Category Archives: musings

Lent and the Incarnation: Our Bodies, Ourselves

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Boz

We who call ourselves Anglican are often labeled incarnationalists. With our Creator, we believe that what he made is good and acknowledge on Ash Wednesday, “You hate nothing you have made.” With Gerard Manley Hopkins, we exult that “the world … Continue reading →

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The Artist’s Left-Brained Creative Sister

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Boz

These are some of my dirty secrets: I won first place in the Arizona state spelling bee in 1967, and I got a prize (not first) in the state math contest in 1971. My entire freshman year of college, I … Continue reading →

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Extrospection: Globe, Google Maps, and the Wound of Geography

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Boz

I have studied with depth, breadth, and passion not only the literature, but also the history–both political and intellectual–of the American South. During the most impressionable years of my intellectual formation, I was reading Wilbur J. Cash on The Mind of the … Continue reading →

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Acedia–In One Image

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Boz

My initial goal for this post was to discuss acedia in 25 words or less. That opening line (including its ungrammatical modification of a countable noun) was meant as a joke, but it turned out to be not much more laughable than my … Continue reading →

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Not Exactly Epiphanies

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Boz

At the age of 36, I decided to get a master’s degree in English. I have elsewhere–well, everywhere, including in the introductory lecture of nearly every class I teach–suggested that I was standing in a bookstore, staring at the American literature selection, when … Continue reading →

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Ho-Hum; Or, Whatever Happened to the Capacity for Wonder?

Posted on July 20, 2016 by Boz

As we were driving home from seeing the movie Genius in Chapel Hill, my husband asked me why people don’t read Thomas Wolfe any more. My snappy retort masked what has been for some time an insidious fear: “Because they can no … Continue reading →

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My Name Is Vicki, and I Am a Taphophile

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Boz

1960: My sister, my cousins, and I scrambled into the back of my uncle’s 1948 Ford pick-up and headed with our fathers to the cemetery overlooking the dusty town of Globe, Arizona. We played among the graves while they watered the grass … Continue reading →

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Forever Becoming: A Meditation

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Boz

Written at Oakwood Cemetery, Raleigh, 11 Nov. 2009 I was only 36, beginning a second graduate program—clearly, I was far from complete.  We who continually reinvent ourselves retain the illusion of eternal becoming far longer than those respectable adults with 2½ … Continue reading →

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Rites of Passage Part I: A Motley Pentateuch

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Boz

Spring 1973: As an overachieving, overprotected, overweight college sophomore, I approached the end of the spring semester with the dread of impending loss. In addition to my accustomed success in school that year, I had incrementally begun the process—equally exhilarating and … Continue reading →

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The Prison of “I Am”

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Boz

For a number of years in my late twenties and early thirties, if I didn’t have a long, skinny, brown More cigarette between my lips or fingers, I was nonetheless enveloped in a malodorous, smoky haze that I am sure … Continue reading →

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