A Painter’s Pages

The Paintings

The Remembering Voice

A figure under a single hanging lamp. Everything outside the pool of light falls away, which is what the essay says attention does.

Altogether Beautiful (Conversion Without Erasure)

Ordinary things in a strong shaft of light, lit up and still themselves. The essay’s conversion works that way: the everyday stays, and the sacred comes in beside it.

Crossings—The Complete Collection

Morning light moving across a bare floor, the way the poems come into a reader’s room.

Author’s Notes

A sunlit desk by a tall window over the coast, where a reader might sit to write these readings.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study (Second Sight as Narrative Technology)

A man whose reflection shows someone else. The novel’s narrator finds out he is the ghost he has been hunting.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Method Named)

The threshold, the hand, the basin of water, and the slant of light, all in one kitchen: the images that keep returning, kept together so they will not be lost.

The Sacred in the Shabby (The Creed Behind the Method) · Free Guides

Morning light fills an empty classroom, the “Oversoul” coming into an ordinary room.

The Comic-Grotesque Tradition (Sacred Meets Scatological)

One desk under two windows, pale light from one and gold from the other: the same scene lit as comedy and as something graver.

Credo (The Ordinary as Sanctuary)

An ordinary kitchen in warm morning light. The Credo starts here, with the sacred in everyday rooms.

Molly Bonamici: A Comprehensive Study (The Novella Behind the Novel)

A white house alone in a wide field, for the novella’s title: home as something longed for, lit up and far off. The storefront faith healer, the widow’s timed death, and the beach that stands in for the Assumption all circle back to a house like this.

The Voices That Would Not Be Tidied (Profanity as Intimacy)

Two figures seated apart in morning light, easy enough with each other to say anything. The essay hears the family’s swearing that way, as a language of trust.

Thin Places (The Poets Already Knew)

A lone figure at a bright window, in what the essay would call a thin place: an ordinary room where the wall between the inner life and the world seems, for a moment, to give.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (Light, the Unasked Question, and the Withheld Gloss)

Light slanting across a kitchen: Dickinson’s “tell it slant” falling on Whitman’s crowded, lived-in world.

Teaching at Fifty-Six

An empty, sun-filled classroom. The essay finds the sacred in rooms like this, and it shows most after the students have gone.

Credo (The Discipline of Attention)

A lamp lit on a writing desk before daylight. Attention starts early.

The Writing

An open notebook on a windowsill over the city, the page between the writer and the street.

Credo (Writing as Communion)

A bright, empty café in morning light: the writer, the page, and a reader who has not come in yet, all in the same light.

The Allusive Method (Literally True First)

One annotated book left open at the end of the stacks, the pencil still beside it: notes kept next to the printed line, not over it. The other books run back toward the light, close enough to be heard and far enough off to leave the open page alone.

The Allusive Mulhern (Frontispiece)

A sheet on a line, and in the same glance a shroud lifted into the light. The concordance is built on things like this, plain and sacred at once.

Crossings—The Complete Collection

A rowboat at dawn, resting at the water’s edge, about to cross.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study

A lone cottage, one window lit, on a sunlit headland, like the Glencars against the sea, with the water where Martin drowns and the púca moves. This is the novel’s other country, the Achill and Sligo shore the family came from.

The Unspoken Elegy (The Published Twenty-Poem Sequence)

A single white sail on calm water, for the quiet voyages in the poems and what the sea means throughout the work: freedom, and motion.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (Water) · Molly Bonamici: A Comprehensive Study (Home at Last)

The poem “Water” draws the old man on the dock as a body in drought, and the painting holds the moment the essay waits for: his reach toward a lake that will not rise. In the Molly Bonamici study the same still water receives Molly at the novel’s close, when she swims out and walks back to shore, “grateful to be home at last.”

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (One Book)

A lighthouse comes back to the same station and shows the same light. The essay finds that steadiness, the “silver current” of recurring families, settings, and symbols, across the whole catalog.

Thin Places

A holy well on a coastal bluff, the kind of “thin place” where, the essay says, this world and the next come close.

The Unspoken Elegy (The Reader as Confessor)

A lighthouse keeping watch, a fixed light over the sea that carries the dead.

Unquenchable Fire

Sun shimmering on the water where the unquenchable fire of Gehenna should be. Two women wade into the sea and are healed, not judged.

About the Author

A Boston triple-decker, the Irish-American working-class house the author grew up in and the fiction keeps returning to. (There is a full essay on class, ethnicity, and the triple-decker.) At dusk the windows are lit, a street he knows.

