writing Archives – James D. Hogan

All Creatures Great and Small

On May 12, 2025

Giving in–and learning along the way.

After months–honestly, it was years–of avoiding what felt like our children’s inevitable acquisition of small, furry rodent animals to serve as pets, and after successfully weaving between the pitiful pleas of kids number one and two–those eyes, those knowing looks of disappointment–I finally (finally!) acquiesced. Annie wanted a hamster. And I was too worn down to object. I held out for what should have been an appropriate amount of time. Even the most dogged defenses, it turns out, have vulnerabilities.

Mine began with a PowerPoint deck.

It’s only appropriate. How perfect that the chink in my armor involved a slide deck and an impassioned pitch. How pathetic that at nine years old, Annie had me figured out.

Advent 2: In the words of its making

By James D. Hogan

On December 11, 2024

In writing

Peace be with you.

Peace like a river; an evening paddling down, the river flat and black, chimney swifts swooping down in ashen shadow, clouds of insects wound tight into balls about eye level, the sound of rushing water. All of this a season–no, two seasons–ago. Floating with the current, the brookies and browns and smallmouths slipping beneath undercut banks, disappearing into dark pools to sleep, their shadows impossible to discern, their gills slowing to an ancient rhythm, in and out. Breathe in, breathe out.

Inner peace. The sharpness of a gunshot in the December twilight, sharp and lonesome is the report, the sound racing up the cove and bouncing off these old stone hills and racing back to share. It is a massive sound, close enough to wonder who is hunting so close to the house, but then I remember that we live in a national forest, that out here it might be a fellow stalking a deer, and it might be someone putting down something lame, and it might be just the neighbor shooting down mistletoe. We think of gunfire as anathema to peace, and for a few breaths my afternoon stops in its tracks, my ears perked up, but soon the sounds of the world around me relax, return, and all of that tension leaves.

Advent 1: Point Nemo

By James D. Hogan

On December 2, 2024

In writing

When lighthouses go dark.

In the early dark of December, I recall walking down to St. David’s in Cullowhee. I was a college student, a junior I think, and it was Advent. My friend Brittany had been invited to read a meditation she’d composed, and we were both going.

These meditations were a weekly occurrence at St. David’s. We arrived in the cold, entering into the nave directly from the red door at the side. Inside was a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling. The Advent evening prayer services were candlelit; there was a podium in the aisle for reading. A chest organ at the back provided some music. Dr. Lillian Pearson–Kelly’s piano professor–usually supplied.

I cannot remember the subject of Brittany’s meditation. I can only guess it was something literary. (We were English majors.) But the reason I was there in the first place had more to do with the rector who led the parish.

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