cook the big chicken” is what one of our neighbors called Thanksgiving, which seemed entirely appropriate to me. That year my husband and I invited all of our neighbors—refugees mostly from Bhutan and Somalia—to the community center of our low-income apartment complex to experience a traditional American holiday meal. It was not going well. People had filed into the community room, sitting at... Read more

The Subtle Traitor

Last updated on: November 19, 2014 at 1:15 pm By A. G. Harmon

I’m about to describe a character. He doesn’t exist everywhere, nor is he a threat to everyone. But it’s important to sketch out his profile, because he’s hardly ever seen for what he is, and because his brotherly embraces can end with a knife between your ribs. To be even halfway familiar with him, you have to be from a place, or of a group, that has a “checkered past”—a group whose forebears transgressed against the modern orthodoxies in a... Read more

The Treasure in the Trash

Last updated on: November 19, 2014 at 12:18 pm By Chad Thomas Johnston

As much as I associate Kansas with The Wizard of Oz, I have yet to come across one canary-colored brick in my eight years as a Kansan. There are, however, a number of historic red brick sidewalks and streets in Lawrence, the city I call home. The words “LAWRENCE KANSAS” appear, imprinted, on the bricks, so no one can mistake their parentage—they belong to their municipal mother. One day, while walking alone on one of those sidewalks several years ago,... Read more

Trouble Called Again Last Night

Last updated on: November 18, 2014 at 10:07 am By Richard Chess

Trouble called again last Thursday night. The number illuminated in the landline phone’s small window. Mother. She’s eighty-four now. Father’s eighty-seven. They sold their house—where we lived when I was in in high school—about twenty-five years ago. Moved into a condo. They’re still living in the condo, independently. A few nights earlier, during one of my routine every-other-day-or-so phone calls with her, Mom told me that Dad had a cold. He’d spent most of the day sleeping. Dad’s a big... Read more

Back off, Man, I’m a Scientist

Last updated on: November 12, 2014 at 12:55 pm By Tony Woodlief

My friend in graduate school used to groan as the holidays approached. His father was a surgeon whose every dinner table pronouncement about medicine was taken as authoritative. His sister was a lawyer, and her proclamations about whatever legal conflicts happened to be in the news were likewise greeted with unquestioning acceptance. My friend lamented that our impending PhDs in political science garnered no such deference. Your uncle holds forth on the need to start a third political party, and... Read more

Seeing and Being the Face of Christ

Last updated on: April 19, 2015 at 8:49 am By Jan Vallone

The Catholic church I attend is lovely. A wine brick building with a copper steeple in the English Gothic style, it is not only a city landmark, but listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Perhaps it’s because of this pedigree that the sanctuary is maintained in a way that exudes warmth and welcome, but vigilantly avoids the cute, sentimental, or kitsch—the Christmas trees have no drug store baubles, the paschal lilies lack purple foiled pots, and the ambo... Read more

Apocatastasis at the Essex

Last updated on: November 12, 2014 at 11:43 am By Caroline Langston

“You have to choose the places you don’t walk away from.” —Joan Didion This one’s for Sarinah Viya Kalb, who was there. With love. And so the season of death returns: the leaves now in their last burst of red and gold before starting their descent, and at night, sometimes, a stiff wind scuttling down my hilltop street. From now until Easter—Pascha, as we Orthodox have it, signifying both Passover and passage—is the evocative time of the year for me,... Read more

Epic Tales: an Interview with Amit Majmudar, part 2

Last updated on: November 10, 2014 at 4:53 pm By Guest Contributor

Guest post by Sarah Arthur Continued from yesterday. SA: In your essay “Me and the Monotheists,” you say that even though you are a Hindu, many Christians seem to warmly welcome your poetry (e.g., I’ve included your poem “Incarnation” in the anthology Light Upon Light). You say this is primarily about “aesthetic resonance”—particularly with imagery—but you also point to the English language itself as being encoded with biblical influence. And yet not every contemporary English-speaking poet writes this way. Can... Read more

Epic Tales: an Interview with Amit Majmudar, part 1

Last updated on: November 12, 2014 at 1:25 pm By Guest Contributor

Guest post by Sarah Arthur To call Amit Majmudar a poet doesn’t express the range of interests that characterize this brilliant, generous, inexhaustibly inquisitive young writer: Notable novelist, literary essayist, diagnostic nuclear radiologist, husband, parent of young children, expert in comparative religion. His works have appeared in Image, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Smithsonian, The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Divinity Review, and First Things. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including the poem “Incarnation” from... Read more

Inside My Nostalgia Box

Last updated on: November 7, 2014 at 11:56 am By Peggy Rosenthal

Look at my new Easter eggs. Red and blue with yellow legs. See them run around and around. Then they tumble on the ground. I’ve just discovered this intriguingly surrealist verse in a box in my attic labeled “Nostalgia.” The box has been sitting there for decades, and I got curious recently about what might be in it. Judging from the large, carefully printed lettering of this poem, I’d guess it’s from first grade, before I’d learned cursive. Examples of... Read more