Church

Take notes. Last Church Standing could be a book title. I live in the Blue Ridge. Our little towns all have a kinda strange housing market where $250,000 buys you one bedroom. I lived in a church once in Michigan. My bedroom was the balcony. It was a great place…

Fire Cracker

Take notes. Truly great literature is written by outsiders—the unorthodox and the nonconformist. When their careers are destroyed before they begin, we all lose. Writers privately tell us that they are concerned about the inevitable literary pablum of the coming decade. It’s already here.  I live in a village in…

Tim Barrus: Coyote Den

Last night, the three coyotes slept in the coyote den I made. I needed to make the den bigger. I dug a hole in the cedar. Cleaned out the hibiscus. I wore gloves. I did not know about the puppy. They protect the puppy with their coyote lives and they…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Ross Douthat on the American West. I gotta hand it to him. He goes right up to a thing, and presses his nose hard against the window. Ross wants more people in the West. I want them to go away and take their reproductions with them. The West does not…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

I live at the top of a mountain in the Blue Ridge. I ride a dirt bike. Street bikers think I’m nuts. But who needs a helmet anyway. I am thinking America in my hair. When I ride into a city, someone tries to steal my bike. I have caught…

Most People In The Blue Ridge

Most people in the Blue Ridge live like this. I do. Our silence is not Us In Absentia. The dirt bike is in the back yard.

Blue Ridge

Censorship At The New York Times

When a publication publishes you at 10am — for the entire world to see — but by 11am, or less than an hour later, they unpublish you, they yank your work down, this is what is known in journalism as censorship. The reason the New York Times publishes me, and…