Ingham County, MI November writes its questions down In slender panes of ice That form in secret overnight On puddles in the yard. So a feeble imagination bodied forth...

Last week the United States went through another one of our regular, mostly ritualized exercises in mass democracy. What did (or should) localists think...

When I came across John Hockenberry’s essay, “Exile,” in the October edition of Harper’s Magazine, I had never heard of him. I still know little...

A woman in another kind of grief uttered the terrible “should have been.”

I am an unlikely localist. My life is a product of globalization. My mother’s side of the family is from Singapore, China, and India,...

While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about...

Bear in mind that clowns are sinister.

One of my heroes of the faith is dead. Eugene Peterson experienced death, but certainly not its sting, as he uttered his final words,...

In Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain, a minister’s daughter decides after her father’s death to remain on their western North Carolina farm, rather...