The Lost Art of the South
A gift from my musically esoteric boyfriend, my record player has been my proverbial time capsule to the American Southlands I call home. I load dusty albums from the past--kings and queens of country--on the record’s arm and they drop by themselves. So I stack up five of those melancholy discs, and listen to the A-sides. They play through, drop down, and I flip and start with the B-sides. Sadness, coated with betr...
Savannah: City In Flux
The lens centers upon a row of boarded up buildings, with tattered siding and leaning roofs. Along the edges of the image, there is a crumbling sidewalk strewn with derelict characters. At night, the streets in this neighborhood shine bright with globes installed by the city. Behind closed doors, the community rages: shouts of anger burst through a cracked window, a woman calls for help, two kids light up in hopes ...
On Keeping a Spiritual Travelogue
My grandfather's death absorbed a December ten years ago and cast a long shadow on Decembers to come. Because of this, "getting into the Christmas spirit" now requires me to reflect on death, and I suspect this is the case for many. It's a fitting meditation for Advent because the birth and death of Christ, and our own death and sense of being made new, all twine together in Christians' musings. The long...
The Case for the Much-Maligned Short Story
The average person, confronted with a free half hour, might spend it watching television or staring at a computer screen - or maybe reading a novel. Maybe. But of those inclined to read, few might read a short story, even it could be finished in that half hour. The short story is the novel's cousin, sitting in the corner at the party, pleasant looking, full of interesting conversation, but never dancing on the table...
Mütter Museum’s Gruesome Grace
I am not the sort of person who flips through pictorial medical dictionaries to pass the time. I can't believe sites like Dictionary.com and MySpace post ads for toenail fungus medicine, and even if I scroll down before the toenail lifts like a trapdoor and the cartoon bug squirms out, I still feel queasy. This summer, though, my husband considered it serendipitous that we were traveling to Philadelphia right after w...
