religion & spirituality

4 writers on their messy process

October 4, 2011 | 8 Comments

Bill Roorbach has instituted a new feature over at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, an author interview. The first, with John J. Clayton, marking the appearance of his new novel, Mitzvah Man, is remarkable for being done all in scene—Bill interviewed him at his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts—and for Clayton’s thoughts on just what God truly is. Or may be. On his laborious daily struggle to write:  I do what I can to avoid writing fiction, because writing fiction is …

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The quotes on my desktop

June 23, 2011 | 10 Comments

There are quotes about writing on my desktop. Actually, they’re in a Word file, at the top of a journal I’ve kept for the last year as I produced a fourth version of my memoir. I don’t make journal entries every day, usually when things go really badly or really well. Or when I notice something I want to remember—like the fact that I won’t be able to remember or recreate or explain how I interwove narrative threads over the …

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Thoughts at Eastertime, too

April 22, 2011 | 9 Comments

This is my second, and final, excerpt from my memoir’s Epilogue. At this point, after the death of our farm helper, Sam, we’ve sold the sheep flock we tended for a decade. My mother has just died. We’re getting ready to list our farm for sale. We’ve been attending a country church for almost a year, and after thirteen years in Appalachian Ohio we feel at last at home as we prepare to leave. February 15, 2009. “Have you heard …

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Thoughts on Palm Sunday

April 17, 2011 | 8 Comments

Below is part of the new Epilogue of the memoir I’m writing. The book is about my and my family’s experiences living in Appalachian Ohio for thirteen years, years in which our children grew up, my wife, Kathy, rose through the ranks of a university, and I worked in book publishing, taught, and ran our sheep farm.  Now we’re on the cusp of leaving, a bittersweet time. My mother is ill. We’ve become empty-nesters. I’ve delivered a eulogy, in a …

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Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory,’ ver. 2.0

January 28, 2011 | 3 Comments

Olga Khotiashova responded to my review of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory by posting as a comment a lovely essay, which I have also featured as a guest post, below; it unites her personal history with her reading of the book and with literary and political analysis. A mathematician by education, she now lives in Houston. Reflections on Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory by a Russian native speaker recently immigrated to the USA By Olga Khotiashova I read the famous Lolita …

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With a song in our hearts

December 13, 2010 | 9 Comments

Touring mainland China with a college choir stirs the spirit. The consciousness of divinity is divinity itself. The more we wake to holiness, the more of it we give birth to, the more we introduce, expand, and multiply it on earth, the more “God is on the field.”—Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (page 40; reviewed previously) I’ve just returned from ten days in mainland China, touring with Otterbein University’s choir, which gave concerts in Beijing, Tianjin, and Xi’an. We got …

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Review: ‘Name All the Animals’

March 28, 2010 | 6 Comments

Name All the Animals: A Memoir by Alison Smith. Scribner. 319 pages. In 1984, a small, happy family lives in Rochester, New York: a resolute, devout mother; a dreamy, spiritual father; a quiet, competent boy; a watchful, bookish girl. But they’re on the brink of disaster, and, almost immediately, it happens: one day in late July the boy, eighteen, dies in a fiery automobile crash. Nothing will ever be the same. They become secretive, walled off their separate grieving, as …

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