A talk given on the occasion of the unveiling of a plaque by the Writers’ Chapel Trust at St. James…

In chapter three of Barbara Kingsolver’s 1988 novel The Bean Trees, Taylor Greer and Turtle, the toddler who was deposited…

I If the inhabitants of a certain Victorian townhouse in Lampeter, west Wales, ever strip the wallpaper in one of…

I was eighteen when I read L’Étranger for the first time. I read it in French in a freshman class…

I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, during the 1980s, which is to say, Before Internet. What it meant…

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed You’re gonna have to serve somebody, Well, it may be the…

Until my brother and I were well into our thirties, our father collected vintage cars and motorcycles. He loved their design, the satisfaction of repairing and restoring them, and the social atmosphere of the car shows and swap meets.

It’s not the same as memory. Memory is a record of actual experience: things you did, places you visited, feelings you felt. This is something more subtle and uncanny.

A perplexing fate awaits a reader in an elementary school. There is no place for this strange child in classroom,…

It seems churlish to complain that there is anything insufficient about John Metcalf’s literary output. (It seems especially churlish to…