The now disbanded songwriting duo Harrod & Funck played in a now defunct coffee shop called The One Way Café in Morgantown, West Virginia.

These days I would avoid an establishment called the One Way Café, preferring the Everyway Café or Leave My Theology Out of It And Just Make Me Some Damn Coffee Café.

I’d heard of Harrod & Funck from my friend Jessie, who’d heard about them from her sister, Michaelanne. Jessie also turned me on to Radiohead. She got me to read The Brothers K and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Jessie and I lived with two other girls in an old, carved-up house on Willey Street. Yellow-orange carpet covered the wall by the stairs, as though it had crossed the floor with such gusto that it just couldn’t stop.

It was 1997, the year that Joshua Harris published his crazy popular … Read More »

{in this post, blogger jeremy statton reflects on how writing has changed his life.}

The last time I was given a writing assignment was my freshman year in college for a history class. And that moment almost became the last time I expressed myself through the written word.

I was headed to medical school, a life dedicated to science. My goal was to solve the world’s problems through surgeries and medicines. To me writing was a nuisance. An undesired chore.

Fourteen years later, however, I finally put pen to paper again, and it changed my life.

The Plan

As a senior in high school I decided to become an orthopedic surgeon. The course of my life was set. College. Medical school. Marriage crammed into the empty space somewhere. Maybe kids. Then Residency.

My plan was like the life of science I pursued. Precise. Without error.

For the … Read More »

{Lore Ferguson on the power of remembering and when we should choose to remember.}

It is morning and early. Saturday morning is the only morning we can’t hear the traffic from 170, which can sound like a river, rushing and wild if I let myself think so, and no horns sound or brakes screech. The world is sleeping in.

In Texas they build homes with north facing windows, which is the exact opposite of the North (where we build homes with south facing windows), but which is a very sensible thing to do here. The only window in our home that gets any sunlight at all is the laundry room and so I have found my morning coffee tastes best in here, so long as I can keep lint dust from getting in it.

I sit on top of the dryer, my feet … Read More »

when you picture someone reading writing, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others?

I write for the wounded ones and for the wounded places in my own heart.

When I began writing my memoir at Hamline University, I was very angry with Christians, with “the church people,” as I called them then. They had hurt me in deep ways, failed me in my darkest moments, and as I wrote about it, I found that every single person in my classes could relate. Everyone has an old hurt from a person of faith, everyone has a story.

I hope my writing appeals across the board, but the people that are the closest to my heart are … Read More »