PORTION TWO
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“Christ is contingency,” I tell M. as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to rocklike English, the two fusing for a moment into a single dialect then splitting again; cowboys with creekbed faces stepping determinedly out of the convenience store with sky in their eyes and twelve-packs in their arms. I have spent the past four weeks in solitude, working on these little prose fragments that seem to be the only thing I can sustain, trying day and night to “figure out” just what it is I believe, a mission made more urgent by the fact that I have recently been diagnosed with an incurable but unpredictable cancer. How strange it is to be back in this place, where visible distance is so much a part of things that things acquire a kind of space, an otherness, a nowhere-ness, as if even the single scrub cedar outside the window where I’m working holds—in its precise little limbs, its assertive seasonless green—the fact of its absence. . to be continued… . ♦♦♦ There is an interview of Christian Wiman from 2007 at the blog Kaurab Online.
A LITTLE SOMETHIN' 
ramshackle resiliency…
I reckon we all could use a big dollop of that.
(I can’t tell how old he is from the image, but he writes from a heart that seems to hold lots o’ wisdom. I’m debating on clicking away and reading ahead… )
Thanks for sharing this series.
Blessings.
These are pulling me in!
i was thinking if i just put the link, that it would bee to boring to get any one to click. and if i put the whole thing it would be totally overwhelming and no one would take the time to read it. i thought it worth reading, so i tried to present it in a way that would make it more attractive and palatable. Like having photographs in a recipe book; that always helps me.
He is such a good writer, and i like stories, so i was totally drawn in too.
Wow nance , what a find here. Thanks for featuring this writer .
“the fact of its absence…” well, that phrase alone leaves me longing with wonder.
i’m glad that you are reading about him. i so much wanted to share it.