Savoring Pie Town →

Liz Rawson February 1, 2005

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December 7, 2020

On James Dickey and the Truths That Matter

December 7, 2020

Lit Hub | December 7, 2020

Here he is, 26, forever young, team leader of Flight C in the 549th Night Fighter Squadron of the VII Fighter Command of the Seventh Air Force, on Iwo Jima, in either the spring or summer of 1945, half turned, gazing straight at whomever is documenting the moment. Is he going up tonight? I wish I could say. There’s no date on the back of the photograph. My siblings and I share a fair number of pictures of our father from World War II, but this is the only one we have in which we’re able to see First Lieutenant Joe Paul Hendrickson of Morganfield, Kentucky, sitting in his “glass treasure-hole of blue light.”

December 7, 2020

September 23, 2020

Snapshots Before the War: Saying Goodbye in 1944

September 23, 2020

Lit Hub | September 23, 2020

I am looking at a faded page from my broken-backed baby book.

On September 20, 1944, at about nine in the morning, two farm kids from Ohio and Kentucky told each other goodbye out front of a sad-sack-looking motor court in Amarillo, Texas. Perhaps the only thing extraordinary about the moment was how ordinary it was to its time and place. They were my parents, and they are dead now. No matter what else I might ambivalently say about what turned out to be their largely sorrowful 61-year marriage, this part of their story seems to me absolutely good, even heroic.

I have been thinking about this parting moment a lot lately for too-obvious reasons: the idea of terrifying things swirling invisibly about you and over which you seem to have only limited control.

September 23, 2020

November 6, 2019

On Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and the Art of Omission

November 6, 2019

Lit Hub | November 6, 2019

No single piece of Wright architecture moves me more. I haven’t seen all of his extant buildings, but I’ve seen plenty. Long before I started this book, well before I started the last, which was about Ernest Hemingway, I was going to Unity Temple whenever I could, to sit in one of its old smooth wooden pews, with all its light and silence and seeming saving grace pouring down.

Going to Unity, during the years of the work on Hemingway, so I believe, helped me to begin to understand things about him I wouldn’t have otherwise remotely understood. Similarly, sitting these days in Unity (no less than standing now and again at a stone on the South Side of Chicago) has helped me to find, or re-find, the person who I think Frank Lloyd Wright truly was…

November 6, 2019

May 17, 2013

An Audible Feast

May 17, 2013

The New York Times | May 17, 2013

In a foreshortened life that didn’t make 62, Ernest Hemingway got a lot down on paper. If, by his middle and later years, enough of it seemed self-parodying and sometimes even mawkish, great swaths of it remain immortal — and not just the early work, as some critics would claim. Hemingway changed the look and sound of American speech on the printed page. But how did he get so much work done, the stories, the novels, the nonfiction (not to mention the thousands of letters he wrote), amid all that wasteful boozing and boasting, the depressions, the freakish accidents, the bouts of soaring blood pressure, the stark-awake and Seconal-stoked nights?

May 17, 2013

February 1, 2005

Savoring Pie Town

February 1, 2005

Smithsonian Magazine | February 2005

The name alone would make a stomach-growling man wish to get up and go there: PieTown. And then too, there are the old photographs—those moving gelatin-silver prints, and the equally beautiful ones made in Kodachrome color, six and a half decades ago, at the heel of the Depression, on the eve of a global war, by a gifted, itinerant, government, documentary photographer working on behalf of FDR’s New Deal. His name was Russell Lee. His Pie Town images—and there are something like 600 of them preserved in the archives of the Library of Congress—portrayed this little clot of high-mountain-desert New Mexico humanity in all of its redemptive, communal, hard-won glory. Many were published last year in Bound for Glory, Americain Color 1939-43. But let’s get back to pie for a minute.

February 1, 2005

April 28, 2002

The Nation: Altar-Boy Innocents; A Former Seminarian Reflects on Moral Ambivalence

April 28, 2002

The New York Times | April 28, 2002

WHAT are some of the sexual tensions and moral predicaments of seminary life? I can only tell you of my own experience, which was a very long time ago. That is all that's valid here. Two decades ago I tried to put some of those tensions and predicaments into a first book, called ''Seminary: A Search.''

To start where it starts: from 1958 to 1965, from age 14 to 21, I studied for the Roman Catholic missionary priesthood. It was a small and fevered American religious order called the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity. The school of religious formation was at the outback of Christianity, in a red-dirt and loblolly-scented place called Holy Trinity, Ala. You can still find it on maps, although Holy Trinity hasn't been a seminary for decades. It's still the holiest ground I know, which may seem like either denial or dishonesty in terms of a particular event I am going to describe, or at least outline. But, you see, that is why it is all so ambivalent and morally equivocal in me even now, that seminary life, thinking about it on the far side of 50, with 60 in sight, a father to teenage boys, a husband for 23 years to the same, good, decent, Catholic woman. Oh, that's probably incorrect; Ceil and I are ''cultural Catholics,'' if we are anything. We don't go to Mass, not with any regularity. But we believe. We fear. We each say our prayers.

April 28, 2002

November 12, 1998

On Veterans Day, a Busload of Memories

November 12, 1998

The Washington Post | November 12, 1998; Page A1

These old, old men, breasting their medals, lost in the castles of their memories and stories: Here they were yesterday, about 15 of them, game and proud old duffers, vets, in their seventies and eighties, in the 9 a.m. gloom and spitting rain. They were dressed up in their Legion hats and VFW blazers, dressed up in their Uncle Sam ties, trying to climb aboard -- sprightly or not so sprightly -- a Blue Bird bus at the U.S. Soldiers and Airmen's Home…

November 12, 1998

July 22, 1998

From the Fires of Hate, An Ember of Hope

July 22, 1998

The Washington Post | Wednesday, July 22, 1998

HATTIESBURG, Miss.—Ellie Dahmer's right hand has risen to the side of her neck, as if to feel for something that can't be seen in dimming evening light. "My nerves got so bad, I'd just break out," she says.

"Rashes," says another woman, much younger, her daughter, seated a few feet away on an opposite sofa. Her name's Bettie Dahmer, and on the night of her family's burning, she was a 10-year-old asleep in a back room. "Mama means rashes. She would break out in rashes. See, it was always the fear of whether they were going to come for Daddy or not."…

July 22, 1998

From the Fires of Hate, An Ember of Hope

July 22, 1998

The Washington Post | Wednesday, July 22, 1998

July 22, 1998

June 4, 1998

The Essential Enigma of Robert F. Kennedy Remains, Even 30 Years Later

June 4, 1998

The Washington Post | June 4, 1998; Page B01

Like his brother, he died on the road. Who could have known there would be less than five years between the rifle in Dallas and the snub-nose revolver in Los Angeles? It was an eye-blink of time in America, from the crack of one to the pop-pop-pop of the other, during which so much about our national life went helter-skelter. Martin Luther King Jr. died also in those five years, and cities burned, and Vietnam became the hemorrhage no one could stanch…

June 4, 1998