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Writing and Painting Through Pain: The Heartlands Interview with Katherine James, 1 of 3
How can we see the world in new ways? In her debut novel, Can You See Anything Now?, (recently reviewed here on Heartlands), Katherine James uses her background in painting and the difficult passages in her life to weave a story of a healing town named Trinity and the people who live in it. It’s →
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Finding God in a Small Town: A Review of Can You See Anything Now?
You could hardly imagine two more different artists than the ones you meet in the opening pages of Katherine James’s debut novel, Can You See Anything Now? [Paraclete, 2017]. There’s Margie, who paints vivid canvases, attributing personal characteristics to still lifes, sketching nudes, and doing a grand scale work featuring ovens that make her daughter →
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Taking Hospitality Out of the House (& Keeping Worship Weird)
Preachers are fond of quoting Annie Dillard’s devastating critique of worship as she experienced it in a traditional church: On the whole, I do not find Christians outside of the catacombs sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no →
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The Destabilizing Doors of Exit West: A Review
Reading Mohsin Hamid’s acclaimed new novel, Exit West, as a window on the current global migration crisis is a mistake. The world imagined by the Pakistani-born Hamid is not one facing a migration issue – migration is the environment in which all its characters swim. It’s not a problem to be addressed; it is in →
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Dreaming Something Real: A Review of Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan
“Probably the real self is in fact the invented self fully accepted.” That’s Lewis Nordan’s justification for declaring that his outrageous, out-sized fiction is actually memoir. He created himself through imagining a different past, different circumstances, and a different father than the disappointing realities he knew as a child growing up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. →
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Can We Talk About Sexuality?
“In every family there are subjects that seem to bring out the worst in us when we discuss them. For United Methodists, that topic is currently homosexuality.” (9) So says Jill Johnson, one of my co-authors of the new book, Living Faithfully: Human Sexuality and The United Methodist Church, just out from Abingdon Press. But this →
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Freaks & Monsters – Being an Artist in the South – My interview with Nick Norwood concludes – Part 3 of 3
Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, is also a great poet. Like McCullers, he writes about what he knows – the American South and its eccentricities. In previous segments of this essay we talked about the universal themes in McCullers’ work and her sense →
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Carson’s Place – My Interview with Nick Norwood Continues – part 2 of 3
In the first part of my interview with Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, we talked about the universal themes of McCullers’ writing. Today we talk about the strong sense of place in her work and the way Columbus, Georgia, her hometown, informs it. So we →
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The Spiritual Isolation of Carson McCullers – An Interview with Nick Norwood – part 1 of 3
So, I’ve got a thing for Carson McCullers. Anybody who read this blog through the McCullers-palooza that was her 100th birthday celebration in February will know that this Southern writer speaks to me. The characters that she introduced us to in such classics as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of →
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Strong, Resilient, Independent – the Characters of Virginia Reeves – part 3 of 3
Work Like Any Other, Virginia Reeves’s debut novel, has some very memorable characters that are worth getting to know. In previous segments of this interview we have talked about resiliency in strange times and the meaning of Alabama. If you’ve read the book, you’ll enjoy this segment because we get down deeper into the characters →
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