Carrying the Cross in the Suburbs: A Poet's View
Tania Runyan
The suburbs kill individuality, don’t they? Every vinyl-sided house, tree-named cul-de-sac and video-equipped Toyota Sienna is toxic to the poet.
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Agendas Do Not Dazzle
Tania Runyan
I’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 MoreWhy Christians Love to Read Poetry
Brad Fruhauff
The 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 MoreObsessed With Words
Brad Fruhauff
Today, 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 MoreSubmission Period Ending Soon!
Brad Fruhauff
Relief's reading period is quickly coming to an end, but we're open to new submissions, still. If you haven't submitted yet, maybe it's time to do something about that.
Read MoreThin Blue Smoke: A Cure for Your Reading Malaise
Lyle Enright
This, 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 MoreChristians Watching Batman: A Dark Knight Dialogue
Brad Fruhauff
A 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 MoreSerendipity, Peeps, and Poetry
Brad Fruhauff
Poet Barbara Crooker opens to serendipity in writing and reimagines the spiritual poem through a popular foamy candy.
Read MoreFamily Fundamentals | 6.1 Author Vic Sizemore
Brad Fruhauff
“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.
Read MoreStories Within Stories | 6.1 author Max Harris
Brad Fruhauff
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.
This World and This One | 6.1 Author Marjorie Maddox Hafer
Brad Fruhauff
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 MoreEncouraging Words? 6.1 Author Patrice Gopo on Race and Cross-Culture Work
Brad Fruhauff
6.1 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 MoreRelief 6.1 Now Available for Kindle-ing!
Brad Fruhauff
Relief Issue 6.1 is now available for Amazon Kindle!
Read MoreThe Poem on the Telephone: 6.1 Author David Wright
Brad Fruhauff
To 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 MoreAPB: Submit and Resubmit!
Brad Fruhauff
Tell your friends and family: Relief needs your poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, images, graphic narrative, etc.!
Read MoreCrafting the Community of the Word
Brad Fruhauff
6.1 poet Jill Reid found community in words, and now she is working on a Holy Spirit building one word at a time.
Read MoreAfter Ash Wednesday: A Confession
Brad Fruhauff
It'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 MoreAnnouncing 6.1 Poets
Brad Fruhauff
If you were at Calvin's Festival, you may recognize some of these names. Others are new discoveries for us, and still others are new friends.
Read MoreThis Wasn't About That: Musings on the Art of Fiction and Fictionalized Abortion
Brad Fruhauff
6.1 fiction author Joshua Hren describes the role of short stories in a tragic world.
Read MoreCauliflower, Christianity, and Short Fiction
Brad Fruhauff
6.1 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.
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