writing

One highlight of the year was a busy week in a cabin with three friends and a dog.

Rebecca McCarthy traces Norman Maclean’s poetic sensibilities from his University of Chicago classroom to A River Runs Through It.

Rosalind Brown’s debut novel could be understood as a midrash on Montaigne’s metaphor of the mind as runaway horse.

I’m trying to live as Haruki Murakami writes: with questions but not an end in mind. 

Marriage is an opportunity to keep working on the same story each day.

Buechner never stopped searching his own life for clues to the presence of God.

As it tells the story of our time, the Century makes readers and writers of us all.

It doesn’t matter what genre Translating Myself and Others is. What matters is that it is irresistibly immersive.

Lying in bed and listening, I heard devotion. And creativity. And mystery.

But it has helped me to survive them.

This is true of failures in writing, in faith, in life itself.

How do you construct a narrative in the aftermath of communal trauma?

The Weil siblings and the dense worlds of their minds

Can we cross them? Is it worth it?

The poet’s essays are winsome and articulate, wide-ranging and intellectually rigorous.

While women have historically been bound by family obligations, household chores, or desperate poverty, there have been monasteries throughout history that allowed some to focus on their vocation without those typical pressures.

We cannot always create something out of nothing. Rather, we change what already exists, and these tiny alterations give us meaning and purpose in our lives.

This year, as I meditated on my longing, my pregnant hope, I located it on that table, somewhere between the salad and the ravioli, when our imperfect lives came together.

Do women have to trade intimacy for trust in ways that men do not? If we do, should we stop? Are we playing into stereotypes? Are we inviting people to take us less seriously?