John Leax (pronunciation: leks) is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in Houghton, New York. His articles, fiction and poems have been widely published in anthologies and in periodicals such as Image, The Christian Century, The Other Side, The Cresset, The Reformed Journal, Christianity Today, ASLE, Christianity and Literature, Radix, Cold Mountain Review and Midwest Quarterly

Grace Is Where I Live Ebook

Biographies & Memoirs

Leax, John

Arts & Literature

WordFarm

Grace Is Where I Live has inspired--even mentored--many writers, readers and teachers during the decade since it was first published. Here John Leax shares the experiences that shaped his life along with insights on choosing writing as a vocation, successful and failed teaching, identifying a personal "poetic," writing in different genres, writing from "placedness" and writing for a particular community. He wrestles with the "questions that must be asked" and ultimately offers "good news" about the struggles, trials and rewards of the writing life. 
This new edition, marking the tenth anniversary of Grace Is Where I Live, includes the complete text of the original revised by Leax and expanded with a new preface, six recent essays, the poem "Vow" and a bibliography.

Grace Is Where I Live: The Landscape of Faith & Writing

Leaders & Notable People

This enhanced ebook marks the tenth anniversary of Grace Is Where I Live, John Leax's spiritual and intellectual memoir on the writing life. It includes two CDs, one containing selections read by Leax (also available separately as an audio book) and the other containing the complete text from the revised and expanded edition (PDF), additional audio excerpts (MP3), photos, links, a bibliography and background information.

Grace Is Where I Live Enhanced Ebook

Shares the experiences that shaped the poet's life along with insights on choosing writing as a vocation, identifying a personal 'poetic' writing in different genres, writing from 'placedness' and writing for a community.

Grace Is Where I Live Audio Book

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

This topical young adult book won an Illinois Arts Council award.Wanda Louise Ledbetter, —thirteen, "white trash," orphaned, mad, and too smart for her own good —is eyeballing every man leaving the doctor's’ entrance of the big Dallas hospital. Perched on her mama’'s rusted-out Cadillac, she'’s been there ever since her stepfather Harley, drunk and abusive after her mother'’s funeral, yelled out the secret nobody was ever supposed to know: Wanda'’s daddy wasn'’t her daddy, and not even her dead mama knew his name, —because Wanda was made with donor sperm. So Wanda has grabbed her half-gone grandma and her half-dog Wild Thing and hit the road to find her "real" daddy. There’'s brave new trouble ahead, and Brave New Wanda is roaring toward it.

Brave New Wanda

Lynda Rutledge

Literature & Fiction

One afternoon when poet John Leax was standing in a grocery store checkout line, a tabloid news headline beckoned: "Leaping Turtles Invade US." As he looked more closely at the accompanying image, two lines sprang into his imagination: "Suppose one could believe the tabloid headlines. Suppose the stories under them were true." Leax later wrote that “true story.” Then he wrote another. And another. They are all collected in Tabloid News, his fourth book of poems. As he wrote, Leax explored two linked impulses that he found in the tabloids: desire and fear. We desire connection to beings other than ourselves. Yet we fear what we do not know—what is alien or different from us. In poems like “Baby Born with Antlers,” “Dog Makes $60 Million Modeling” and “Duck Hunters Shoot Angel,” Leax grapples with this conflict between desire and fear humorously, chillingly, poignantly and artfully. If you've ever been attracted—or repelled—by a tabloid news headline, these poems are for you.

Tabloid News: Poems

John Leax

Poetry

"All true loves are full of quarrels, and these essays tangle through some of mine," writes Paul J. Willis. Candid, adventuresome, hilarious and soul-searching, Willis explores his conservative religious upbringing, his affinity for the Romantic poets, his lifelong avocation of mountaineering and his midlife understandings of faith and wilderness. Several of the twenty-one essays in this collection have appeared in publications such as Ascent, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004, The Best Christian Writing 2006, Books &amp; Culture, The Climbing Art, Image, The Other Side, Redwood Coast Review, River Teeth and Summit. "Settle into the steady expectation of delight," says John Wilson, editor of Books &amp; Culture. "Such is the charm of Paul Willis's splendid essays."

Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild

Willis, Paul J.

Essays & Correspondence

Full of humor and pathos, as southern stories ought to be, the fifteen short-shorts in this debut collection will haunt you. From simple family dysfunction to tragic twists of fate, the characters in Surviving Nashville suffer their losses with surprising grace. Stacy Barton is a storyteller with an ear for dialect, an eye for detail and a heart for her character--even the mean ones.

Surviving Nashville: Short Stories

Stacy Barton

Contemporary

"This is what a sacramental poetry sounds like," says fellow poet Paul Mariani of Luci Shaw's new collection, What the Light Was Like. Shaw holds up both world and words to the light, revealing to us what has been there all along and teaching us how to see it for ourselves--with honesty, precision and patience.
 Tenting, Burr Trail, Long Canyon, Escalante Even when I close my eyes, even later in the tent, dreaming, I see banks and rivers running red. My blood has drunk color from the stones as if it were the meal I needed. I am ready to eat any beauty--these vistas of stars, storms. The mesas and vermillion cliffs. The light they magnify into the canyon. The echoes, the distances. The rocks carved with ancient knowledge. But after vast valleys I am so ready for this low notch in the gorge, the intimate cottonwoods lifting their leafy skirts and blowing their small soft kisses into my tent on the wastland's stringy breath. The spaces between the gusts are rich with silence. I am ready to stay in this one place, sleep, dream, breathe the grace of wind and earth that is never too much, and more than I will ever need. In this parchment land, the scribble and blot of junipers and sagebrush--each crouched separate, rooted in its own desert space-- spreads low to the sand, holding it down the way the tent pegs anchor my tent, keep it from blowing away. The way I want my words to hold, growing maybe an inch a year, grateful for the least glisten of dew.

What the Light Was Like: Poems

Shaw, Luci

With poems that are "as entertaining as they are compelling" (Greg Pape) The Gravity Soundtrack will please both veteran readers of poetry and those who've never before picked up a book of poems. In this debut collection Erin Keane explores subjects ranging from classic myth, philosophy and religion to rock 'n roll, pop culture and children's book characters. The poems are finely crafted, with a "confident and alert use of language" (Greg Pape), and each one shows keen insight into the nature of what it means to be human.In The Gravity Soundtrack, the poet is not a voice from above passing truths down to the reader, but rather is right there with us in the muck and mire of human experience--and, all along, shows great compassion for our questioning, our losses, our uncertainty. In the end, Keane has few answers for this questioning, but, still, the book leaves us with a feeling of redemption and hope. Is it our very stories, she says, that finally redeem us: "I couldn't give you/anything to hold, so take this wakeful night/know it can't make sense. What's left? At least/make it a good story. An offering, one last" ("Grievous Angel").

The Gravity Soundtrack

Erin Keane

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