All Posts By

James Schaap

Blog

Emma Coger made a scene

“Let’s have a conversation,” or so my neighbor Brian Keepers suggested wisely on Monday. “Do you see patience as a virtue or a privilege?” It’s

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Blog

Elegy

We watched him shave–at least I did. I mean, I didn’t stand there gawking like some silly ten-year-old idiot, but when he was up beside

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Blog

Park Lane improv

Okay, this little story feels for all the world like urban myth, but some stories just beg to be told whether or not they happened,

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Blog

My neighbors’ stories

Men, women, and children huddled in covered wagons crossing endless prairie seem to beckon all by themselves some hovering, mounted Native war parties up on

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Blog

Of the Heart

Nobody gets paid. Let’s get that out of the way. A goodly number of us do commendable and even exhausting work on this now ten-year-old

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Blog

Saturday Dance Macabre

I don’t mean this to sound like a “dance macabre,” an old late-medieval allegory of death. I swear it wasn’t. Don’t think of that Saturday

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Featured

The Quality of Mercy

You will abide, I hope, my looking back a bit. It comes easily to a man or woman in his/her 70s. Just ask. But if

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Blog

Preparations

If you’re a prairie kind of person, some ordinary flat-lander, and if you consider Iowa’s rolling landscape as the very definition of normal, then you can’t

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