All My Sites & Books

A row of houses with several windows lit, one street with many doors, like the sites listed on this page.

The Remembering Voice

A triple-decker stairwell, a neighbor half-seen through a thin wall. In the Boston these voices remember, much is overheard and little is explained.

Crossings (analysis)

A painted crosswalk at a quiet corner, one man waiting at the curb, the book’s “crossing” taken literally, with long shadows for the elegy.

The Unspoken Elegy (The Published Twenty-Poem Sequence)

A road running toward dawn. This essay asks about order more than meaning: the route a reader travels from “A Prayer” to “Leaves.”

Crossings—The Complete Collection

A landing window on a stairwell, the poems’ climb from the ordinary toward the light.

Molly Bonamici: A Comprehensive Study

A woman alone at a window at night. Molly is that alone, and that unbothered by it.

Musings: Notebook to Essay

An open notebook on a porch railing at day’s end: a commonplace book, fragments that will later become essays.

The Poetics of Crossings

A footbridge over a still stream, a real crossing and a figurative one, the way the book carries its grief across.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study (The Pooka and the Poem)

A phantom horse at the well: the púca, a shapeshifter tied to water, whose revenge for a disturbed home drives the novel’s plot.

All We Ever Needed (Motifs)

Two people sitting close on a small Florida stoop. In these stories families are often chosen, and made on the doorstep.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Chalice Told Twice)

A figure walking toward a single lit door. In the essay’s reading of The Weight of Small Mercies, the dead and the living walk into the same light again.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study (The Pooka and the Poem)

A figure alone on a lane at dusk. The novel takes its title, its family name, and its closing poem from Yeats’s Celtic twilight.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study (Second Sight)

The same twilight lane, faintly doubled: second sight as a writer’s tool, foreshadowing and compressing, what is seen and what is foreseen in one frame.

Store

A small shop glowing at dusk, books sold straight to readers, warm against the dark.

Submissions & Contests

A small-town post office with its lights off. Submissions are closed until the next reading period.

Teaching as Vocation and Trap

An empty school corridor in long light, a calling and a confinement both.

Teaching as Vocation and Trap (The Diptych’s Argument)

Worn stone stairs, lit unevenly: a long working life climbed one step at a time, with the dark landings the two school stories set side by side.

Molly Bonamici: A Comprehensive Study (Seeing Without Feeling)

A small child in an oversized doorway, like the narrators of these stories: too young for what the room holds.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study (The Brother Who Came Back)

A figure lifting a fallen man at the curb: Martin’s first return, “I got you,” a promise kept in the snow. The lamppost lays a cross over the scene without comment, the way the novel follows the Gospel pattern and never names it.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study (The Brother Who Came Back)

A young man keeping watch at a bedside: Martin come back to sit with the sick, a touch that answers a fever. The window’s light lays a cross on the wall without comment, the way the novel follows the Gospel pattern and never names it.

All We Ever Needed

Bread and milk on an empty table. The title calls mercy “all we ever needed,” and here it is plain food, nothing more.

The Comic-Grotesque Tradition (Sacred Meets Scatological)

A nearly empty bus in morning light, the kind of ride where the essay’s scenes of bingo, indignity, and small kindnesses take place.

Book Club Companions · The Room Kept Ready

An empty circle of chairs under lamplight is a company not yet arrived—the exact invitation of a discussion guide. The warmth is in the waiting. In “The Room Kept Ready” the same circle opens the essay: a room set for whoever comes in.

Books & Collections · Downloadable Studies

A quiet library, shelves to the ceiling in afternoon light. These books were made for a shelf.

The Comic-Grotesque Tradition (The Comic Underworld)

A genial older man at a card table under a warm lamp: Mr. Scarfone, friendly and a little frightening, the underworld played for comedy.

The Comic-Grotesque Tradition

A forlorn clown on a trunk, the comic grotesque in one figure: funny and sad in the same face.

From the Work

A woman reading alone in a bright room, meeting the passages with nothing in between.

The Confessor Archetype

A grandmother leaning down to hear a small child. She is the confessor the essay studies, the one who hears what cannot be told to a parent.

The Confessor Archetype (The Grandmother Who Hears)

The grandmother’s table, a child’s coat on the empty chair. This is where the secret is brought, to the matriarch, the last court of appeal, for better and worse.

Give Them Unquiet Dreams: A Comprehensive Study (Diagnosed and Believed)

An institutional building on a sloping lawn, where the novel’s two explanations meet: a psychiatric diagnosis, and the second sight the family brought from Ireland.

