A Language for the Inward Landscape: Spiritual Wisdom from the Quaker Movement by Brian Drayton and William P. Taber, Jr.
Homing Instincts by Sarah Menkedick
The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley
We Sinners by Hanna Pylväinen
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Upstream by Mary Oliver
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm
Miriam's Kitchen by Elizabeth Ehrlich
The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamandis
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon
The Lonely City by Olivia Liang
"The Crack-Up" by F Scott Fitzgerald
The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro
A Slant of Sun by Beth Kephart
"Upon This Rock" by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
The Complete Poems of Cavafy, Introduction by W. H. Auden, Translated by Rae Dalven
Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Edited by Saskia Hamilton
Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose
In God's Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki
Portrait of Hemingway by Lilian Ross
Wearing God by Lauren Winner
Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
Incarnadine by Mary Szybist
Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
Essays by E.B. White
Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
Short Trip to the Edge by Scott Cairns
Faith, Sex, Mystery by Richard Gilman
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
U and I by Nicholson Baker
Air Guitar by Dave Hickey
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
Mariette In Ecstasy by Ron Hansen
Dakota by Kathleen Norris
Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard
How to Stop Time by Anne Marlowe
Still by Lauren Winner
"Goodbye to All That" by Joan Didion
Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana
At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman
Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The Best Day, The Worst Day by Donald Hall
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Brown by Richard Rodriguez
Beautiful Boy by David Sheff
Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff
Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating
A Grace Disguised by Gerald Sittser
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
Two Part Invention by Madeleine L'Engle
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman
Lit by Mary Karr
A Grief Observed by CS Lewis
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Waiting For God by Simone Weil
Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose
The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate, ed.
A Door In The Ocean by David McGlynn
The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen
Anatomy of the Soul by Curt Thompson
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway
Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
Looking For Alaska by John Green
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott
Small Victories by Anne Lamott
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Wendell Berry - Hannah Coulter
Selections from CS Lewis' The Last Battle
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead
Marilynne Robinson - Home
Madeleine L'Engle - A Swiftly Tilting Planet
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?"
"Saints and poets, maybe. They do some."
- Emily Webb to Narrator, Thornton Wilder's Our Town
* * *
Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon
This was a gift from Grady Powell, director of the Trinity Forum Academy, to each of the fellows at commencement. I hope that Capon's reflections on food and table culture push me to heed Grady's charge to practice "astonishment at the ordinary" in this new season of my life.
My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman
A memoir by the man who wrote this stunning essay, whose honest, compassionate voice serves as a model for me as I grapple with questions of faith and the sorrows of the human experience in my own writing. Wiman is the former editor of Poetry magazine, a poet in his own right, and a man whose great love and great sorrow have given him extraordinary insight into the deep things of our humanity.
annah Coulter by Wendell Berry
Hannah Coulter's simple and delicate narration unfolds the story of a lifetime of farming and marriage, calling my rootless generation to brave commitment to people and place. In an introduction to the Trinity Forum Reading of "Hannah and Nathan," Greg Wolfe (Image Journal) writes this... “Love is not a passing emotion but a fundamental commitment, a rootedness in being. Its shape and meaning can only be known on the scale of a lifetime. To bind oneself to a spouse is the same as binding oneself to a place. As Hannah says, ‘Most people now are looking for a better place which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. There is no better place than this, not in this world, and it is by the place we’ve got and our love for it and our keeping of it that this world is joined to heaven.’”
Standing By Words and Imagination in Place by Wendell Berry, excerpts
Berry's writing about art and place has been central to my thinking about the possibility for an artist, in an age of isolation and dislocation, to root herself in the place where she lives and to commit to the flourishing of that place and its people. Berry writes of his work as a novelist as it compares to his work as a farmer: "Advocacy is dangerous to art, and you must be aware of the danger, but if you accept the health of the place as a standard, advocacy is going to be present in your work."
Refractions y Makoto Fujimura.
Fujimura writes about the role of the arts in peace-making and community-building. I value this New Yorker’s perspective on how to rally a local urban community around the arts, and look forward to Mako and his wife Judy's visit to the Trinity Forum Academy later this month.
Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art by Jenefer Robinson, excerpts.
