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June 2018

June 27, 2018

The Summer I Wasn’t Attacked By a Shark

Jaws is released the summer I turn fourteen, and my friends and I spend every...

May 2018

May 22, 2018

Recently Soft Hearts and Thin Skin

I found myself engaged in another maddening conversation with my four-year old daughter. We were...

May 04, 2018

Poetry Friday: “Shortnin’ Bread”

We sang it, too. In 1961, Mr. D taught our fourth grade music class folk...

February 2018

February 28, 2018

I Promise My Kid’s Not Racist

The waiting room was filled with the kinds of people one sees in my town:...

February 09, 2018

Poetry Friday: “Relic”

They say the flu circulating this season begins with the sensation of having swallowed a...

July 2017

July 07, 2017

Poetry Friday: “The Field”

I find solace in the natural world, in those precious moments alone, outside, away from...

June 2017

June 29, 2017

My Own Desert (Tortoise) Father

This post originally appeared on “Good Letters” on July 21, 2014. I didn’t spend enough...

June 26, 2017

Practicing Presence, Part 1

The following two-part post was originally delivered as the 2017 commencement address for Trinity Academy...

March 2017

March 24, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Love’s Last” by Christian Wiman

The spring equinox was on Monday. I am slowly seeing a flush of new life...

February 2017

February 03, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Bewilder”

This is a poem about scale, about the awesome power of the Creator, who in...

December 2016

December 02, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Advent”

Of course you’ve heard of “El Niño.” And you know that it refers to the...

November 2016

November 30, 2016

The Ghosts of Home

When I visit my family in northern Minnesota, I find myself on the same roads...

August 2016

August 16, 2016

The Neglected Garden, Part II

Continued from yesterday. The dollhouse my father was building for me was still unfinished when...

August 15, 2016

The Neglected Garden, Part I

When my father built the house where I was born, the land was flat and...

July 2016

July 15, 2016

Poetry Friday: “I Am Poured Out Like Water”

What attracts me to this poem is something deliberately absent yet evocatively present: baptism in...

June 2016

June 14, 2016

Fifty Shores of Grief

I write this the evening of June 12, 2016, the day forty-nine people died in the...

March 2016

March 28, 2016

Fairies and Mystics

On the first day of summer, my daughter created a makeshift microphone in the backyard...

March 16, 2016

What Happened to Fun?

I was so good, and for such a long time, two weeks at least of...

March 07, 2016

The Abandoned, Broken, and Burned

By the time you read this, inshallah, we will have the new dishwasher purchased and...

March 01, 2016

So Much for the American Dream

My six-year-old son caught me off guard. “I wish we had a backyard,” he said...

February 2016

February 17, 2016

Drive-By Memory

My first memory takes place in Lakewood, CA, a small suburb south of Los Angeles....

January 2016

January 19, 2016

Eden’s Border: Where Objects Have Stories

We’ll have to go back to the gun shop today. There’s no way around it....

November 2015

November 24, 2015

The Tyrannical Self-Gaze

I'm doing most of my walking after dark these days as night comes a little...

September 2015

September 16, 2015

Not Your Mother’s Book Tour

In my world, a typical book signing involves sitting behind a small publisher’s table at...

June 2015

June 11, 2015

Prayers in the River

I stand hip-deep in a river, casting into the eddies. I am not the kind...

June 02, 2015

The Beautiful Attitudes

By Dyana Herron I clearly remember the last day of being nine. I stood in...

May 2015

May 15, 2015

Go Ahead and Have the Damn Children!

I was working from home a few days ago, on a day when both of...

May 07, 2015

Sugar, Sugar, Part 1: June 10, 2011

I’ve written before about my father’s alcoholism. From my adolescence until his death, I spent...

May 06, 2015

My Rainbow Connection, Disconnected

By Chad Thomas Johnston It was a Saturday night and my wife, Becki, wanted to...

April 2015

April 22, 2015

For the Love of Money

My husband and I took a spring break trip to the central coast of California,...