Essay |
“We Try to Ignore the Elephant Somehow”
“Isbell’s songs provide the language for saying something that so few of us can say on our own, whether we’re racked by guilt or shame or grief for all the things that life does to us, and we do to life.”
Essay |
“Dog People”
“Whenever I arrive at my regular coffee shop in the morning with my dog, Juneau, I hope that there will be other dogs on the wide front deck. If I don’t have sufficient caffeine in a single-shot latte by 9 a.m., I’ll get a migraine, but I don’t come to the coffee shop only for the lattes. I come for the dogs.”
Essay |
“I Always Want to Wear Spring”
“I had planned to have the Chinese students over during spring break. A group of us had been meeting to translate poems by the late Chinese poet, Hai Zi (海子), and we’d had several conversations about Chinese and American culture.”
Essay |
“Froberger — An Outward Journey Inward”
“The great landmarks of Baroque music are musical reflections of meditative prayer much in practice when devastation and sectarian conflict increased the intensity of spiritual yearning.”
Essay |
“Uplokkid”
“Like medieval mystics in their anchorages, my mind was on the long-term rewards of short-term sacrifices. I found myself embracing solitude for a higher purpose: not holiness, but haleness, wholeness.”
Essay |
“Some Thoughts Prompted by David Brooks’ Turin: Approaching Animals“
“Like many people, I’m a mass of contradictions: I don’t buy products tested on animals but no doubt benefit, unwittingly, from experiments carried out on them.”
Essay |
“A Portrait”
“After lunch, the sitting. The set-up is elaborate: a narrow mirror where I can watch the portrait emerge and a cellphone camera in time-lapse mode …”
Essay |
“Duglegur”
“‘Sóley,’ she says, which I understand to mean creeping buttercup. She tells me I can pull them out. Their spindly stems branch off in every direction.”
Essay |
“My Mother’s Fingers”
“As I learn about her incarceration during World War II, I better understand the anger that she expressed when pain and dysfunction prevented her from sewing and gardening.”
Essay |
“Alone”
“The week after my husband filled out an online application, people from the program contacted him. He was interviewed on the phone for an hour and encouraged.”
Essay |
“The Angry Estate Gardener” & “Exercise After a Long Flight”
“The gardener raged, rattled high-speed after the Porsche — in a pickup truck hitched to a trailer full of fertilizer. He pursued, but didn’t come close …”
Essay |
“‘What burns through existence to endlessness?’ Dean Rader’s Poems on Cy Twombly”
“Death, the meaning of life and contact with that which defies naming are recurring leitmotifs … Rader approaches these themes with the help of the dialogical method of maieutics, which helps the interlocutor to gain knowledge through targeted questioning.”
Essay |
“Soap: Art of Failure”
“What if instead of saying we have failed we say that we are failuring? What if a practice of imagination is often also a practice of failure?”
Essay |
“Fairfield”
“But there was something in the dirt, in the water, my mom’s cousin Troy said — a toxic fallout that made its way into the bodies of the people.”
Essay |
“Bad Faith, Obsession, and Guns: on Reading Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner”
“Whereas I’ve spent my life avoiding guns, Wagner faces them straight on. As it turns out, both of us had something to learn from Annie Oakley: ‘She knew to not look at the gun, but at the thing, / to point at what you wanted until it fell / at your feet.'”