Fenton visited with poet, essayist, and retreat leader Judith Valente and poet and monk Paul Quenon on the porch of Thomas Merton’s hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky. Judith was photographing and filming Brother Paul for inclusion on her blog, found at...
Following here, reading suggestions compiled from friends and colleagues, along with suggested readings for those interested in deepening their experience of solitude and silence. An evolving list; suggestions invited. Readings for a time of quarantine My nominee first: Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, a...
Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays has been selected by the American Library Association's Over the Rainbow Committee for its 2018 list of "outstanding works of literature and nonfiction" of interest to LGBTQ readers and those interested in LGBTQ issues....
Watch Fenton read from his new collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays at the James Hormel LGBT Center at the San Francisco Main Library, followed by his former student, author and editor Andrew Lam. https://youtu.be/HnWg3VAUHr4...
Here’s a link to photographs and a recording from the April 20, 2017 reading and talk at the Bowling Green Barnes & Noble, sponsored by Western Kentucky University Libraries. This was the official premiere of my new collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays. http://library.blog.wku.edu/?p=13910...
Remarks, Deep Dish Presentation, Institute for LGBT Studies 16 February 2017 University of Arizona Let's observe a moment of silence for Frederick Douglass, and all those who sacrificed their careers and lives so that we might be here today. Let’s gather them together in this room. A...
Christmas doggerel, 2015 Father Louis is blessing the writers againPoets and prosodists, comely good men,Who quoth and who quaff in the woods where he trodTyping and tapping in service to God.Theophilus Woodchuck is burrowing deepPreparing himself for a long winter’s sleep,Before hibernating he’s making a...
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the RockRegardless of what one thinks about the therapeutic potential or lack thereof of psychedelics, the long piece by Michael Pollan in...
Writer and writing maven Cynthia Newberry Martin maintains a blog in which writers chronicle our daily lives. She asked me to write the July entry, with a prompt from Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." But when...