Greetings from the Porch,

We had a great gathering in Indy last week and enjoyed thought-provoking talks, good food and conversation, and a beautiful venue. Thanks to Robb Greene for being such a generous host. I share a few thoughts and pictures from the conference here. We are working on plans for next year, so stay tuned for details in the coming weeks.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about anarchists, maxxing, and baseball.

• Michial Farmer reviews a new collection of Dwight MacDonald essays and reflects on the questions that animated his thinking and writing: "What am I willing to lose to preserve the humanity of my neighbor?"

• Adam Smith talks with Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor of Iowa, about localist politics: "If we’re not conserving the water, the soil, the people who live in our state, we’re just conserving the wrong things."

• Art Kusserow reviews Matthew Loftus's new book about therapy culture: "All forms of suffering are intrinsic to human nature; it is only how each age and its therapeutic agents (including monasteries) respond to them that changes."

• Nadya Williams reflects on her experience attending the FPR conference: "Front Porch Republic, which began publishing essays in March 2009, and has held an annual conference every fall since 2011 (with a Covid interruption), is about much more than simply bringing people together for convivial purposes, including delightful meals and conversations together. But it is certainly about no less than that."

• Alex Littlefield describes what and how one man imagines his collecting hobby: "What follows is my account of Doug’s collecting adventures, and of a life spent noticing what other people overlook."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about marriage this week.

This spring, Daniel McInerny is coming to Grove City College to speak at our Christian Writers Conference (more details on the conference are here if you want to join us). In preparation for his visit, I read his novel The Good Death of Kate Montclair. On a surface level, the novel is about a woman with terminal cancer and her decision to choose to end her life through assisted suicide. But the book is really about the shape of a ripe life and the possibility of redemption beyond all we might imagine. It’s a marvelous novel; think Walker Percy writing in the 2020s. Here’s a passage from early in the book about Kate’s sense of the shape of her own life as a shapeless mass lived in the wake of a catastrophe:

As I rumbled along on the shuttle, I indulged myself in an imaginary conversation with Chloe, my therapist. “OK,” Imaginary Chloe was saying, “you’re dying. Let’s look it squarely in the eye. What feelings come to mind?”

“That it’s all been a waste.”

“What has been a waste?”

“My life.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing has come to anything. Nothing has come to a climax and resolution. I can’t even detect a narrative. It’s just a series of disconnected, for the most part unhappy, episodes. Hey! That’s Aristotle’s definition of a bad tragedy: a string of disconnected episodes. I can’t even say my life has been a good tragedy.”

“There have been disappointments,” Imaginary Chloe said. “Agreed. But surely you’ve found some satisfaction in teaching?”

“To a point, sure. There are worse things than spending your life trying to turn kids on to literature and good writing. At Christmas, kids bake me my share of cookies and mini banana bread loaves and leave me heartwarming notes along with Starbucks gift cards, so something must be working. But before you get all Mr. Chips on me, consider the case of Rachel Lord. Rachel Lord was the brightest, most gifted student I have ever taught. Period, end of discussion. . . . . She graduated from Brook Farm and went on to get a BA in English from Harvard, then did graduate work at Cal-Berkeley. Then last week, Lisa told me that she saw an alumna’s Facebook post that said Rachel Lord had committed suicide. Overdosed on pills in a seedy hotel room in Palo Alto.

“Why, Rachel? What happened to what we used to feel when we read ‘I heard a Fly buzz—when I died’ or The Bell Jar? What happened to the feeling that we would never be the same again, that our lives were going to burn in every moment from then on?

Why wasn’t the poetry enough to keep the catastrophe at bay?

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro