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 my previous post I talked about the importance of silent waiting. While I hold that adding regular intervals of waiting worship to one’s religious life is optimal, I realize not everyone will go that route. So in terms of practical application I’d like to focus on a method that combines verbal queries with intervals of expectant silence.  One such method is Rex Ambler’s Experiments in the Light, which has proved a powerful method for many people. As it is most commonly practiced, an individual—alone or in a group—reads the following prompts aloud with five to six minutes of silence between each prompt.

1. Relax body and mind. Make yourself comfortable….Be relaxed, but alert. Let yourself become wholly receptive.

2. In this receptive state of mind, let the real concerns of your life emerge. Ask yourself, ‘What is really going on in … Read More »

One of the most mysterious things about Christian poets today is how little we talk about the poetry of the Bible. We have… It’s true we might sprinkle Bible-y stuff here or there in our poems, but we have yet to explore how the very structures and techniques of Hebrew poetry could inspire our work on a more fundamental, craft level.

I think there may be a few reasons for our timidity:

1) Some writers already feel conflicted about either their faith or their faith in their writing. It’s both a personal struggle and a cultural one. How do we speak authentically about our own faith experience (and what do we even mean by that?)—and in a way that is comprehensible (acceptable?) to the world at large? So we attempt to keep it light by using the Bible in ironic or literary … Read More »

Whenever I find myself in any kind of slump — whether it be in writing, exercising, or praying — I try to resist my first natural inclination toward giving up entirely.  One of the best remedies I’ve found to combat my defeatist tendencies has been to gain a new perspective, and I suppose that’s what I was searching for when I found myself signing up for meditation classes at the Passionist Earth and Spirit Center a couple months ago.   I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I know I couldn’t have been the only one in my class who had scenes from Eat, Pray, Love flash to mind.  In search of a renewed perspective and needing to find balance amidst demands from work and school, I thought that this might bring a sense of serenity and calm to my … Read More »

A few years ago I was traveling home from Montana to Illinois when I decided to detour three hundred miles to Kathleen Norris’s town of Lemmon, North Dakota.  I didn’t tell her I was coming.  I just stopped in.  Not that I saw her, and I doubt that she even knew I was there.

Norris is the author of such books as Dakota, Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace, and moved to North Dakota after living in the bright, shining din of New York City. I wanted to see where she writes of isolation and spirituality in a place she describes as “the high plains desert, full of sage and tumbleweed and hardy shortgrass.”

Half an hour from her town, I drove into a thunderstorm and the world went dramatic — dark and moody with hard driving rain.  
As I came around … Read More »

Having absorbed the music of the Psalms and having grasped something of the personal intensity of David’s lyrics, it was probably inevitable that when I discovered Wordsworth in my late teens I would succumb to his influence. His powerful emotions overwhelmed me, and it would be years before I could temper them with recollections in tranquility.

The Wordsworth who most attracted me was the Wordsworth of the Lucy poems.  I was a young man in love. When in my nineteenth year I gathered the poems I was writing into an awkward, halting manuscript, I chose a quatrain from one of them as an epigraph:

Strange fits of passion I have known:

And I will dare to tell,

But in the lover’s ear alone,

What once to me befell.

Some days, now, I think these lines are a bit precious, but I suspect that thought is a … Read More »

when you picture someone reading your poetry, 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?

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that I tend to write in short arcs and that I am madly in love with the chapbook. I think of the chapbook as a working-class, accessible means of getting poetry (or even fiction and non-fiction) into the hands of those who may not have the time or money to consume an entire book of poetry. So I feel like I’m writing for those people that crave a satisfying little holiday into poetry, something they can read on their lunch break or while the kids are napping, that feels complete, and that … Read More »

In an earlier essay, featured here on Antler, I attempted to establish the legitimacy and shape of a modern poetic-prophetic ministry. One of the claims of that piece was that a prophet does not choose their call to speak, but are themselves chosen by the Other. True as that may be it doesn’t follow that individuals can’t makes themselves more open to just such a call—or to any other form of Spirit-led service for that matter—and prepare themselves to carry it out. One of the most fundamental of these methods is the use of silent waiting.

While periods of silence may have some physiological and emotional benefits in and of themselves that isn’t our concern here. We are interested in silence as a tool—a method by which an individual may wait on the Lord, and through which the Word may come … Read More »

{ANTLER author tania runyan interview karen swallow prior, author of booked: literature in the soul of me, t.s. poetry press, 2012}

It’s embarrassing for me to recount, but when I was still young in my faith, I questioned whether I could major in English or writing. My thinking went like this: If I’m either for God or against him, and if most texts studied in literature courses are written by nonbelievers, then I’d be spending my days studying words against God. With the help of some spiritual mentors, I was able to free myself from that burden (although I still taped over all my secular albums with Keith Green). But many people go through their entire lives paralyzed by their perceived need to choose between right and wrong in every situation: what to read, what to watch and listen to, even … Read More »

It’s been five months since I quit teaching.  For three months I worked forty hours at Starbucks and read a lot: Hunger Games, The Lord of the Rings,  Psalms, Surprised by Joy, Letters to a Young Poet.  It’s been almost two months since I started work at a call center; forty hours there, twenty hours at Starbucks.  I had hoped to work two jobs through Christmas, but when I got home one day and couldn’t stop crying, I gave my two-weeks at Starbucks.  So now both familiar jobs, teaching and Starbucks, the ones that supported me in grad school, France, and when I returned to Louisville, are gone.

The reasons I’ve left these jobs are money and writing.  I can’t complain about money, really.  I have enough for rent and small luxuries, but not enough to save, travel, or buy my … Read More »