I hadn’t read Boethius or Petrarch in 1967. If I had, I may not have been so taken, when one late spring afternoon, I read Wendell Berry’s two-sentence poem “To Think of the Life of a Man.” I read it standing alongside the shelf of literary journals in the Johns Hopkins bookstore. I had come to be there by a circuitous route. I had dropped out of college, been rejected by the draft, returned to college, married and with my wife risked all we had to attend the Hopkins Writing Seminars on the chance that I might become a poet and novelist. Each morning my wife went to her job and I went to my desk. Afternoons I went to the library or the bookstore where I read but rarely bought. In nearby Washington, the first protests against the Vietnam … 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 »

I became a perfectionist sometime in middle school.  This was when I started to read the Bible on my own, and discovered the verse “Whatsoever you do, do it wholeheartedly unto The Lord.” Until then, I only tried when I felt like it; when the task seemed fun or interesting.  After reading this verse, however, I felt compelled to vacuum under every piece of furniture, be sure every dish I washed was spotless, and never say anything mean to anyone.  I became a much better worker, but work also became weighty.  For one thing, vacuuming thoroughly took a lot more time and effort, and for another, it mattered.  If I didn’t do well, I was failing God.  I didn’t believe God would reject me if I didn’t do things perfectly, but I believed He’d be disappointed, which would be almost … Read More »

{an interview with writer, David Ebenbach}

when you picture someone reading your 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?

Well, when I’m in the midst of writing, I try not to picture anyone—except my characters, anyway. Otherwise it’s like I’m sitting at my computer while a roomful of people stares awkwardly at me. Once I’m done writing, however, I do think about readers. I somewhat sympathize with Mary Oliver, who wrote, “I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now.” In other words, I like to think that my work touches enough of the universal that it can be meaningful to people in … Read More »

I am a dreamer.  I believe that a person can will a dream into reality.  It takes time.  It takes effort.  It takes persistence.  It requires that the dreamer eliminate “can’t” from his or her vocabulary.  Certain names come to mind as I write this: St Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi.  After finishing Nonviolent Soldier of Islam not long ago, I add Badshah Khan to the list.

I believe that some dreams must exist in the minds of many before they can be willed into being.  
Peace. Justice.  Freedom.  The Reign of God.  Small shifts bringing us closer to the Reign have happened over many generations, through the commitment of a relatively few dedicated souls.

 We have yet to reach that ultimate dream, but I believe that someday we will, even as I doubt … 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 »

I’m a young writer in my first year of college at Asbury University. As with most college level courses, the classes I’m taking are very writing intensive. Between my regular classes, my creative writing fiction class, writing for antler, and occasionally writing for my college newspaper, I’m writing a story, sketch, article, or essay of 500 words or more pretty much every other day.

I love to write—I’m absolutely passionate about it. But because I have so many prescribed and predetermined pieces, I often forget the real reason that I should write: to glorify God.

Usually I write with the following goals in mind: to get the assignment completed as quickly as possible, to earn a good grade, or to intrigue or help others. These are not necessarily ignoble ambitions—they have their time and place. However, this should not be the outcome … 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 »

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 »

Last spring, I wrote a piece for this website on the poetry of Maurice Manning, whose work reflects and draws on the rich language, stories and landscape of his native Kentucky.

One of the things I learned from writing that reflection is that place itself is a kind of language. And like any language, it informs our view of the world and gives shape to our thoughts as we try to make sense of the world around us.

I believe that the place we are from is in our blood, whether we like it or not. I believe that the land gets under our skin. And I know that, for all its faults, for all its shallowness and brokenness and glitter that isn’t gold, California is under mine.
Hopeless dreams, a rootless restlessness, and heartbreaking proximity to a neverending sea are … Read More »