Michial Farmer
Michial Farmer is a poet, essayist, and history teacher. He is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, 2021). He lives in Atlanta.
Articles by Michial Farmer
Time for Leaving: Songs About Restlessness
This week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’re listening to songs about restlessness—or, as the scholar Frederick R. Karl calls it, spatiality. I managed to do this whole episode…
Terrestrial Otherness: Songs About Insects
In conjunction with my recent FPR article “Terrestrial Otherness,” this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’ll be listening to music honoring the noble six-legged creatures whose world we…
Soft in the Middle: Songs About Middle Age
In this first episode of A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’ll be listening to music about middle age and talking about its various indignities.
Terrestrial Otherness
Why didn’t Fabre gaze out into the heavens, like Copernicus and Galileo, instead of down at these grotesque little monsters?
The Race to the Bottom: A Review of Ross Benes’s ‘1999’
It never fails—whenever Benes defends low culture, he does so in the exact terms that he ought to be using to criticize it
From Postliberalism to Preliberalism: A Review of The Church Against the State
Next time we’re drinking bourbon together, I look forward to telling him that he’s got all the right impulses and is coming to the wrong conclusions.
Unpacking My Library (Again)
Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.
Human Dominion in Kipling’s Just So Stories
Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.
The Cozy Loneliness of Owl at Home
children are inchoately aware of the sadness of the world; it’s another of the human mysteries that they already have access to. Lobel’s genius is in choosing for his subject…
Flowers and Dust: Summer in The Great Gatsby
The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told…
The Insistent Cough of Grace: Remembering Frederick Buechner
His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but…
Calvino’s Leonia and the Weight of History
The conservationist recognizes that the society we live in, as much as the natural world we live in, was given to us as a gift with the demand that we…