Tag: Marilynne Robinson
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A Grudging Endorsement of The Advantage
I’m not one for business books. They are, as a rule, reductive, shallow, formulaic, and hokey. So imagine my surprise when I came to Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business and found that it was…nah, not what you’re thinking. Let’s just say that it didn’t stir my skeptical heart.…
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Sitting Beneath the Michigan Tree: Back at the Festival of Faith & Writing
Kwame Alexander, Newberry Award-winning author of The Crossover, looked out across the sea of 2,000 introverts and defied every tenet of writerly reserve. “Say ‘yes,’” he said. Say ‘yes’ to the opportunity, the challenge, even to the indignities of selling your work. There is power in your words. Kwame has a bus now with a…
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God, love, God, love: The Winn Collier Interview Concludes (3 of 3)
In previous segments of this interview with Winn Collier we talked small towns, small churches, and his use of letters to tell the story of Granby Presbyterian Church, the fictional congregation at the heart of Collier’s new book. Love Big. Be Well.:Letters to a Small-Town Church is a big-hearted, hopeful book that celebrates what Christian…
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The Lure of Small Towns: The Heartlands Interview with Winn Collier – (1 of 3)
Winn Collier’s new book, Love Big. Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church, is a generous celebration of the potential of church. In my review I noted that it is a gentle, human love story between a pastor and his congregation told in the form of letters written to the church over the course of…
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Keeping the Midwest Weird: My interview with Mark Athitakis continues – part 2
In my last interview blog post with the writer Mark Athitakis, “Why we we’ve got to get Willa out of the cornfield”, we talked about the plural landscape of the Midwest, something he covered in his new book, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt. Today we…
Heartlands 