Writers and Writings

She calls it reading iconically. Which is to say, Jessica Hooten Wilson approaches literature like an icon, an object that itself can be beautiful but points toward something else. That’s what she writes about in The Scandal of Holiness, it’s really what she’s been writing about for years, and that’s what we talked about for today’s conversation.

From the introduction of his new book: “We enter the bookstore, see all the books arrayed there, and think: so many books, so little time; but the truth goes the other way: books do not take time, they give time. They enable us to see the dimensions of life, a gift and a vision that are unavailable to us as we live day to day.” And that’s what we’re talking about today.

Maybe, when you fantasize about your writing life, you picture a quill pen and scrolling parchment. But probably not. More than likely, you think about the machine that still stars in almost every novel and film about writers: the typewriter. In a new book, historian Martyn Lyons looks at the relatively short life of the typewriter and how its most famous users approached their work on the famed machines.

Romanticism gave the writing world its share of luminaries. Poe, Dickinson, Wadsworth. But despite its good reads, the movement also left us some poor assumptions about the nature of writing itself. You know, ideas about those uncontrollable moods of inspiration that end in a great novel. The reality of writing is a lot more, well, unromantic. And simpler.

I like them. I work on them, and I read them. Because there’s a certain magic to the way a magazine is more than just words or just pictures. It’s not just an aesthetic: a magazine can host a whole conversation, bringing ideas big and small, conflicting and complementary into view. That’s what good magazines do. Good magazines like The Point. But it’s not easy. Just ask the magazine’s founding editor.

Picture this: Drawing and writing a full-page, stand-alone comic strip every week, doing commissioned illustrations for children’s books, and publishing more comics in places like the New Yorker, all while working your day job as an orthodontist — and being a father of five. It’s hard to imagine, but actually easy to picture. Because that’s Grant Snider.

There’s a saying that goes like this: The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates, right? As often as that idea gets batted around, though, the big questions about life — why are we here? what really matters? — seem mainly to go ignored. That’s what the preeminent social critic Os Guinness writes about in his newest book. Which highlights another interesting phenomenon: Searching for answers to the deepest questions almost always centers around reading and, yep, writing.

We really only have two choices: We either go home or we go somewhere else. For a good percentage of educated, upwardly mobile Americans, the default choice seems to be to leave. But why? And, more importantly, what are we leaving behind?

In the pages of America’s papers and magazines, Roosevelt Montás has stirred up a debate. These so-called great books, what do they really offer society? And to *which part* of society, exactly?

You meet two kinds of readers: Those with a cultish devotion to the writing of Wendell Berry and those who haven’t read it (or read it carefully). Okay, both of those are extremes. But barely.