Here’s a post for Luther’s Ideas and Creations blog in which I try to balance pessimism about the future of print with reasons – and there ARE reasons – for hope. (Hint: students.)
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Thanks to Decorah News.com’s Ben Gardner (my former Paideia student!) for this lovely story about Eldorado, Iowa and how it came to be.
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I’m so honored that Orion Magazine has featured my essay “Gaze Upon This World,” which appeared in its Spring 2018 issue, in its feature “Father’s Day: Top Five Articles About Dads.” The piece is print-only, but here’s an excerpt from the beginning: I’m biking through the dark in the smoky chill of October. Overhead, a […]
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Here’s a lovely account by fellow writer Martyn Crucefix of my workshop “Looking Like Keats: Observation and Inspiration for Your Writing” at the Keats House in Hampstead on May 25. Brother John, as we affectionately called him, was looking down on us from this portrait, hanging in the Chester Room, the whole time – and […]
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Easter Sunday, 2019. Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square. Extinction Rebellion and Brexit and Eucharist. Two hundred years on from Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” and Keats’ Odes. What if this is the site of Incarnation, here and now? parliament square easter sunday Carn, the root: meat, flesh. Incarnation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. […]
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“[We] never turn sentimental about something of real value — wilderness, wild animals, small towns, baseball, mountain music, our privacy — until the way we live and do business has pressed it to the edge of extinction. Then we administer affectionate last rites to everything we failed to love enough.” – Hal Crowther My boxing […]
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Did I ever think I’d be writing the words, “My first novel is published today?” Not really. But I am. And here it is, from Bowen Press Books. As a twenty-one-year-old dreaming of being a writer, I never could have imagined I’d be sitting here (in the British Library, no less!) marking this day. Nor […]
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With thanks to Robert Hand and the team at Bowen Press Books and to the students of my first-session “Writing in London” class, who offered comments on previous versions that have been incorporated here. Can’t wait to see it in book form.
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At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]
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Hunkered on a funeral urn, he howls into the void. Howls? Is that mouth open or closed? Is that even a mouth? In the dim gallery, walls dappled all around with trees, I circle him like John Keats at the Grecian urn. We’re in this forest together now. Dug out of the earth in Spong […]
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