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What Grief Leaves Behind: On Isla Morley’s Come Sunday

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It begins on Maundy Thursday, the kind of day where the weight of the world doesn’t come all at once but in small, unremarkable pieces. A child wants to wear something impractical. A husband moves too slowly. A wife, already overwhelmed, tries to hold everything together. Abbe Deighton, the wife in question, has a full day ahead and plans for the evening. To make room for it all, she leaves her daughter Cleo with a friend. Not the friend she first thought of, but one close enough. A safe choice, she believes. The kind of everyday compromise parents make constantly. But by nightfall, the road outside that friend’s house is clogged with police, neighbors, and blue lights. Cleo is gone. Some novels teach, some entertain, and some simply sit with you.  Come Sunday , Isla Morley’s first does the last. It does not move with urgency. It does not try to dazzle. It opens a door to grief and leaves it open, inviting you to stand in the doorway and feel the air turn cold. Morley’s writing is ...
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The Silence That Stays

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The first time I saw Job’s arm at the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts, I didn’t think about theology. I thought about hospitals. Specifically, the way someone looks when they’re beyond needing help and just want to be seen. His body was curled inward, as if someone were trying to disappear into their own bones. But the arm reached up. That arm changed everything. It’s a pale, drawn thing, ribs visible, skin translucent, hand half-open like it forgot what fists are for. Reaching not like he expects an answer, but like asking the question is all he has left. He’s alone, lit by an eerie lunar light that makes him look more like stone than flesh, though he’s definitely still alive. Barely. Around him sit three men cloaked in silence. Their backs are turned to us or their faces obscured. One might be looking at him, or maybe just through him. They don’t touch him. They don’t help him. They’re just there. Watching. The painting is called  Job’s Comforters , and it was painted by Alfred Bram...
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Location: Richmond, VA, USA
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“The Crime You Watched”: Revisiting The Accused in an Era of Performed Outrage

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In 1988, a young woman was raped in a bar. On a pinball machine. While men cheered. It wasn’t a headline, though it easily could have been. It was a scene from a film called  The Accused . But the horror of it didn't feel distant or fictional. It felt too real. Too familiar. The kind of thing we hope never happens, but know in our bones already does. The woman was named Sarah Tobias. She had messy hair, a denim jacket, and a loud mouth. She was played by Jodie Foster, who wasn’t supposed to get the part. Studios didn’t think she was right for it. Too smart, too reserved, too Yale. But Foster wanted it, fought for it. And when she got it, she gave it everything. Sarah Tobias is not the kind of victim movies usually give us. She drinks. She dances. She argues. She doesn't look for sympathy. She demands it. And that’s what made her unforgettable. You couldn’t tuck her into a corner of your conscience and move on. You had to sit with her. All of her. The story unfolds like this: Sa...
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Location: Washington, DC, USA
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Lines in the Water: Sailing with the Nathan of Dorchester

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The boat was waiting for us. Not dramatically. Not with fanfare or creaking grandeur. Just quietly, the way old truths tend to wait, tied gently to the dock in Cambridge, Maryland. Her hull white and unbothered, her lines taut against the pilings, her sails bundled like folded hands. Her name, painted just above the rail in crisp lettering, was  Nathan of Dorchester . The day was bright. The air smelled like river salt and sunscreen. A few of us stood at the edge of the harbor, squinting, not entirely sure what to expect. This wasn’t a thrill ride or a reenactment. No pirate flags. No costumed guides. Just a skipjack and the people who loved her. And so we climbed aboard. At first, you don’t think about history. You think about footing. The slight give of the deck. The ropes underfoot. The unexpected intimacy of being on a boat powered only by wind and bodies. There’s no engine hum. No digital screens. Just the creak of wood and the sound of someone asking if you’ll help raise the ...
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Location: Cambridge, MD 21613, USA
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The Band That Shouldn’t Have Worked: Genesis, Three Sides Live, and the Sound of Reformation

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They were supposed to be over. Twice. Once when Gabriel left, once again when Hackett followed. But there they were in 1982, tight, relentless, and smiling. Not proving anything. Just playing like they belonged there.  Three Sides Live , Genesis’s hybrid concert film and live album, doesn’t just document a band on tour; it captures the strange alchemy of artistic rebirth and a pivotal moment in the history of one of the most influential bands to ever play. Most bands don’t survive the departure of their mythmaker. Genesis lost two: Peter Gabriel, their masked, fox-headed bard, and Steve Hackett, their angular, pastoral architect. The late ’70s should have buried them. Instead, they turned inward, writing not with grand design but raw necessity. The result wasn’t just continuity. It was a mutation. A quiet, self-determined kind of resurrection. Genesis didn’t just pivot, they split their skin. Released in June 1982,  Three Sides Live  straddled two worlds. The double LP co...
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The Genre We Inherited, The Woman We Forgot

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There is a staircase in every haunted house, and it never leads anywhere good. But what if the staircase is circular, winding back on itself like a snake swallowing its own secrets? I came across Mary Roberts Rinehart’s  The Circular Staircase  only recently, while working my way through one of those 'Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time' lists, half curiosity, half pilgrimage. What I expected was a dated curiosity, something dusty and overwritten, a historical artifact more than a living work. What I found, instead, was the foundation. Not just of a mystery, but of something stranger and more structurally daring. The blueprint, not for a murder, but for a genre. Published in 1908,  The Circular Staircase  was Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first full-length novel, serialized originally in  All-Story Magazine  before being released in book form by Bobbs-Merrill. It tells the story of Rachel Innes, a sharp-tongued, middle-aged woman who rents a sprawling country home...
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Location: Washington, DC, USA
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Where the Wild Boar Dies: Power, Pageantry, and Performance in Carle Vernet’s A Boar Hunt in Poland

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Carle Vernet,  A Boar Hunt in Poland , ca. early 19th century. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Photograph by the author. The moment you look at it, you can feel the dirt fly. Not metaphorically. Literally,  A Boar Hunt in Poland  by Carle Vernet seems to detonate right in front of you. Horses rear, dogs snarl, a pike catches the light mid-thrust. In the middle of it all, a dying boar still fights back, a lump of muscle and defiance against the crimson swirl of aristocracy on horseback. It’s not a painting so much as a tableau frozen milliseconds before either triumph or gore. But beyond its bravado, the painting whispers something older and colder: this isn’t just a hunt, it’s a ritual. A performance of dominance. A mirror of empire. And the more you look, the more it begins to resemble a history painting in disguise, a drama of class, conquest, and the spectacle of control. Carle Vernet’s  A Boar Hunt in Poland  is an early 19th-century oil painting, pa...
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