Category archives: Creative Nonfiction

Teaching a Stone to Talk: “An Expedition to the Pole,” p. 31

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing,… continue reading »

Wendy and Nathan break up

This book, I wrote in my last post, seems to mirror my circumstances. It got weirder when Wendy and her boyfriend Nathan started having problems. The chapter about their break up started like this: It needs to be said that… continue reading »

No surprise.

“That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created.” — Annie Dillard  

Surviving Turkey

I can’t sleep, so a blog post. The scariest moment of my life didn’t scare me at all. I don’t understand it, because looking back I’m nervous for myself. I get jittery. I keep myself from falling asleep. I was… continue reading »

Poetry to creative nonfiction and back again

I read an essay earlier this semester in Creative Nonfiction about how you should write a poem before you write a CNF piece, to get all your thoughts out. Interesting. I’ve never tried it before–usually I do the opposite–but I’m… continue reading »

Bird by bird by bird

“… Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out… continue reading »

Holy the Firm, pp. 60-62

His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind from birth, “Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Christ, who spat on the ground, made a mud of his spittle… continue reading »

Grace grows in winter

Grace doesn’t grow in the springtime. Grace grows in the winter, when everything’s dead, when life is the brown sludge beneath your rubber boots. It comes as a surprise. We talk about life as having seasons. In the spring, life… continue reading »

Jesus Wore Klash

The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.—Kurdish men wear these funny shoes called klash. They’re handmade, hand-sown clogs with a hard sole and white top. Ever since Lydia and I first arrived at the Sulaimania airport,… continue reading »

Georgia peach

“We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God.” Annie Dillard — I am supposed to… continue reading »

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