Boundaries Part I

“Thank you for taking time to visit with me again,” I said to Pastor Tim Bohlmann at Bethany Lutheran Church in Waynesboro, Virginia. We sat across from one another at a small table in his office. Light reflecting off the snow outside the windows cast the room in...

Devotion

After 9/11, writer Dani Shapiro, her husband journalist-turned-screenwriter Michael Maren and their young son Jacob moved from New York City to rural Connecticut. She tried to have another child, but suffered miscarriages, and now was in her forties. Jacob was...

Rules

One day at the Recovery Café, James raised his voice, disturbing others. This wasn’t his first incident. He was out of control and probably off his meds. “You have gotten yourself cut off from almost every place of support in this city,” one of the counselors said to...

Tales of Two Cities

Istanbul: Memoirs and the City by Orhan Pamuk and Venice: A New history by Thomas F. Madden – tales of two cities. Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, blends history, black-and-white photographs of his family and the city, art and literature...

Callings

Magazines had piled up: three weeks of New Yorkers, The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books, Writer’s Chronicle, Smithsonian, Creative Nonfiction, Poets & Writers, and a few education periodicals. I also had several unread e-books...