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April 2013

April 03, 2013

The Poems Left In Me

With gratitude to the poets whose poems gave me this. The poems left in me...

March 2013

March 26, 2013

A Story About the Horrible Glorious Truth

I want to write a beautiful story. I want my reader to cry when the...

March 18, 2013

Auden’s Love of Neighbor

This is my one hundredth post for Good Letters. What a privilege it has been...

February 2013

February 26, 2013

The Poverty of Language

Another exercise. This one an exercise in seeing deeply, visualization, sketching from memory, and composing...

February 14, 2013

Stories that Clamor for Attention

A few weeks ago, early planning started for this summer’s Fiction Intensive at UC Berkeley...

February 05, 2013

The Value of What I Teach

“Inch your way through dead dreams to another land.” —“Box of Rain,” Robert Hunter, lyrics;...

February 04, 2013

Amateur Mentors

For Katherine Diop Plod on, you Angels say, do better aspire higher And one day...

January 2013

January 28, 2013

Remembering the Sabbath

I was recently in an e-mail exchange with someone regarding my refusal to force my...

January 23, 2013

Commonplacing

Encore Guest Post by Ann Conway Here in central Maine, the world has come down...

January 21, 2013

Writing in the Age of Unbelief

Years ago I was at a panel discussion featuring several Catholic authors when someone asked...

January 21, 2013

Secession, or Why This New Yorker Won’t Be Joining the Enlightened States of America

Shortly after the November presidential election, I was sent an e-mail on the assumption that...

January 19, 2013

A Reading with Kelly Foster

If you’re a Good Letters reader in the Seattle era, blogger emerita Kelly Foster, now...

January 11, 2013

Whispers of Faith in a Postmodern World

The Wall Street Journal featured this article by Image founder and editor Gregory Wolfe on Friday,...

January 04, 2013

Reynolds Price and Me: The Tale of Two Rhodes Scholars

Part Two Guest Post By Casey N. Cep Continued from yesterday. Years passed and fewer...

January 03, 2013

Reynolds Price and Me: The Tale of Two Rhodes Scholars

Part One Guest Post By Casey N. Cep Fifty years ago Reynolds Price slithered onto...

December 2012

December 27, 2012

Come Before Winter Part Two

Continued from yesterday. Paul faced the winter of death, and Timothy faces the winter of...

December 25, 2012

Come Before Winter Part One

Every year when I was young, as the vibrant colors of West Virginia’s fall foliage...

November 2012

November 30, 2012

The Cost of Writing the Truth

I remember my mother used to go to bed for the day. The blackness of...

October 2012

October 19, 2012

The Unbearable Badness of Ayn Rand

My good friend Marcelo has decided to read Ayn Rand’s fiction, to “see what all...

October 04, 2012

Words both Real and True

I belong to a movie group that meets monthly in one another’s living rooms...

October 03, 2012

The Tower of Light

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the makings of a...

September 2012

September 30, 2012

Teaching and Seeing

Not yet a month into the semester, my students and I move cautiously around one...

September 21, 2012

The Theological Imagination of David Foster Wallace, Part Two

Continued from yesterday. In his now infamous 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster...

September 20, 2012

The Theological Imagination of David Foster Wallace, Part One

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 there was much speculation and spilling of...

September 10, 2012

A Heart Exposed

By Jessica Eddings-Roeser Guest Post My husband is asleep in bed, snuggled under our powder...

September 06, 2012

Poetry as Balance Beam

Because I don’t currently have a television, I wasn’t able to catch much of this...

August 2012

August 24, 2012

Dear Diary

For my ninth birthday, I was given a green leather-bound diary with a lock and...

August 20, 2012

Rediscovering Rilke

Like many people, I discovered the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke in college. I took...

August 17, 2012

My Online Footprint

Part Two: Repentance In Part One of this post, aptly subtitled “Resistance” by our new...

August 14, 2012

Shaping the Heart

The following post is an edited version of the commencement address given at the graduation...