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Why Don’t Country People Just Get Out? – revisited
The struggles of rural communities has led a number of recent writers to ask, “Why don’t people just leave?,” an attitude I groused about in a recent post. The Atlantic has been covering this beat in a series of articles. Now Brian Alexander has written another piece in that magazine titled “If Declining Towns ‘Deserve to →
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On Talking to the Dead
Guest-blogging on the Streetlight Magazine site and talking to dead people: On Talking to the Dead →
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How to write a good country song
When was it that a hit country song became a list of country-fried images? Seems like all you have to do is string together bare feet, pickup trucks, fishing poles, and mama and you’ve got you a bestseller. (And, yes, I do know that I was a country music DJ back in the day when →
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A glorious, shabby democracy – my interview with photographer Michael Mergen concludes (3 of 3)
Having talked with photographer Michael Mergen in previous segments about his Civil War landscapes and the parallel Civil Rights series, today we talk about the glorious shabbiness of American democracy. This is something he explored in two works we talk about here – one a series in which he photographs buildings across the country that →
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Interchangeable heads and crayons in Selma – my interview with photographer Michael Mergen continues (part 2 of 3)
I’m so glad I obeyed my impulse at the stoplight in downtown Farmville, Virginia. I was driving through and stopped at a red light next to the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts where a local photographer’s work was on display. I pulled into a parking spot and discovered Michael Mergen. In the first part →
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When Robert E. Lee was in the Walgreen’s Parking Lot – An interview with Photographer Michael Mergen (part 1 of 3)
Michael Mergen is a photographer of memory and landscape. His photos capture ordinary, even shabby parts of America and invest them with the meanings we place on them. So a series on the things businesses give as freebies to veterans (burgers, ice cream) and another on the things we name for war heroes (interstate highway →
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You are the one and only threshold
“If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known →
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A comedy after all: Easter
He says her name, “Mary.” And suddenly Easter happens. The random becomes the real. The new story line clicks into place. The world rotates on a different axis. The universe is turned upside-down, inside out. Mary becomes the first to understand that death cannot be the last word. That Jesus’s story was not a tragedy. →
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“S-Town” and the sordid underbelly of this American life
This week I finished listening to “S-Town,” the latest buzzy podcast from the folks who brought us “This American Life,” and “Serial.” Like a trip to the all-you-can-eat buffet, it was great while it lasted but made me feel various degrees of queasy when it was all over, and least of all because of all →
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Why don’t country people just get out?
It’s subtly phrased, but I’m hearing it more in recent days – Why don’t people who live in the country just get out of there? Rural America has gotten a lot of attention in recent months in the wake of the unexpected presidential election results. The problems of the heartlands — and particularly the white, →
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