The Confessor Archetype (“A Bath”: The Confession That Is Earned)

A woman drawing water into a worn tub. In the essay the bath is where care and violation share one room, and what happened is told by what goes unsaid.

The Remembering Voice (Dialogue, Beats, and the Em Dash)

A diner booth, one chair pushed back, the meal left half-eaten: a conversation broken off, which is what the essay listens for in the dialogue.

The Greatest Short Stories · Start Here

A sunlit, orderly library for twelve great stories, each one a problem of the form solved.

Guides for Student Writers

Graded papers on a teacher’s desk in late light. Thirty years of these stand behind every handout and workbook.

The Unspoken Elegy (Objects That Hold the Feeling)

The folded robe, first of the essay’s three objects. It stands in for the body, for a son’s care of his father, and for grief the poem never names.

Press Kit

A typewriter by a window over city rooftops, the working desk the press kit introduces to reviewers and booksellers.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (One Instrument, Two Grammars)

A Steinway in a modest parlor, the piano the essay meets twice: broken in the poem, simply played in the story.

The Unspoken Elegy (The Reader as Confessor)

A worn armchair facing the window, empty. In the essay the reader takes this seat and hears the confession.

The Sacred in the Shabby (The Kitchen Table)

A table set with cookies and candies. The essay treats food in these stories as a kind of sacrament, holy by being exactly what it is.

Services

Two armchairs facing each other by a window, for the one-on-one conversation every service on this page comes down to.

The Comic-Grotesque Tradition (The Comic Underworld)

A rumpled man at a cluttered desk: the syndicate in its unglamorous back room, with the menace let out of it.

The Voices That Would Not Be Tidied

A kitchen full of talk, the voices as they really sound, before anyone corrects the grammar.

The Comic-Grotesque Tradition (The Faith Healer’s Parlor)

A woman leaning over the cards in a sunlit parlor. The women in these stories take up belief like a part in a play, and put it down again.

Altogether Beautiful (The Words It Never Says)

A table set for two, one glass half-empty, a chair askew. No altar, no amen, no rosary: the words the story leaves out.

Commonplace Shelf

Pigeonholes full of papers and a bundle of handouts on the counter, a teacher’s mailroom open to anyone who comes in.

Author’s Notes

A cabinet of drawers with one pulled open. Everything is kept in order, and any of it can be opened. The light finds the chosen drawer, and the chair waits for whoever stays to read.

Home

The front door of the site: the desk is waiting and the chair is empty, so the room belongs to whoever reads. The city in the window is the one the work keeps returning to—near, bright, and seen from inside.

About

The same city from the same kind of room, with the writer at the window—attention as a daily practice, the work done at a desk facing the place it is about.

Press Kit (Author Biographies)

At his own desk, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the window behind him: the writer placed inside the city his books keep returning to, the working room offered to the press as the place the work is made.

About the Author

Five people from different books in one kitchen, and somehow there is enough bread. No one was introduced, and everyone already knows where the cups are.

Lessons (Lessons in Poetry)

A reader alone with a small book of poems in late sun. The poetry lessons start where she is: one poem, read slowly, in good light.

Lessons (Lessons in Fiction)

A novel held open on a train at dusk while the river town goes by unseen. The fiction lessons study how a story holds a reader that completely.

Lessons (Lessons in Nonfiction)

A man reading with a pencil at a library table, taking notes as he goes. The nonfiction lessons ask for that kind of reading: close attention to how a speech or essay makes its case.

Writing Children’s Books · Commonplace Shelf

Two small chairs and a picture book open on the table, before anyone has come in. The guide is written for that room, where a child and a grown-up read one book together.

Writing Alternate History

A wounded soldier dictating a letter home from a hospital ward in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. The guide begins from history like this, which has to be right before a writer imagines it otherwise.

Altogether Beautiful

The title is a Marian acclamation, and the painting rests a shaft of light on the Virgin’s statue—the feast-day liturgy of the Assumption that the essay reads against the story’s images of stain, care, and mortality.

The Sacred in the Shabby (Communion Without an Altar)

The stone pelican over a parish door is the medieval emblem of self-giving—the pelican wounding its own breast to feed its young—communion, in weathered stone.

Credo

An empty chapel where only the colored light says the liturgy. The Credo finds the sacred in ordinary life, and grace here is just light.

Crossings—On Prosody

A metronome caught mid-swing: the steady beat under the free verse, which the poems keep varying and sometimes leave behind.

