The current issue of WORLD magazine carries my latest essay, "What They Teach Us." If you aren't a subscriber, a) why aren't you?; and b) you can pick it up wherever thoughtful news magazines are sold. Or you can get an online subscription.

My first short story, "The Grace I Know," meanwhile, is available in the summer issue (Issue 4) of Ruminate, a literary journal rooted in the Christian faith. If you'd like to support good writing, you should subscribe. If, on the other hand, you simply want a souvenir of this landmark event (my first fiction in print), you can order Issue 4. But the subscription is, if you're thinking pennies per quality word, a far better deal. Here's the first paragraph from the story:

Grace comes for me in the loneliest part of the night, the way she used to do. Her steady tap on the door pulls me from sleep, and there she stands in the dim light of the hallway, wearing her cotton nightgown embroidered with purple flowers. Her stare is fixed on the place where my head emerges from the darkness of our bedroom, as if her eyes can divine the black. I know what she wants before she raises her arms. She was always my little spool of thread, spilling out of her bed and down the hall to bump against my door, to wait until I cradled her and rewound the invisible string between her door and mine, returning her to rest.

Aren't you intrigued? So go subscribe already.

And in case you've forgotten, there's also this. So stop complaining about having nothing good to read at the beach this summer.