On a recent visit to the Art Institute with Tim and a friend, I dragged a little into the area of the galleries of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean arts that contains one of my favorites, the Ando Gallery. We had already been at the museum for a couple hours and I was running out of […]
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Elena Ferrante, the Italian author of My Beautiful Friend, has a book of four essays out titled, In The Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. These are deeply thought out and intimately written essays about some of the influences on her disciplines of reading and writing. She writes about finding her own voice […]
Temma and I got our little tree trimmed with all our ornaments this afternoon. That is always a nostalgic task. Many of the ornaments come from friends, as far back as when Temma was a baby and coming off life-support at the hospital after her cardiac arrest. Tim and I came home to our apartment […]
Tim suggested I write something about this painting of our daughter Temma, titled Rapt, meaning paying rapt attention. This is a state of seeing, listening, waiting, wondering, for something that is coming, like Advent. Temma seems to be ever in the season of Advent. Today, as we cross over once again from Advent to the […]
Growing up in Michigan is a story of winter, at least in my memory. The harshness of winter when things cannot grow in the ground and the fun of winter tobogganing at the golf course hill, snowboarding on the small hill in our backyard, sledding, snowball fights, and walking out on the big ice waves […]
Last night, Tim and I finished watching the series, The Underground Railroad, based on Colson Whitehead’s book by the same name. I’m haunted by the characters depicted on the screen. I finished reading the book a couple of years ago now, so watching the written images come to life on the screen brought the characters […]
My best friend, Susie, from my Kindergarten class, died before the end of the school year. I keep a photo of her in my scrapbook, in the first part where the pages are still neatly arranged. After about twenty pages the neatness ends and the rest of the scraps are thrown in. I forgot about […]
Yesterday I finished reading Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own, by Eddie S. Glauber Jr. I read it for a book-discussion group and I’m so glad that I did. I have not read all of James Baldwin’s writings, and I know that I will never be able to do […]
Is it the ongoing isolation of a pandemic that is the cause of my lack of concentration? Is it my age? The change of going from weekly writing of sermons to my own writing? I don’t feel a restless “cabin fever” so much as a desire to watch and listen. There’s a lot to see […]
In the three months of my retirement from local church ministry I’ve been doing what I love the most—reading and writing. One of the books I took off my shelf to reread is Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, which led me to another of her books off my shelf, Home, and that led me to her […]
Writing From the Margins 