The Artful Use of a Wound

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher told me I had no imagination. She’d asked us to draw something appropriate for Christmas, and I’d drawn a nativity scene—Joseph and Mary and the Christ child. My teacher, when she saw it, wrinkled her nose. “Clearly,” she said, “you have no imagination.” I’ll admit I…

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Keep Going: The Writing Life and Perseverance

It’s a really windy day here in central Ohio, and consequently there’s a lot of noise—the sound of the wind, the jangle of wind chimes, the creaking of siding on my house. When I was running into that wind in the last of my five miles, it was hard to keep going. The gusts pushed…

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Can’t Never Did Nothing

Take from this what you will. There came a time, toward the end of my father’s life—though we had no way of knowing the days were running out—when I had to bathe him. My mother, his caretaker ever since the farming accident that cost him his hands, was in the hospital, and so I did…

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