One of the classes I’m teaching this quarter is a Creative Writing elective. Hardly a day goes by that one of the students declares he or she is unable to write anything because of “writer’s block.” My response is generally one of amusement, since they appear to have
Language was opening me up in ways I couldn’t explain and I assumed it was part of the apprenticeship of a poet. (Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand ) apprentice c.1300, from O.Fr. aprentiz "someone learning" (13c.), from aprendre (Mod.Fr. apprendre ) "to learn,
When it comes to faith, I started early. I was five years old when I walked down the aisle at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston, Texas and gave my heart to Jesus. I was the oldest son and namesake of a Southern Baptist preacher, the son of two parents who
I’m writing this morning from a hotel in Napier, Illinois, which borders Wheaton, Illinois, home of Wheaton College, which, for the last four years, has been home for my nephew, Scott, who graduated yesterday. As much of the family as could get here gathered to celebrate him and his
As I remember we sang a lot about tin soldiers even as our friends and brothers drew lots to see who would wade through rice paddies and not come home or come home dead inside I was thirteen the spring of the Kent State shootings tin soldiers and Nixon coming
In my new vocational incarnation, I am reading more, both books I’ve had stacked around for awhile and those I’m reading again with students. My tenth grade class is reading one of my favorite novels, Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country , which tells the story of Stephen
I preached this morning at our church here in Durham as the culmination of a study we did on the Book of Job. This is the text of my sermon, "The Last Word." Night Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my
We sat at the oyster bar at Felix’s in the middle of a N’awlins afternoon, eating fried food and listening to the Chi-Lites, the O’Jays, even Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes sing Seventies soul as the smiling shucker offered up oysters and opinions, both free
Ginger and I leave in the morning to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary on the twenty-first, and we're going to do it in New Orleans, thanks to our friend Jay. So I offer a little traveling music, that is to say, some of the songs we'
adjectives attach like grammatical barnacles explanatory sidecars directing distinctions guitars didn’t need them until someone found a Fender and plugged in so we pulled out acoustic and electric to state the obvious writing goes back as far as the stories and then one day some scheduler needed a name
I have to admit I didn’t know it was a hymn the first time I heard it. I was in tenth grade, living in Fort Worth, Texas during our year of leave from the mission field (as they used to say) and completely taken with American popular radio. It
Through all of our years in Massachusetts, we had more than one Easter that left the children hunting for eggs in the snow. North Carolina offers warmer climes, but snow of a different sort: we’ve been knee deep in pollen. And I’ve sneezed and sorted and snuffled all