Urban Gothic
Cities veer in the public imagination from weird and enchanted to crime-ridden and drug-addled.
Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.
by Ben DeVries | Mar 18, 2023 | 2 comments
Cities veer in the public imagination from weird and enchanted to crime-ridden and drug-addled.
by Ben DeVries | Feb 18, 2023 | 0 comments
Beyond the walls, the infected lurk—zombies in all but name.
by Ben DeVries | Jan 18, 2023 | 1 comment
Their poems a problem to be intimidated by, and then picked apart, and then finally, exhaustingly brute-forced into yet another five-paragraph essay.
by Ben DeVries | Dec 18, 2022 | 0 comments
ChatGPT can compose serviceable feminist criticism, of the kind I’d expect to receive from my first-year undergrads.
by Ben DeVries | Nov 18, 2022 | 1 comment
On good days, I remember that a job is just a job and that sometimes jobs change.
by Ben DeVries | Oct 18, 2022 | 0 comments
the Clock has given vent to a slowly spiraling sense of despair.
by Ben DeVries | Sep 18, 2022 | 2 comments
How do you narrate to yourself how you have changed?
by Ben DeVries | Aug 18, 2022 | 2 comments
Kimmerer’s book is—I should stop myself. It’s one of those books that’s easy to lapse into cliché when describing.
by Ben DeVries | Jul 18, 2022 | 1 comment
I don’t see what the big deal is.
by Ben DeVries | Jun 18, 2022 | 1 comment
The denomination would like for things to be settled.
by Ben DeVries | May 18, 2022 | 1 comment
What does it mean to try to persuade when you don’t think you can?
by Ben DeVries | Apr 18, 2022 | 3 comments
It’s the quiet sense of time slowed down, of time doubled back on itself, that I enjoy about this morning walk
by Ben DeVries | Mar 18, 2022 | 1 comment
Words like fond, roux, and laminated dough mean something to me now.
by Ben DeVries | Feb 18, 2022 | 0 comments
Missionary Conquest’s colonialism for Christ is not exceptional at all.
by Ben DeVries | Jan 18, 2022 | 4 comments
In the US, opposition to the left is as American as apple pie and as invisible as water is to a fish.
by Ben DeVries | Dec 18, 2021 | 0 comments
I’m not much for that old chestnut: that those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.
by Ben DeVries | Nov 18, 2021 | 1 comment
Sometimes opacity can be an ethic.
by Ben DeVries | Oct 18, 2021 | 0 comments
It is growing, the poem, quick as trees.
by Ben DeVries | Aug 18, 2021 | 1 comment
Inertia doesn’t require much, after all. It never does.
by Ben DeVries | May 18, 2021 | 7 comments
In the stage play of my life, I am always the most vivid, the most fully realized, actor.
by Ben DeVries | Apr 18, 2021 | 2 comments
In many respects, Hummingbird Salamander is a typical VanderMeer story. Except when it isn’t.
by Ben DeVries | Mar 18, 2021 | 3 comments
I found that I could barely bring myself to open it. The thought of reading it just felt … wrong
by Ben DeVries | Feb 18, 2021 | 2 comments
In a happy marriage of Star Wars and Friedrich Nietzsche: the abyss strikes back.
by Ben DeVries | Jan 18, 2021 | 2 comments
People are storied, first, before they are instructed.
by Ben DeVries | Dec 18, 2020 | 2 comments
In the end, the crisis I fretted over, the risk I hoped to mitigate, never quite materialized.
by Ben DeVries | Nov 18, 2020 | 5 comments
Silicon is, I think, a good standard-bearer for the present, because it reminds us that the abstract and the concrete are always intertwined.
by Ben DeVries | Oct 18, 2020 | 1 comment
Law and order, but only certain laws and certain orders.
by Ben DeVries | Sep 18, 2020 | 3 comments
I’m not convinced that looter’s increased presence in my life is the result of a newly expanded horizon of awareness.