The Mudroom Turns 6!

I started The Mudroom six years ago because there wasn’t enough space for everyone. The collaborative blogs at the time were filled up with “featured” writers who already had a name and a platform and a following. That meant that there were fewer places people, especially women, could submit their writing.  I felt like there […]

When Hospitality is Radical

  She pauses, the doorbell’s eerie reverberations beat a note of panic through her veins. She wipes her hands on the linen apron wrapped around her and hurries to tell them to hide themselves in the basement or attic.   She breathes deeply, realizes this is the moment she and her husband have talked about, […]

I’m done with resolutions

Each time the calendar turns to January, we’re inundated with new ways to eat clean, organize our drawers according to what we love or find useful, start a new workout routine, or figure out how best to get our goals met. We pick new rhythms, routines, a word of the year, or a new intention.  […]

Tasting Beauty in the Suburbs

Flashback Friday: This post was originally published on May 10, 2016. It had been a string of days with too much noise—me, children, politics, social media—so I took to the neighborhood walking paths to work things out in my body, while my husband constructed things out of wood (his own way of working things out). I […]

Prayers in Wingback Chairs

I sat in our green wingback chair, my legs curled under me, my hands outstretched to the ceiling. I prayed for God to show up, my fingertips flying through space, willing him to do something. I was bred on “praying the sinner’s prayer,” and extemporaneous prayer overflowing with all the big feelings in youth group. […]

You are Woman: You Belong

We sat on the curb at the edge of the elementary school playground. Five friends huddled around me, my white plastic three-ring binder with the words “Mon Amis” written on it. We were starting an exclusive club — a club where we had things like codes and friendship pledges and anything I could use to […]

Coffee Cups and Emmanuel

 I knew now… why I could feel homesick at home. — G.K. Chesterton   O Come O Come Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appear   Coffee cups I don’t remember much of the particulars of that conversation. I remember fumbling around for words as my […]

Finding My Place, One Avocado at a Time

I do not yet know how to belong to a place. It always happens in the in-between space of small conversations, the way the light hits just so, or the accumulated miles where your route “home” becomes something you can do in your sleep. It happens when what was “different” from “there” instead just “is.” […]

On Writing My First Book

A few weeks ago, I turned in the manuscript for my first book to my publisher, Finding Holy in the Suburbs. I suppose there had been others — scrawled words in composition notebooks and spiral notebooks, abandoned stories where I gave up writing and thought I could only write about writing, and a PhD that approximately […]