• The Silence of No-One’s Land

    The Silence of No-One’s Land

    I’m back up on the great StreetLight Magazine blog with a new meditation on silence–the way it can wallop you and open you up to something immense. Check it out here: https://streetlightmag.com/2022/11/07/the-silence-of-no-ones-land-by-alex-joyner/

  • Little Cups

    Alex has a new memoir essay up on the great StreetLight magazine website: https://streetlightmag.com/2022/08/01/little-cups-by-alex-joyner/.

  • Whole City Podcast with Elizabeth Catte

    Whole City Podcast with Elizabeth Catte

    Alex Joyner, editor of Heartlands, has a new podcast, The Whole City. You can find the initial episode on the Charlottesville Podcasting Network and on YouTube. In this episode, Alex talks with Elizabeth Catte, author of Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, about the history and future of Market St. Park in […]

  • To Speak the Truth in Bombingham

    To Speak the Truth in Bombingham

    John Archibald is almost my exact contemporary. Same age. White cis male. Southern. Methodist. A man who deals in words, though he’s an Alabama newspaperman who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his work in The Birmingham News while my main public output are sermons these days. What Archibald has done in his […]

  • Glorious Excess: S.A. Cosby and the Future of Southern Fiction

    Glorious Excess: S.A. Cosby and the Future of Southern Fiction

    S.A. Cosby knows that he’s prone to excess. He told The Guardian as much in an interview last year: “I write long sentences. I like similes (maybe too much, according to some reviewers). I like to write esoterically. I pontificate and wax poetic in the middle of gunfights. That’s my style.” –S.A. Cosby In his […]

  • How Memory Lingers: Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed

    How Memory Lingers: Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed

    The year my grandfather was born, twenty-one people were lynched and no one heard a sound. The trees died and the soil turned over and the leaves baptized all that was left behind. (273) The fact that Clint Smith is also a poet does not make his recent book an easy read. How the Word […]

  • The Audacity of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads

    The Audacity of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads

    It’s hard to know where to start when talking about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads. Do you start with the audacity? Franzen ripping across the page, delving into the minds of female and Native American characters with abandon and heedless of the caution so much of contemporary literature has fallen prey to? How about the […]

  • An American Journey: Gayle Jessup White’s Reclamation

    An American Journey: Gayle Jessup White’s Reclamation

    Gayle Jessup White’s journey is an American journey. An award-winning broadcast journalist and the current Public Relations and Community Engagement Officer at Monticello, White’s life has been marked by the gradual discovery of her roots in the much larger story of the country. It’s a journey she chronicles in her new book Reclamation: Sally Hemings, […]

  • Annie Dillard’s Writing Life

    Annie Dillard’s Writing Life

    It’s hard for me to overstate how much of an influence Annie Dillard has been on me over the years. A short story about weasels in her essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk is a big part of my call story. The one about a man pursuing her as a child through the snow […]

  • Burning Down the House of Fear with Brian Zahnd

    Burning Down the House of Fear with Brian Zahnd

    ‘Deconstruction’ is a popular term in conversations among church leaders these days. Only when deconstruction is invoked, we’re not talking French intellectual movements; it’s more to do with reassessing the received faith of our childhood and sorting out what resources are still there for life as an adult. In other words it’s what we used […]