I remember a decade or more ago while helping my friend Beth reorganize her homeschooling room, seeing her table spread with children’s picture books and chapter books, and saying, “You are allowed to get rid of books you don’t like.” Responding to her quizzical look, I said, “If reading a book out loud to one […]

When I wake up each morning, the first thing I see as my eyes start to clear is a giant calendar. It represents the first 18 years of my son’s life, and more days are crossed off than not. I rub my eyes and try to focus and remember that the calendar is not really […]

Note: This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition in February 2021. When the cures ran out during my worst days of doctoring, I would pace a patient’s room, loathe the insufficiency of my own hands, and yearn for Lucy Pevensie’s cordial. A heart tracing on a monitor would fatally spasm, my own heart would […]

If you’ve read Glenn McCarty’s The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson, you’ve heard about US Marshall Dead-Eye Dan. And if you’ve read McCarty’s Junction Tales, you’ve met Dan face-to-face. (For the record, I highly recommend that you do both of those things.) But Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid dives deeper into the world of Tumbleweed and tells the […]

“It was a dark and stormy night.” Everyone knows that cliché’d opening sentence, but I’ve always kind of enjoyed it. Cliches generally exist because they’re somewhat effective at what they’re trying to do, and therefore get overused. And a storm really is a great way to start a story! Storms are dynamic and interesting; they […]