Category Archives: reading

For Your Listening Pleasure

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Lindsey Crittenden

Ten of my short stories are now available as audio books on Audible!  Several of the stories were published almost 20 years ago, and the others more recently. It’s wonderful to hear talented narrators bring new life to words I first heard only in my imagination.  I’ve read many of these aloud myself, so I’m used to them as “mine” — hearing them anew makes them work as stories.  Not just my stories, but stories out there in the world.  For that, I’m grateful. Last night I drove from Rainbow Grocery to the Sutter-Stockton garage in about 18 minutes, just … Continue reading →

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Darkness & Light

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Lindsey Crittenden

Lent has officially ended. Today is Good Friday, the second of the three days (Triduum) leading up to Easter Sunday.  Today — or rather, tonight, at sundown — marks the start of  Passover.  I’ve been thinking today about story, without which we wouldn’t commemorate either event.  I’ve also been thinking, this Lent, about trust, about giving up my often desperate grip on control in my own stories.   I’ve been praying, I guess, about letting go.  Today, too, I am struck by the Triduum’s embrace of sorrow and agony, and how those dark places open us up.  Story does that too, … Continue reading →

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(You must realize)

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Lindsey Crittenden

…that when he looked, and she looked up at him, their looks so merged in one the world outside grew vacant, suddenly, and all things being seen, endured and done were crowded into them: just she and he… here at the point and at this point alone:- see, this arouses fear. Such fear both knew. When I first encountered those words, my body thrummed. I was weeping without having realized I was moved. I had found my way home. This happened in 1996, at a small church in Berkeley, California, and the words were spoken as part of the sermon. … Continue reading →

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Story of an Ending*

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

Halfway through the year, a visitor appeared to a teenaged girl.  This was no ordinary visitor. The visitor greeted the girl, who was perplexed, even troubled, by the greeting.  Why had this extraordinary visitor come?  Don’t be afraid, the visitor told her, and then went on to say that the girl had found favor with God and would conceive and bear a son.  The visitor told her the son’s name and predicted greatness for him—a throne, even.  This troubled the girl even further.  She’d never slept with a man, as she pointed out to the visitor—how could she conceive? And, … Continue reading →

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Borne Back

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

I sat down this morning, a week late, to blog about deadlines and writing for money.  And then I opened my email in-box.  As the new messages tumbled in like dominoes down the left-hand side of my Mail window, one caught my eye.  “Gatsby Tops Knox.”  I grinned.  I didn’t have to open it to know what the subject header, from PW (Publishers’ Weekly) Daily, meant.  The classic American novel, published in 1925 and staple of every high-school American Lit class since, had topped the memoir by Amanda Knox, the American convicted in 2009 of murdering her roommate in Italy.  … Continue reading →

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