Author

A powerfully traumatic event in my childhood was the celebration of Boy Scout Sunday at the Howard Methodist Church on Cherry Street in Findlay, Ohio, when I was in fifth grade. I sensed trouble as soon as our family arrived and I spotted other boys in their Boy Scout uniforms.

The fancy apartment building near the shore, a gleaming white tower with black balconies, suddenly transforms into a pinched gray hulk scarred with graffiti. Single-family homes nearby start doing the…    read more

It’s late afternoon on a hot Friday in early June, and I’m sitting in a plaza in a close-in suburb of Washington, D.C. I’m working, without much energy, on a typical summer project for an English profesor: a study of the funeral elegies of Puritan New England. I always write my scholarship in public places like this. Writing is lonely work, even when your subject isn’t seventeenth-century funerary poems, and it’s a comfort to look up and see people going about their business.