Vulgar

…People are accustomed to regard anything as vulgar that overreaches their own attempts at self-justification. – Robert Penn Warren, Band of Angels Ouch.

Interview on High Plains Public Radio

I had the chance to go on the radio and talk about writing and my upcoming reading at the Burrowing Owl in Canyon this week. Exile a While: Poet/Author Seth Wieck Reads this Thursday in Canyon.

Sermon Under the Pastures

The fine folks at Fathom magazine published my interview with Nathan Poole. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.

No End To the Making of Books

The wind started blowing again last night. Noise you just can’t get away from. I got up for my usual routine this morning. I stretched. My joints are expressing their age. I drank coffee and read Isaiah 11 aloud. I’m not sure there’s a more beautiful stretch of words in the whole Bible. It’s been […]

Donald Mace Williams

When I was a kid, someone wrote a book about my hometown of Umbarger, Texas. It was a big to-do because no one writes books about Umbarger. I read the book and learned a little about my grandparents as young people. It all became the milieu of my growing up. When I was 30, I […]

Nothing In It

He sat leaning forward in the seat with his elbows on the empty seatback in front of him and his chin on his forearms and he watched the play with great intensity. He’d the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was […]

Selective Naturalism

…it is widely recognized today that a painted landscape, however realistic in appearance, is never a pure copy of nature and therefor can never be rendered value free. Implied in the artist’s choice of motifs and his pictorial representation is a certain view of reality. This is conditioned by the many factors of that make […]

Invisible Man

And I remember too, how we confronted those others, those who had set me here in this Eden, whom we knew though we didn’t know, who were unfamiliar in their familiarity, who trailed their words to us through blood and violence and ridicule and condescension with drawling smiles, and who exhorted and threatened, intimidated with […]

Before she fell silent our mama… told stories about our great-granny and other ancestors…, who called birds down from the sky and healed wounds and made love potions and sent their spirits soaring out of their bodies. When I asked if it was all true, she said, “It’s not for me to tell you what’s […]

Rash Award in Fiction

Thanks to the Broad River Review in North Carolina for awarding my story “Tender Mercies of the Wicked” with the 2018 Rash Award in Fiction. I’m especially happy that Amy Greene was the judge. Please go get a copy of one of her books.  I’ll put a link here when the issue with my story […]