A blinding light from the heavens, a booming disembodied voice, and the man falls to the ground. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” the voice demands, and the man is forever changed. This is the conversion story of St. Paul, a man who spent his existence persecuting Christians until a supernatural experience on the…
Wrote the Book, Hated the Movie
“I cried when I saw it. I said, ‘oh, God, what have they done?” “I was deeply disappointed.” It’s “crummy.” Ouch. Hardly the responses movie directors want after a screening. Worse, these comments didn’t come from random viewers, but from the authors of the books on which each film was based. (Which author said which…
Write Boldly Badly!
Are you a good enough reader to write badly? I mean, really, really badly. If you are, it’s time to prove it by submitting to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This fiendishly alluring competition asks contestants to create a first sentence to an utter bomb of a book. With enough skill, that sentence will equal or…
The Lure of the Séance
Once, decades ago, I attended a séance. The medium, Mrs. B, had since childhood spoken to people nobody else could see. In her eighties, she’d been a minister in the Spiritualist church for years. She was part of a long tradition. The American Spiritualist movement dates back to 1848, when the Fox sisters of upstate…
Old Man
You could see it from miles down the road, an odd protrusion from Cannon Mountain in Franconia, New Hampshire. As you got closer, the image began to make sense. You saw the same thing that inspired centuries-old Abenaki and Mohawk legends, the phenomenon that Daniel Webster and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about: you saw the Old…
Mother’s Day
Charlotte is taking inventory of the photos on my first floor. At three, she lives far enough away that I don’t see her nearly often enough. But this also means there’s always something new to discover at Gigi’s house. “Mommy, Aunt Sof, TomTom,” she ticks off, pointing to a photo on the shelf above my…
Stuff
Some of the stuff we’ve saved over the years is laughing at us. Those keepsakes from our kids’ lives that we stashed away to pass down to them? The ones we envisioned handing over as forever-memories? If you tiptoe past that leaning tower o’ stuff, you’ll hear a soft chortle, because the stuff knows the…
