United States of America
Christopher Martin is author of This Gladdening Light: An Ecology of Fatherhood and Faith,
which won the Will D. Campbell Award in Creative Nonfiction.
KAIROS & CRISIS By CHRISTOPHER MARTIN There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. [...]
The author at Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens. (Image courtesy Christopher Martin.) Writing is a winding journey with twists and turns, ups and downs, periods of creativity and blockage. But most of all, it is personal; it's an individual act that is different for all writers.
Winner of the Will D. Campbell Award in Creative Nonfiction “An honest, gritty, and transcendent book.” ~Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood “It is extraordinary that this insightful work comes from a young writer , whose reflections on religion, nature, literature, and family create a synthesis of ideas and imagery that is as pleasurable to read as it is effecting.” ~Anthony Grooms, author of Bombingham and Trouble No More “Our reward is Martin’s honesty,...
The story of the red-tailed hawk roils with my blood, fused with the dirt at Kennesaw Mountain. Kennesaw rises in the suburbs northwest of Atlanta, an isolated ridge-monandock, "lonely mountain"-in the shadow of which thousands of soldiers fell in a battle of the Civil War, June 1864, one of the last battles before Atlanta itself fell.
I would've never believed that this age, here and now, I'd be sitting in this rust-stained tub, soaking in vinegar to relieve chigger bites speckling my legs, wounds amassed the other night walking a meadow along Allatoona Creek with my children.
At Paradise Garden For this world is not our lasting home; we seek a home that is to come. -Hebrews 13:14 Allatoona Range to Ridge and Valley, Etowah River to...
ATHENS, GA - R.E.M. is getting back together, but not in the way fans might have expected or even wanted. Amid scrutiny and second guessing over the resignation and suspected firing of beloved coach Mark Richt, University of Georgia officials have also fired Richt's entire coaching staff and named the former members of the Athens-based rock group as their successors next season, sources confirm.
By CHRISTOPHER MARTIN Contributing Editor Thomas Merton defined kairos as "the time of urgent and providential decision," a time that involves the risk of crisis. This sense of kairos, particularly here in the South, has much if not everything to do with race and religion.
[Poecology] One of the things I admire about your voice is the caring fearlessness with which you balance a critique of contemporary American culture with a religious respect for its iconic places and traditions. It’s a tension that comes out so naturally in your work and expresses a certain need to revisit and mull over connections between place and spirituality. If I can quote from the first nine lines of the poem “Feeding American Bison at the Yellow River Game Ranch,” from your...
These photographs, along with some written fragments not included here, are part of a series I began roughly three years ago about the Yellow River Game Ranch – a privately owned, small-scale, and questionably maintained zoo, located in the piedmont of north-central Georgia, with an emphasis on animals native to the eastern United States. I’ve visited the Yellow River Game Ranch as a child and as a parent, and I’ve left each time with a pathos and a conflict I cannot quite name. These photos...
By CHRISTOPHER MARTIN Contributing Editor Thomas Merton defined kairos as "the time of urgent and providential decision," a time that involves the risk of crisis. This sense of kairos, particularly here in the South, has much if not everything to do with race and religion.