Blog

Old St Mary’s has the newest church building I’ve seen so far (I’m pretty sure it’s the newest church building in the city and quite possibly the whole archdiocese, which is ironic given its name) although the parish is also simultaneously the oldest parish in the city. Of the new church buildings I’ve seen I’m […]

I forgot to add this to my favorites post last night, so for your entertainment, charts of my reading over the last decade:

My submission pace picked up a bit this year in both fiction and poetry. On the fiction front, it was a better than average year with my acceptance rate at 3.2% (up slightly from last year’s 3%) and a positive response rate (personal rejections plus acceptances) of 29% up significantly from last year’s 24%).  In […]

Towards the end of last year I had to do some retrenching on my resolutions and having set a two-month plan to close out the year, it occurs to me that two months is a good time period for goals, short enough that I can’t let myself delay too much and long enough that there’s […]

In no particular order, my favorite reads of the year: Sleep Decades by Israel A. Bonilla The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton Made to Explode: Poems by Sandra Beasley The Wounded Angel: Fiction and the Religious Imagination by Paul Lakeland For Love of the Broken Body: A […]

So looking back on the year, I set three goals: Complete draft of the new novel Between indolence, deciding that the last novel could use another round of revision and ill-advisedly beginning a new large fiction project, this didn’t happen. I set an end-of-year goal at the beginning of November to get two new chapters […]

As a person of a certain age, the name Sylvester brings up a particular cat and his catchphrase, “Thuffering thuccotash!” Needless to say, this is not the namesake of St Sylvester Church but rather the fourth-century Pope of that name (whose papacy was the ninth-longest recorded).  The church (part of a two-church parish) is located […]

St Thomas of Canterbury is located in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, an area that is undergoing gentrification, pushing out the poor residents of the neighborhood, albeit not completely as evidenced by the fact that there was a group of people waiting for the church’s food pantry to open when I arrived for the morning […]

Our Lady of the Holy Family parish was created by the combination of the former Notre Dame de Chicago and Holy Family parishes on the near west side. The latter of these two was later returned to the Jesuits from the archdiocese and it now serves as a chapel to St Ignatius College Prep as […]