This is the 3rd year for the highly-anticipated Heartlands Best Reads list. If you want to check out previous years you can look here (2018) and here (2017). How does a book make the Heartlands list? Well, the main limiting factor is that Alex Joyner has to read it during the year. It’s been another […]
On November 8, 2019 we celebrated the life of Commander Bess Bryant Sheldon, most everybody’s Aunt Bess. These were my remarks at the service: So let me start by acknowledging that you don’t get to be a pastor to your own family. People know you too well. You might get called upon to do the […]
About halfway through Kimberly Johnson’s 2002 poetry collection, Leviathan With a Hook, you find yourself face-to-face with the themes that have since come to characterize much of her work: a moment that opens the world, a rich encounter with nature and transcendence, and a little hint of disturbing fire. It’s all right there in “Up […]
On December 14, 2019, a memorial service was held for my father, Ulysses Percy “Pete” Joyner, Jr., at Trinity United Methodist Church in Orange, Virginia. I shared this witness to his remarkable life. The last time my father remembered seeing his father was on an evening in May 1940. The family was reeling from the […]
I don’t know why it’s the late spring of 1995 when Nothing to See Here begins. Perhaps it’s because it’s a time blessedly free of cell phones and texting and the narrative complications they introduce. Maybe it’s because politics had a few more norms such that a main character who is a senator could imagine […]
The great Streetlight magazine has a new essay of mine up on their blog today. “Deep Ellum B.C.” hits all your favorite topics: Book stores, writing groups, and anti-Semitism. Enjoy. –Alex
