When I was a kid, someone wrote a book about my hometown of Umbarger, Texas. It was a big to-do because no one writes books about Umbarger. I read the book and learned a little about my grandparents as young people. It all became the milieu of my growing up. When I was 30, I […]
Read MoreHe sat leaning forward in the seat with his elbows on the empty seatback in front of him and his chin on his forearms and he watched the play with great intensity. He’d the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was […]
Read More…it is widely recognized today that a painted landscape, however realistic in appearance, is never a pure copy of nature and therefor can never be rendered value free. Implied in the artist’s choice of motifs and his pictorial representation is a certain view of reality. This is conditioned by the many factors of that make […]
Read MoreAnd I remember too, how we confronted those others, those who had set me here in this Eden, whom we knew though we didn’t know, who were unfamiliar in their familiarity, who trailed their words to us through blood and violence and ridicule and condescension with drawling smiles, and who exhorted and threatened, intimidated with […]
Read MoreBefore she fell silent our mama… told stories about our great-granny and other ancestors…, who called birds down from the sky and healed wounds and made love potions and sent their spirits soaring out of their bodies. When I asked if it was all true, she said, “It’s not for me to tell you what’s […]
Read MoreThanks to the Broad River Review in North Carolina for awarding my story “Tender Mercies of the Wicked” with the 2018 Rash Award in Fiction. I’m especially happy that Amy Greene was the judge. Please go get a copy of one of her books. I’ll put a link here when the issue with my story […]
Read MoreThe kind folks at Reel World Theology are publishing an interesting series called “If These Films Could Talk” which take two films with similar themes but from different decades to see what they might have to say to each other. The series editor Blake Collier asked me to contribute, so I chose Cool Hand Luke (1967) […]
Read MoreAny apologetics worth its salt has to recognize the barriers to faith—to sympathetically recognize what Alvin Plantinga calls “defeaters” for faith. What does Marilynne Robinson’s apologia for Christianity have to say in response to a protest like [Ta-Nehisi] Coates’s? It can’t simply be an alternative history, correcting Coates’s blind spots, enumerating all the good things […]
Read MoreAgain, Fathom Magazine published a set of my poems. I’m glad they’ve allowed me to be a part of their project. I hope these poems are helpful for you. Names of Crops The man had a hawk’s vision: So far away, the feral form floated in the fenceline I mimicked his naming of nearly nothing. […]
Read MoreThe kind folks at Fathom Magazine have published a series of Christmas poems I’ve written over the years. Click through the links to read them, but please stick around and browse their magazine. Anno Domini In the year of our Lord was a great hush; 400 years since He’d spoken a word. No man or woman […]
Read More