The Unspoken Elegy (Objects That Hold the Feeling)

The second object: a photograph by the casket. The poems never name the loss; the picture does.

The Unspoken Elegy (Objects That Hold the Feeling)

The third: a shattered print of The Last Supper, a sacred image broken, and grief in the breaking.

Molly Bonamici: A Comprehensive Study (The Marys)

Two women meet at a tenement doorway, the Visitation in working-class Italian-American Boston, as the essay reads the novel’s central scene.

The Comic-Grotesque Tradition (The Matriarchs of Larceny)

Nanna’s ledger in bright midday light, the family account book where crime and care go down on the same page.

The Allusive Method (Names as Citations)

A hand writing names in a registry, “the act of naming as devotion,” each name a promise the story will keep.

The Unspoken Elegy (With Heaney in Mind)

A working man resting on his spade. Grief here is work, dug into the ground, and the essay’s “redress” is partly a matter of digging.

The Religious Architecture of the Work

A nave, looking toward a plain altar. Chapel, font, and altar keep turning up beneath the fiction and poems.

The Remembering Voice

A drawer of letters and a folded photograph. The narrator remembers because the things are kept close.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (Revision in Public)

A manuscript page of pencil cross-outs: revision as a discipline, the same scene redrafted until it comes right.

The Sacred in the Shabby

A housedress and apron on a clothesline: the sacred among shabby things, grace hung out to dry.

Silver Current Press and the Small-Press Tradition

A hand-operated letterpress. Publishing here is handwork, and the essay sets the press beside the wider small-press tradition.

Altogether Beautiful (The Story’s Texts)

Three printed versions of the same story side by side, each making different choices. This section reads the text as a history.

The Confessor Archetype (Confession Without Contrition)

A confessional in dim light, for the narrators whose voices stay calm and reasonable even while they confess.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Threshold)

A figure at a grave. The same dead are visited again across the stories, the same loss taken up again.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Hand and the Tended Body)

The anointing of a foot. Washing and tending come back again and again in the work, its tenderest sign of care.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Hand and the Tended Body)

The sign of the cross made in a car, a small habit of the body that outlasts every other change and gets “taken up” wherever the work goes.

The Sacred in the Shabby (What Makes a Thing Useless)

A rosary worn smooth at the decades, in an old hand. Its holiness comes from the person holding it.

The Allusive Method

Five books open on one table, each held at its page by something ordinary: a stone, a teacup, a key. Old texts kept open by everyday things, in the same low light.

About the Author

The rosary and the things nobody said out loud run all through the fiction, and this is the room they come from: a grandmother in her chair near the end of the afternoon, the light crossing the wall toward the Blessed Mother, and nothing that needs saying.

Credo (The Fire Under the Bridge)

Low embers in a stone hearth under a bright window, a fire that never quite goes out, banked in an ordinary room.

Altogether Beautiful (A Fire That Does Not Consume)

A single flame over still water: “unquenchable fire” beside the water of baptism, judgment beside care.

Credo (The Fire Under the Bridge) · What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up

The bridge fire is the originating scene—the fire Mulhern and his brother Mark built on the way to a dance, the one Credo begins with when it turns to permanence. In What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up it is a secret boyhood rite that will “re-incarnate” across the fiction; in Credo it is the fire that went out behind them and returns, decades later, in a dark room.

Home

The home page opens on the city the work is written from. The reader’s chair is empty and the book lies open; a man stands alone at the glass, and beyond it City Hall keeps its hours over the rooftops.

Home

Near the close of the home page, the Water Works offers Philadelphia at first light: water, stone and an early hour, the elements the poems keep returning to, set in the city where the press now makes its books.

About the Author

The biography begins in Boston, and this is where the schooling began: an old public school of Latin and long sentences, the first discipline behind a life spent reading closely and teaching others to.

About the Author

The river and the empty bench hold the student years in a single view: the university across the water, the evening light, and the long habit of sitting still with a book.

About the Author

Across the Common lies the college where the writing degrees were earned. The path is lit and nearly empty, a route walked many times between the city’s oldest green and the rooms where writing was studied.

About the Author

The Oxford fellowship of 2015 is rendered as a quadrangle at evening, with stone warmed by late sun and one doorway lit. The biography turns from Boston toward Philadelphia here, and the painting marks the hinge.

Teaching Resources

A public reading room is the right emblem for free teaching materials: long tables, open books and a seat for anyone. The windows open onto Logan Square, so the resources belong to the city as well as the classroom.

