Sophfronia’s Blog
Kind Words
A blog about what I find amazing, smart, beautiful, or just plain fun.
A Walk in Harlem
The word Harlem sounds to me like a song and it slips through my lips like that—easy and familiar. I’m often asked if I ever lived in Harlem and the answer is no. I lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, about 40 blocks south. But I took the subway north [...]
Curating the Awst Press Anniversary Essay Series
Recently I had the honor of being asked by Awst Press to curate, along with the author Susanna Childress, its annual essay series. Awst is an independent literary publisher located in Austin, TX. Awst is Welsh for August, the month in which the press was founded, and the essay series takes place [...]
The Music of Unforgivable Love
This lazy summer day, for me, brings to mind a moment in my novel Unforgivable Love when Val Jackson, enjoying after-dinner cocktails with Elizabeth Townsend and his Aunt Rose, puts on a record he's purchased for his aunt. It's a new song by Ella Fitzgerald called "A Sunday Kind of Love" [...]
Book Review: Hunger-A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
“I don’t know how I let things get so out of control, but I do.” These words, repeated a few times in Roxane Gay’s memoir, hold the tension of this important work. The tension is the push and pull between strength and vulnerability, courage and fear, reality and illusion, knowledge [...]
The Intentional Writer: Diana Butler Bass
Diana Butler Bass delivered two insightful keynote addresses at Princeton Theological Seminary recently for the Frederick Buechner Writer’s Workshop. The first, “The Accidental Writer,” described how the author whose latest book is Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution, fell into her writing career by way of the [...]
Words on Writing from Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott delivered the keynote address for the opening of the Frederick Buechner Writer’s Workshop at Princeton Theological Seminary. It’s my second year leading sessions at this powerful event and I was thrilled to learn Ms. Lamott would be here. I arrived at Miller Chapel extra early to grab a [...]
Inspired by Louis Jordan
I knew Louis Jordan’s music long before I knew his name. My daddy loved B.B. King so I grew up listening to B.B. King and one of my favorite songs he sung was “Caldonia.” I think I liked how Caldonia is pretty close to rhyming with Sophfronia! Anyway, in [...]
Book Review: Living in the Weather of the World by Richard Bausch
This book made me reconsider the word “story”—not the definition of story but our experience of story in its ages-old form before it had the word “short” in front of it; before it was bound in hardcover and made eligible for awards. Before all that there was someone talking and [...]
