Please see the new page (link here) for a haiku a day. Toward the end of 2020, during the Christian season of Advent, my sister Deb and I determined to write a haiku each day until Christmas. We shared those with each other along the way, in the process sharing a fragment of a moment …
“The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses,” E. L. Doctorow observed. How? Why? And what about this whole crazy business, the idiosyncratic process, angst and euphoria of writing in the first place? These are are some of the wide-ranging things that author Meredith Cole and I explore with special guests on The …
What is it about an other that can be so… well, whatever you wouldn’t come up with yourself? When it comes to creativity — making something new whether on canvas, with sound, in writing, or out of clay – most people work alone. It’s a solitary life, the way of an artist, isn’t it? Then …
This morning, I ran across Cristina Peri Rossi’s State of Exile. Or rather, I learned of its existence, of her work, her experience as a woman without country… finding a way to live new. I happened on it through Ginsberg’s Kaddish as published by the wonderful City Lights Books, San Fran in handy pocket size. …
At what point in writing does one book become another? In the editing, rewriting, re-editing and re-rewriting of a project engaged over years, should we just call it a different book? (The shadow question is, of course, at what point does one pack it away, brush off one’s hands, and turn to something else?) In …
*A version of this article is also available on The Huffington Post. “We, three kings of Orient are,” intone the guys in robes and crowns. But were they really three, or kings for that matter, and from where exactly did they come? Every year at this time, questions about historicity – what really happened (and …
It was only when I began revising an essay that I discovered what it was about. I had thought the piece would be a simple meditation on what I’d learned about Cyrus the Great over these past few years – the sexy “messiah” byline, author of the first declaration of human rights, all that… and …
It was a great honor to be invited to give the Dillard series of lectures at Trinity United Methodist Church this year. Wow, what a turn-out! and what wonderfully warm, hospitable, and thoughtful folks I met there, people deeply invested in the pursuit of understanding, committed as much to the humbling business of query and …
What if I took a psalm a day, read it, took a walk, and returned to my desk with jot-able thoughts? There are the year-of-living-some-way books, the applications-of-a-classic books, the travel-across-somewhere or enduring-peculiar-deprivations books,… Why not a scholar’s-nonscholarship-of-a-biblical-book book? Turns out, there are several reasons not, not for me, anyway, not now. The house where …
I have been writing in a closet lately. It’s not that I don’t have another, actually quite wonderful place to work. But that other place is a super old building (tough to say – early to mid 1800’s?) that’s not quite water tight, and it’s been a rainy summer. Besides, the view from there is …
