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October 2013

October 07, 2013

Seamus Heaney: Poet of Holy Saturday

Guest Post by Conor McDonough The late, great Seamus Heaney understood the sadness of the...

October 04, 2013

Sarah Masen: The Trying Mark, Part 2

Guest Post By Angela Doll Carlson In yesterday’s interview with Sarah Masen, we chatted about...

October 03, 2013

Sarah Masen: The Trying Mark, Part 1

Guest Post By Angela Doll Carlson The first time I heard Sarah Masen sing was...

October 02, 2013

A Good War Is Hard To Find

A few nights ago, after Jess and the kids were in bed, I finally bit...

September 2013

September 17, 2013

Over the Rhine’s Sound of Place

Guest Post Brian Volck “Somewhere is better than anywhere.” —Flannery O’Connor Early in...

September 09, 2013

The Image Top 25 Contemporary Writers of Faith List

Gregory Wolfe “I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor.” That was the opening sentence of a recent...

September 06, 2013

From Luci Shaw to Brother K: My Life with IMAGE

Guest post by Lucas Kwong “Art, Faith, Mystery.” These watchwords have formed the center...

August 2013

August 15, 2013

Genius(es) Wanted

Guest Post By Santiago Ramos Where do literary geniuses come from? Or should the question...

August 11, 2013

A Single Share

Eleven years teaching writing. The best years of my working life. The writing teacher is...

August 02, 2013

In Praise of the Printed Book, Part 2

By Warren Farha Guest Post Continued from yesterday. An increasing torrent of books and articles...

July 2013

July 29, 2013

A Feast for Hungry Eyes: An Interview with Sam Phillips, Part 1

Many songsmiths have struggled to navigate the commercial wilderness that arose in the aftermath of...

July 17, 2013

Living on the Threshold

Guest Post By Elizabeth Kalman My house sits on the edge of a salt marsh...

July 15, 2013

What We Learn

As he is evacuated from a battle zone, Chris Taylor—Oliver Stone’s protagonist in Platoon—marches us...

July 12, 2013

The Narratives We Need, Part 2

Continued from yesterday. Recently I sang Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with the Seattle Symphony. In...

July 11, 2013

The Narratives We Need, Part 1

“Tell me a story,” my son has started to say after reading his bedtime books....

July 09, 2013

A Baby Smaller Than Roosevelt’s Eye

Guest Post By Lindsey DeLoach Jones For most new parents, the first glimpse of the...

June 2013

June 19, 2013

On Plumber’s Block and the Birth Process, Part 2

Guest Post Yesterday, I asked a question that I will now attempt to answer. That...

June 18, 2013

On Plumber’s Block and the Birth Process, Part 1

Guest Post Recently, I watched a documentary that featured famous Irish writers giving advice about...

June 17, 2013

Mr. Putter: My Kind of Writer

A favorite anecdote that I’ve often shared with other writers dates back to college when...

June 10, 2013

Wiman and Words

At “Good Letters,” words are what we work with. Of course, this is true of...

May 2013

May 20, 2013

Why We Make Art

“Who you actually are is far bigger than the narrative you construct about who you...

May 06, 2013

Tuck In Your Artifice, It’s Showing

When someone shared Michael Chabon’s New York Review of Books blog post about the movies...

May 03, 2013

Beautiful Loser: Poetry at the Mall

Guest Post By Daniel Bowman Jr. Pray for one good humiliation every day. –Richard Rohr...

May 02, 2013

The Diameter of the Bomb

By the time this posts more than two weeks after the event, the Boston Marathon...

April 2013

April 29, 2013

Partaking and Passing On: The Work of Luci Shaw

The world is not with us—enough. O taste and see. –Denise Levertov, “Taste and See”...

April 26, 2013

Luci Shaw’s Poetry of Hope and Humility

The pale bits—twigs, fibers, pine needles—sun struck, fall through the lazy air as if yearning...

April 23, 2013

Peripheral Vision

Not long ago, I had surgery. I suppose that in the vastness of creation, the...

April 22, 2013

The Inestimable Value of Clichés

In his great work, Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess has the main character—Kenneth Toomey, a doddering,...

April 08, 2013

More Poetry of Married Love

In a previous post, I used Richard Wilbur’s poem “for C” to talk about my...

April 05, 2013

The Moveable Feast of Memory

There are moments when you take stock of everyone and everything around you because you...