Just another writer
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Church exploring: St Giles
This week, I went to the 5p mass at St Giles. The north end of Oak Park is by far the most suburban section of our village. It largely lacks multi-family housing and is far enough away from the two “L” lines that run through Oak Park that people are far enough away that the…
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Beautiful Sentences
I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
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Church exploring
I’ve decided to look around for a somewhat more satisfying faith community, so as one step in that direction, my wife and I went to mass at St Catherine of Sienna/St Lucy parish. The parish community is certainly more diverse than St Edmund’s, which is 95% white (at least). The St Catherine/St Lucy community is…
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Beautiful Sentences
We all—in the end—die in medias res. Mona Simpson, “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs” (The New York Times 30 October 2011)
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Beautiful Sentences
I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
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Tiered rejection from Granta
I don’t intend, as a rule, to write much about rejections. For that I’ve got Rejection Wiki, but I just got a tiered rejection from Granta in my e-mail. Considering that I’d put Granta in the top-three markets worldwide for fiction (alongside The New Yorker and The Paris Review), this was pretty exciting for me. The piece that…
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New York Public School’s banned words list
There’s a list getting some play of the 50 words/topics banned from standardized tests. It seems like it’s also a good check list to make sure that a piece of writing has some relevance to contemporary readers. In The Archbishop’s Son, I manage to get 16/44. The current novel I’m working on scores 13/44 (despite…
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Beautiful Sentences
He wondered now if everyone had a private life. He wondered if his wife had one. It was possible all these years that he had been alone, never knowing that a complete world existed and no one spoke of it. Ann Patchett, Bel Canto.
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Beautiful Sentences
“What’s your baby’s name?” She told him what Ezra called the baby. Elisabeth Fairchild, “A Heavy Breath” (The Missouri Review Summer 2011)