Callie Feyen

hi. I have a little tradition with myself each December 6, which I know is St. Nick’s day, but it is also my birthday and here is what I do: I go to Target. I get a medium coffee – black – and I walked the aisles, alone. It is superficial. It is trite. It is so very much a… View Post

In his book, The Christmas Plains, Joseph Bottum writes about a myriad of Christmas experiences, taking us to South Dakota, Washington DC, and back to the Black Hills. Despite the many different settings and experiences Bottom writes about, he constructs his sentences in such a way that makes it easy – and a pleasure – to follow along. Near the… View Post

At the grocery store, the cashier asks me how my Thanksgiving was. “Lonely,” I say, remarking to myself that any other year, regardless if I thought it was fine or not, I’d have said, “Fine. Yours?” “Yeah, same,” she replied and both of us laughed and then talked about the turkey and the fixins we made. We compared brining rituals… View Post

  The Herd Boy is not the story of Nelson Mandela. Not exactly. The author, Niki Daly, gives her main character a different name, Malusi. But he is a herd boy like Mandela was, and he is living in a village similar to the one Mandela grew up in. And like Mandela, Malusi has dreams of becoming President. The book… View Post

I haven’t been sleeping well and we have an abundance of pears that are about two days away from turning to jam. The pears aren’t what’s keeping me up at night, but they did pop up in my string of thoughts somewhere between 3-5:30 in the morning, and it was the pears I decided with a groggy conviction that I… View Post