Rebecca Tirrell Talbot lives in Chicago, where she teaches writing courses and works in the Writing Center at North Park University.
[From the Archive] Not Home for the Holidays
I wanted to travel to Pennsylvania to be with my family this Christmas. My family always swaddles the holiday thick with traditions, and I missed those. On Christmas Eve, my mom crushes candy canes for homemade peppermint stick ice cream. That night, my dad sometimes builds a fire on the far side of their pond. […]
Works (and Cities) in Progress
How the GoggleWorks arts center inspires pride and hope in the city of Reading, Pennsylvania.
This Baffled Dance: Amy Leach's "Things That Are"
Chances are you’ve never read a book like “Things That Are”: equal parts poetry, nature-walk, National Geographic, and fantasy.
Now I know, and now I know how much I want to be converted. To be all at once what this world privileges.
The lesson of my later twenties has been that a true conviction has the power to startle me, as if I stepped on the ground expecting moss only to find sharp rock underneath.
In viewing an adaptation, we join a more communal imagination. If a film animates the book in ways similar to how we’ve imagined it, we feel, somehow, rewarded by the community. We feel like our vision of the book has been validated.
The narrow doorway opens onto a large and freeing vista where we can be overcome by what is solidly there in the world.
If she were anyone but me, I could be kind to her.
It still just feels like Christmas is where Mom is. There’s no way around it.
Books to Read In a Cabin in the Woods
Having forfeited pleasures of nature for worlds of fiction and creative nonfiction, I am here to recommend three books that are perfect to pack if you’re planning a mountain- or lake-side vacation this autumn.
Is this just another way that consumerism has seeped into me, making me think that the way my accessories sculpt my surroundings offers the best means of knowing my true self?
Ultimate Liberty, Ultimate Fun
A cup of coffee with composer Ron Thomas.
Each line of a poem is a mystery, a puzzle for the mind to solve. Good poems are mysteries so absorbing that only by carrying them around with me does the mystery begin to make sense.
I Try To Keep My Language Classy
Checking in with the Cains and Abels.
Mattie Ross and the Golden Age of Feminine Aplomb
Girlhood, growing up, and the young heroine of True Grit.
Thanksgiving seems to be for the firmly grounded, so how does someone keep this feast if her way of life feels temporary?
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetic aesthetics suggest a singular place to be both creature and creator.
For members of Phoenixville Area Time Bank, “exchanges are not exchanges. They’re connections.”
An open letter to a popular genre.
Greenberg and the Fight for Fearless Identity
The audience hopes the last scene is not the start of one more lonely cycle, and is given reasonable grounds for expecting it to be the start of something new.
Can we use sad music any way we see fit? Or does the disclosure of pain oblige us to think carefully about the way we listen?
On Keeping a Spiritual Travelogue
I had no paradigm for my grandfather’s quiet faith, but his journal changed all that.
Learning to Love Jonathan Richman
It’s Jonathan Richman’s lack of snide irony that lets him indulge in wonder.
Down-to-Earth Romanticism: Jane Campion's Bright Star
In Bright Star, Jane Campion steers the love story of Fanny Brawne and John Keats away from sentimentality.
The joys, and pros, and cons of participating in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).
Creativity, Community, and Secret Agents
826 CHI: your one-stop shop for tutoring and supplies for your work as a secret agent.
Connecting Refugees, One Bead at a Time
Refugee Beads and Village Gatherings help establish connections and make lasting changes in the life of refugees – and Americans.
Cains & Abels Sing Their Heads Off
Two hundred people fill a sparsely furnished sanctuary, singing at the top of their lungs. They are untrained singers with plenty of vocal eccentricities. No instruments give the right key or take the edge off the voices’ peculiarities. Stumbling upon a scenario like this would make many people flee for the exits. And, knowing that […]
Of Public Transit and Human Nature
It’s the mantra of CTA riding: “If you see someone acting suspiciously, please inform CTA personnel immediately.” The thing is, if we took that mantra seriously, we’d be on the intercom every five minutes or so.
Midway through aMike Rose Semester
Mike Rose expresses an ethic of care, directly wanting the good of “the other,” and as a model of this ethic, Rose is an exemplar for more than just teachers. Anyone who seeks to understand another person’s needs could use Rose as a model, particularly in their day-to-day vocation.
Free Bubble Wrap, and Other Joys of Urban Simplicity
Our cultural imagination has us thinking the country life is the good and simple life. But it’s hardly the only simple life. The city has vast potential to provide an uncomplicated way of life – much more potential than it gets credit for.
Virtuous Fun in the Films of Whit Stillman
I’ll tell you candidly – I love dark, cynical, yes, even nihilistic films. The macabre side of human experience is fascinating, and there has been a strong run of artistic, bleak films lately. I propose, however, that it’s equally important to examine another side of life: experiences of virtue.
The Courtyards of Rebirth:Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, Part II
It is appropriate to tiptoe into the courtyards of suffering and rebirth and listen, watch, and learn.
What Ghosts Teach:Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, Part I
Book available on Amazon.com. What could being asleep for fifty years, and then awakening, teach a person about life? You might tell me to Google Washington Irving or the Brothers Grimm and see what lessons they intended, but I am dead serious when I ask this question. I ask it because in the early part […]
One of Authenticity's Last Great Sanctuaries?
Photo: Sean Talbot It didn’t surprise me when Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam movement and host of the Uptown Poetry slam, told me that ministers sometimes “lurk in the shadows” of the Green Mill Lounge, a prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy, during the Sunday night poetry slam. When I first moved to Chicago, I, too, […]
Mütter Museum's Gruesome Grace
The Mütter museum claims to tell stories about the human experience, and as I swallowed my squeamishness and faced specimens in jars, I realized the morbid collection resonates with Christian ideas of truth, goodness, and even beauty.
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