Before 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 […]

Rash Award in Fiction

Thanks 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 […]

New Essay

The 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) […]

Apologia Crucis

Any 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 […]

New Poems Published

Again, 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.  […]

Christmas Poems

The 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 […]

New Story

Fathom Magazine awarded and published one of my stories ––Once in This Bread–– this morning. Below is an excerpt (and link): On the college library steps, she finds Adam reclined, waiting on her. He eats a sandwich from a paper bag while the vestige of summer heat slides out of October. “This might be the […]

Beginning

I always wanted to be an animator. Then I tried and gave up after 10 seconds. I did this for Ryan Culwell’s song “Piss Down in My Bones”. It took me several weeks to get this far. I felt like that scene in Parks and Rec when Ben Wyatt realizes that he spent six weeks […]

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday. G K Chesterton (via revenantwaltz)

Reading Dr. King: Part 1

In signing [the Voting Rights Bill of 1965], the President announced that “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that’s ever been won on any battlefield… today we strike away the last major shackle of…fierce and ancient bonds.” One year later, some of the people who had been brutalized in Selma and […]