David Heddendorf
David Heddendorf lives in Ames, Iowa. His essays on literary and religious topics have appeared in various magazines. He is also the author of a short novel, The Wrestler.
Articles by David Heddendorf
One Hundred Years of Obscurity
Eloquent and nuanced, never pompous, The Rector’s Daughter sets before us the inexhaustible mystery of persons and the ways they manage to live together.
What I Learned in Grad School
Temperamentally and vocationally, I was in the wrong place. Yet I don’t regret a single day I spent there—not only because I met my wife, but because I learned to…
P.G. Wodehouse and the Idea of Genius
We might not use the word “genius” in all these contexts, but the mystery is the same. Where did this exceptional ability come from? Is it just another trait like…
Scenes of Arrival, Stories of Home
Here are three novels about three places in the world. Each conveys not just a perfunctory setting but a web of topography, livelihoods, pastimes, and lore. And in each the…
Mr. Munson’s Mustang: A Fable
"In order to implement vital system updates, you must install the Trans-Mog-Z Facilitator, available at any Big Horizon Automotive Intervention Center. This has been your first notice.”
The Man Who Saw the Bear
What Sanders offers might be called the imagination of hope—a means of acting to stem disaster.
On Being Kind
If it keeps us from flying at each other’s throats, I’ll take kindness every time. But if we seek more than survival, kindness is just the beginning.
Sticking It Out in Green Bay: Mona Simpson’s Off Keck Road
"With her glamorous personal life and occasionally edgy prose, Simpson hardly fits the mold of the down-home writer who nurtures a sense of place. Yet..."
A Casual Birder
For most of my adult life I’ve considered myself a birder. Some people say “bird-watcher,” but for me that term conjures up the sort of goofy-looking eccentrics you see in…
Puppets and Portraits: Two Victorians
In “The Dreams of Mrs. Flintwinch thicken,” a short chapter of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), the kind-hearted Arthur Clennam visits his childhood home. “Oppressive secrets” pervade the crumbling house…
Smiling Prophet of Tape and Glue
If you watch a regional sportscast on TV, or some similar out-of-the-way cable fare, you’ll eventually see a commercial featuring a smiling, chubby man wearing casual clothes and speaking in…
Food and “the job of getting it there”
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 than return to the genteel life…