Skip to main content

Month: April 2016

Spiritual Dyslexia and Central Command

I call it “spiritual dyslexia.” When I was teaching myself to write, if an offering really, really did not appeal to me, I reluctantly signed up. That’s how I discovered literary journalism—literary journalism? I gasped when I read the syllabus Randall Kenan was teaching that year. It sounded terrible, but Randall was teaching it...

Continue reading

Targeting LGBT Discrimination in the South

I went to junior high and high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte was the home I returned to in college and law school. When my daddy died, I sang over his grave: “I’m a Tar Heel born, I’m a Tar Heel bred, and when I die, I’m a Tar Heel dead.” The North Carolina legislature recently passed a new law authorizing...

Continue reading

Constructing Life

The boss man wasn’t there today. That’s what the worker told me, standing in the great room of our half-finished house. He was sanding. I was inspecting. He thought the homeowners might want to talk to the boss. I wanted to talk to him, the man guiding the sanding machine, the one who would rub the stain on the floor. The man who...

Continue reading