Reviews & Recognition

A record of notice hangs beside the city’s oldest public building. The painting keeps the tone quiet, with dusk, lit windows and a nearly empty path, so recognition reads as something kept on record.

Contact

The contact page is about reaching across. A bridge at dusk, lit and spanning the river, is the plainest picture of a letter sent and a reply on its way.

Ask the Author

The bench waits for a conversation. Readers send questions anonymously, and the painting offers the kind of place where such a question might be asked: a public square, an October afternoon, room for one more.

Reading Alongside

Notes on other writers belong in a bookshop window: the old books lit against the rain, the shelves where kindred voices sit side by side, and a reader drawn in from the street.

The Recurring Image

A concordance of motifs needs an image of return. The boathouses repeat along the bank and repeat again in the river, and the lone shell moving through that doubled light is the reader tracing a recurrence.

Glossary

The glossary gathers old words still in daily use, and Elfreth’s Alley is an old street still lived on. Each house is plain and exact, set in its row in the way a defined term sits in a reference.

The Shape of a Story

A page about structure hangs beside a building that wears its structure openly. The trusses carry the roof the way a beat map carries a story, and the hour before opening is the draft before readers arrive.

Appearances

Readings and visits happen in neighborhoods like this one. The stoops are where a block gathers on a summer evening, and the painting holds that standing invitation to come and talk about books in person.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Method Named)

The essay names its method as return, and this is a lane of returns: the same doorways, the same shutters, the same step swept again. A morning chore repeated becomes the image of recurrence as care.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Threshold)

A station is a threshold built at the scale of a city. The traveler stands in the light between arriving and leaving, the place the poems keep choosing for their emotional events.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (Water)

Water in the work is domestic before it is sacred, and these temples were built to bring a city its ordinary water. The man at the railing watches it the way the poems do, without asking it for a miracle.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (Light, the Unasked Question, and the Withheld Gloss)

Built to send voices into the dark, the tower glows and says nothing. The woman looking up asks no question aloud, and the painting, like the poems, leaves the light unexplained.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (One Book)

Setting recurs with the specificity of return. The same square, another season, and a reader on the bench holding one book while the leaves keep their annual appointment.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (One Book)

A school seen from a stoop, the neighborhood and the classroom in one frame. The essay reads the work’s places together, and this is why.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (Revision in Public)

A building made for the trade of words, its top carved with figures looking down at the city. The essay is about revising in public, and the tower is a draft set in stone that people keep looking at.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (The Chalice Told Twice)

A commuter’s station is a place of daily repetition, the same platform and the same hour returned to until it becomes a rite. The section reads the book’s twice-told story the same way, as liturgy rather than redundancy.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (One Instrument, Two Grammars)

One building speaks two grammars: an ornamented crown for the sky and a plain lit counter for the street. The section asks what poem and story each make of the same Steinway, and the tower answers in brick and terracotta.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up (One Instrument, Two Grammars)

A theater is where a single score becomes performance. The usher waits under the marquee before the house fills, as the Steinway in “Assumptions” waits in a register opposite the poem’s smashed piano.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up

The conclusion asks why return at all, and the lit crown answers without words: a lantern set high so the city can find its way back each evening.

What Is Laid Down Is Taken Up

Mercy, the essay says, is the ethical name for refusing to let the dead stay finished. Here it is domestic: lit windows coming on one by one above the trees, each a room where someone has been taken up again into evening.

About the Author

A house built for a crowd, a porch with room for everyone, and the evening keeping exactly one light on upstairs.

About the Author

The title promises the inside; the painter never gets past the steps. Tower, tracery and a shut door keep the interior for whoever goes in.

About the Author

Broad morning, and someone upstairs is still burning a lamp. The trim is the blue of the far hills, as if the house had borrowed the view and decided to keep it.

About the Author

Every shutter open, the gate shut, and the hedge grown tall enough to do the talking. One upstairs window keeps the light; the house keeps its own counsel.

About the Author

The leaves are down and the raking has been reassigned. Two dogs take the job very seriously, and the lawn is no tidier for it.

About the Author

Night, the fire low, the book abandoned face down. The crew that worked the leaves all afternoon has clocked out on the rug, and a few of the leaves came in with them.

About the Author

Every stoop on the block is empty at the very hour stoops were made for. The street trees have taken over the watch, laying their shadows across the sidewalk.

About the Author

A bay window built for the view, and the view, for the moment, cooperating. On the far ridge the fog is already making up its mind.

About the Author

Blazing sun on stucco, violet shadows, palms in full display, and one enormous cloud standing in for the entire forecast.