The critic’s task is a paradox: to translate into words works that were created to say what words cannot. So how does Olivia Laing make reading about paintings worth our while, when, as she puts it, “the paintings are the thing”? pshr.us/3zo4PbO

New publication: Music helps me to hold love and sorrow in the same hand. In that spirit, I wrote for WXPN’s The Key about the concerts I attended the year my father was sick and I was falling in love. thekey.xpn.org/2021/09/30/int…

And I made a playlist to accompany your reading experience! open.spotify.com/playlist/1BWqT…

On the eve of #FreeAtNoon's in-person return, we're reflecting on the power of music, both to heal and to channel joy. This moving essay by Catherine Ricketts reflects both as she remembers how the concert series helped her through a turbulent time her life: thekey.xpn.org/2021/09/30/int…

“Music uniquely welcomes this simultaneity. Whereas in visual art, two colors layered become another color, in music, two notes sound at the same time and each maintains its distinctive pitch.” just a gorgeous passage. thank you for this Catherine Ricketts

Tomorrow (Monday), the Mother/Artist Lunch/Break features Suz Slezak @tourmamasuz of David Wax Museum. We'll talk music-making and life on the road with small children. Join us at noon eastern on Instagram Live!

Tomorrow (Tuesday), I’ll welcome jazz vocalist Denise King to the Mother/Artist Lunch/Break. An icon in Philadelphia jazz, King is also a mother, and we’ll talk about how a career in music is compatible & at odds w/ raising children. Join us at 12 eastern on Instagram Live.

Read @AnneliseJolley’s heartbreaking, beautiful essay at The Atavist Magazine about Las Rastreadoras, Sinaloan Mexican women who search for the bodies of missing loved ones—and cook to keep the memory of the dead alive. buff.ly/3lQvE3V

Augustine as Literary Companion in Natalie Carnes’s MOTHERHOOD: A CONFESSION pshr.us/3yvu9wQ

Grateful to be published in Kenyon Review Online. kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issu… "All day I crave my son’s body: his warmth and weight, his skin like a petal. I want him to be still long enough to settle his head on my collarbone or to lie heavily in the arc of my torso..."

Imitating the voice, form, and tone of the CONFESSIONS, Natalie Carnes invokes Augustine as interlocutor, honoring the text’s literary and moral merits while challenging the blind spots inherent in its masculine perspective. Catherine Ricketts Stanford Press pshr.us/3yvu9wQ

"When Alice Neel made portraits of women and children—and she made many—she often painted the pair as a single figure." From "Weaning: Intimacy and Independence in Alice Neel’s Mother Pictures" by Catherine Ricketts: kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issu…

.Catherine Ricketts writes on Alice Neel’s portrayal of mother/child relationships: “[Neel] was not interested in the Marian archetype. . . . What she often captured between mothers and children was intimacy battling the mother’s desire for independence.” buff.ly/3t8Cwhh

Today's Wednesday on the Stoop is Spiritual Writing with Catherine Ricketts! Join us today, 2/23 at 4 PM EST. Register here: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regist…

"My mind is spread so thin it’s brittle. I’ve given so much to this child. But I’m hopeful that the giving expands, rather than constricts, my personhood."

“It was through my most acute moments of grief that I came to see not just aesthetic beauty but the beauty of God’s mercy.” – Catherine Ricketts christiancentury.org/article/first-…