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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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Why Books Will Win
I’m making a wager that books will lead us to the future. Heartlands came about as a desire to understand the present age, particularly from the perspective of rural America and rural church ministry. In the beginning I was trying to figure out why the place where I live seemed suddenly so strange to me. … →
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A Dialect of Longing – Poetry Tuesday
And what is wind but a dialect of longing?–: the high pressure rushing to fill the low, the sky trying to slake its heats against the earth’s asymptotic cool, its somersaulting cools against the earth’s radiance. All weather springs from currents of failed desire. No wonder the wind, when it says anything at… →
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It’s a Howlin’ Shame
Crawling under the skin of the present age is a reality, an anthropology so old that it infests everything we do. I felt it as I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s sociology of Tea Party Louisiana in Strangers in the Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. But it’s there in liberal moral… →
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Grant’s Migraine – Tuesday Poetry
I know what caused Grant’s Appomattox migraine, not death nor politics or Sheridan’s whereabouts. It was the slant light of April nigh to the equinox. The same light troubling my eyes on this slatted porch. It should fall gentle in this season or so I advise the Crafter but instead it blotches my retina sears… →
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Down the Line and on the Edge: Poetry Saturday
There’s no mystery to the ball hit to the gap in right centerfield. So much room for error. So many ways it could have been a hit anyway and otherwise. It’s the tailing ball down the line that sprays up chalk that makes a difference. It could so easily have been elsewise: A forgotten foul… →
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86 Sermons on Song of Songs
The 12th-century monastic, Bernard of Clairvaux, wrote 86 sermons on the Song of Songs… 86 Sermons on Song of Songs Bernard of Clairvaux no doubt wrote many more. The more scandalous never made it out of his cell. But he knew that there was nothing more essential than the one theme of desire. If he… →
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Feathered, Pleated Strength – Psalm 36 loosely translated
Psalm 36 I know the sinful utterance of the wicked– know it like the back of my hand, know the sound of it, the taste of it as it passes my lips. I have heard myself quickening the dead letter of law while God whispers in my ear, “Let it die!” I protest my innocence… →
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