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Filtering by Category: General Curiosities
It's hard to excerpt poetry, but we wanted to give you a flavor of some of what's coming in 6.2. (Pre-sales will last only a little longer, folks. Order today!) This from a poem by John Gosslee about Abraham and Isaac:
He Could Not Count That High
The knife fresh off the whet-stone reflected the sun above them. Twigs cross-stacked, bent under body-weight and Issac’s throat was shaved.
I’ve met two kinds of cowboys in my life, the quiet type, and the talkative type. Can’t say which I’ve enjoyed more.
Read MoreIssue 6.2 poet Brett Foster thinks writing may be an act of devotion, but so can a lot of things if they're done "to Godward."
Read MoreI’m not saying that a poem needs to be “difficult” to be good. It should, however, work on enough levels that a reader can return to it and discover new ideas, memories, images, and questions with each reading. Agendas rarely do that.
Read MoreThe problem is that God himself is impractical. What other deity became a zygote, slid through a birth canal among animals, and lived a vagabond life with outcasts hanging on his robe?
Read MoreToday, I still enjoy traveling the long, quiet distances to finding the exact word needed to make the poem “click,” as Yeats said, “like the closing of a box.”
Read MoreThis, really, is what Thin Blue Smoke is about: people who need one another, and who share their understandings of how things work while the silent, patient, ever-moving I Am slowly fills in the gaps. The results are funny, tearful, thought-provoking, and, like a big mound of pulled chuck with a side of greens, deeply satisfying.
Read MoreA critical dialogue between two Christian viewers of The Dark Knight Rises, at Burnside Writers Collective. I wrote the piece after being unable to decide between my aesthetic and moral appreciation of the film and my political reservations about it.
Read MorePoet Barbara Crooker opens to serendipity in writing and reimagines the spiritual poem through a popular foamy candy.
Read More“Behold I Make All Things New” picks up the story when Berna is struggling to know her duties as a wife and mother after she becomes romantically involved with a church member. She realizes that she has married Zechariah for the wrong reasons, and believes that her entire life as a minister's wife is a lie.
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6.1 author Max Harris offers a brief manifesto of sorts on writing stories as a Christian.
Jesus puzzled his audiences with short stories. We call them parables. The disciples wanted to know their meaning. Sometimes Jesus explained; other times, he didn’t. Embedded in the gospels’ creative nonfiction, Jesus’s parables are stories within stories.
The Holy Spirit crafts gazillions of life stories, in which the characters come alive and insist on shaping their own destinies. Patiently, over a lifetime, the Spirit shapes weak material into something beautiful and true. Even the worst he never discards. A small tweaking of some detail or a sudden flash of light might yet breathe new life into flawed characters.
The Father loves each and every part of the creation. The Father eschews ironic distancing. Faith believes that God’s love is strong enough to forge a happy ending for the whole creation. But not yet.
I wonder what part my poor stories play in this long narrative.
Max Harris was born in England, received his PhD from the University of Virginia, and now lives in Wisconsin. He is the author of five nonfiction books, including Theater and Incarnation and Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools, and several short stories. Writing fiction allows him to make stuff up.
These days, I am both painfully and joyfully aware that I similarly live in more than one world—the cynical and the sublime, the practical and the imaginative, the mundane and the miraculous, the horrific and the heavenly seemingly crisscrossing mid-air.
Read More6.1 creative nonfiction author Patrice Gopo knows her piece about race, faith, and cross-cultural work isn't exactly the kind of thing you will read and say, "Hey, that's beautiful!"
Read MoreTo do anything worthwhile, I think, poems have to matter—to someone, in some place—at least in the generating of the poem itself. I want to feel like someone cares, even if they don't.
Read More6.1 poet Jill Reid found community in words, and now she is working on a Holy Spirit building one word at a time.
Read MoreIt's Ash Wednesday, and 6.1 poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell heads to a bar full of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and others. She has a black ash cross on her forehead.
Read More6.1 fiction author Joshua Hren describes the role of short stories in a tragic world.
Read More6.1 fiction contributor Caralyn Davis describes her ineluctably Christian imagination. Last week I crunched my way through four colors of cauliflower: standard creamy white; rich amethyst; Day-Glo cheddar; and a white tinged with veins of violet. The web of tailgate markets crisscrossing my adopted hometown of Asheville, NC, allows me to indulge in multihued crucifers. However, when all is said and done, I’m still eating the vegetable cauliflower, not a chocolate bar or a muffin.
Read MoreI wonder. Do the dead touch us back when we touch their relics?
Read MoreRay Bradbury died on June 5 after a lengthy illness. We at Relief try not to be foolishly nostalgic, so we are not "devastated" by this news, as some people put it: the man lived a vibrant, active life and had few regrets. The best way to mark his death is to pay our respects to his gift to us. Following are reflections from three of us at Relief and The Midnight Diner.
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