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The Strangeness of Being Here at All: Franz Wright’s Redemption Story
There are days I wake up in sluggish wonder, newly aware, as a last dream image drifts away, of the marvel of my beloved still beside me in the bed, the fan beating time through the air, and the persistence of this body and mind. Or as the poet Franz Wright would put it in →
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So You Want to Write Poetry…
Come for the instruction in how to write poems. Stay for the poetry that flows from Mary Oliver like an undiminished spring. “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision—a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down →
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Can We Talk Here? Recovering Conversation in the Church with C. Christopher Smith
Every pastor knows the scenario. An issue has arisen. Relationships are frayed. People are more than willing to talk it out with the pastor, but with each other? Not so much. C. Christopher Smith, editor of the Englewood Review of Books, has been an advocate for the spiritual practice of conversation based on the long-running →
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Getting Beyond ‘Should’ to What ‘Is’: The Virginia Reeves Interview Concludes
My interview with Virginia Reeves, author of The Behavior of Love, concludes with some thoughts on ‘should’ and the struggles of human beings in love to connect. (The interview begins here.) One of the other big words in this book for me is the word ‘should.’ In fact, you title a whole section ‘Should.’ I →
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“Behavior is a Fraction of Who We Are”: Virginia Reeves Interview (2 of 3)
In the previous segment of our interview with Virginia Reeves, we talked about the origins of her new book, The Behavior of Love, and the inspiration for one of its main characters, Ed, a behaviorist working within a Montana institution. In the second part of the interview we discuss behavior, identity, and the windows of →
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Not Fixated on the Future: Finding Presence with Virginia Reeves (1 of 3)
Virginia Reeves is a confounding author. How does someone who can capture the beauty of landscape and human relationships with such rich writing also manage to resist the expectations of what books about such things must be like? Just when you think you know how her stories will go, when you’ve seen the end of →
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Why Reading About Burundi is Reading About Humanity
“I hope you can understand why it is that despite all its faults and its legacy of violence, I so very much love my country and my culture. It is an amazingly rich, vibrant, and active way of life. So, it is possible that in one country you can find such extremes as genocide and →
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A Bombblast of Uncommon Prayer: The Pitbulls & Pendulums of Kimberly Johnson
“When thundering through the heavens I hear the B-2 Stealth Bomber—it’s elusive grace as it banks trailing fractals from its skin, its clandestine maneuvers, its trinitarian aerodynamism—I think of God.” (38) Spend some time in Kimberly Johnson’s 2014 poetry collection, Uncommon Prayer, and you’ll think of God in some unlikely images—a bug-zapper, a corpse flower, →
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Love and Loss in Montana: Virginia Reeves Writes Another Winner
Can people really change? To hear Ed Malinowski, a behaviorist in the mold of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, tell it, the answer must be yes. Ed is one of the central characters in Virginia Reeves’ beguiling sophomore novel, The Behavior of Love. “People are malleable,” he says, “as are their behaviors, and behavior →
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Recovering the Body: Another Visit with Scott Cairns
A brief word of thanks for an old collection of poems by Scott Cairns. Twenty years has passed since the first publication of Recovered Body, a small collection of Cairns’ poetry. It doesn’t have the warmth of some of his later work, (despite the passionate interludes with Erato, the muse), but it is fun to →
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Heartlands 