Newly published.
“She won’t get her security deposit back, and that’s fifty bucks she really can’t afford to lose, but she also can’t really quit smoking right now. It’s a bad time. It would be like giving up music or the night shift. Or like Micah giving up happy meals.”
Newly published.
“I thought about all the things I could not know about God, like why Ethel and I cannot perceive presence in the depths of our fear, how we can only see the darkness.”
Selected Journalism Bylines & Published Works
“Scholars agree that the Calvinist town of Avonlea made famous in LM Montgomery’s seminal novel, Anne of Green Gables, is a markedly different place at the end of the novel due to the influence of its titular heroine. When postulating as to the cause of Anne’s ability to change her stoic society, writers blame Anne’s uniqueness, but none blame the most fundamental difference of them all: Anne’s theology. Anne believes that the goal of religion (and love, as it is mediated to her through her understanding of God) is to be set free rather than to be bound by laws. In short, Anne Shirley is the advent of the New Testament, the spirit of the law, in an Old Testament town chafing under its rigid letter.”
“The broken silence is like a relief.”
Newly published.
“I try not to think about her too much, try not to ask questions for which there are no answers, like ‘how much did you love her?’ And ‘what did you do when she left?’”
“He did not use the words the priest had used, but the words were there, in the room with u, as my father talked about judgement in this age & in the one to come – world without end, amen.”
“Half of her wanted him to prod her for more information, to be interested in this particular misery of new parenthood that he could not share, and half of her was relieved to be left alone.”
Newly published.
“Her friends’ mothers have all started dying now, too, and they all ask Rachel how did you do it, as if there is a secret guidebook passed among those who lose a parent.”
“‘We all must run from God before we bow to him.’ Father McGilvary died eight days later, and the new priest never made any pronouncements about me at all.”
“‘After we got our diplomas, she went on to the state school for a teaching degree while I used cocoa butter to prevent stretch marks. It hadn’t worked out for either of us.”
Newly published.
“At first, he tells her his flight is cancelled, and it is. Intrepid Flight 8832 from O’Hare to LaGuardia is cancelled, the marquee advertises in scrolling, unapologetic letters. Something to do with engine trouble, or maybe the pilot, or hell if he knows. ”
“She’s desperate to avert the compliment, desperate to put it anywhere else.”
“Neither of them had ever used the names, but they’d carried them around all these years, the knowledge a weight, a penance, a sin that so easily beset them.”
Newly published.
“It’s been nearly two decades since I read ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,’ and I still don’t claim to be much good at prayer.”
“I hated him even more for that, hated that he had become silent, perfect comparison when I had never given him permission to be anything at all.”