Pete
All I know about the donut scene in Champaign, Illinois, I owe to a man named Pete.
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 | Aug 18, 2018 | 0 comments
All I know about the donut scene in Champaign, Illinois, I owe to a man named Pete.
by Ben DeVries | Jul 18, 2018 | 0 comments
For a long time, my reading habits resembled a Michael Pollan polemic, if Michael Pollan had been trying to cure the Western diet with genre fiction instead of carrots: Read fantasy. Not much else. Mostly Tolkien.
by Ben DeVries | Jun 18, 2018 | 0 comments
Or to put it another way: what happens when marriage comes to be defined by the promise of sex?
by Ben DeVries | May 18, 2018 | 0 comments
I spent a good chunk of my prewriting time for this blog post keeping Satan at bay.
by Ben DeVries | Apr 18, 2018 | 0 comments
We’re used to standing apart from the places we occupy, fillers and subduers of the earth that we are.
by Ben DeVries | Mar 18, 2018 | 0 comments
Turning out in droves despite rain and wind and snow, we marched and chanted and beat on bucket-drums and blew on whistles and papered the campus with fliers. We disrupted classes. We shut down buildings.
by Ben DeVries | Feb 18, 2018 | 0 comments
I do not want to strike. No one wants a strike. But if it comes to it, Jes and I will be on the picket line February 26, bright and early, because at that point we will have no other choice.
by Ben DeVries | Jan 18, 2018 | 0 comments
Season 11 aired its first episode on January 3 of this year and picks up, sort of, where its predecessor left off. I say sort of advisedly.
by Ben DeVries | Dec 18, 2017 | 0 comments
Still, having experienced it myself now, I can sympathize with the twinge I’m about to give my many well-meaning English teachers when I divulge this next bit of information.
by Ben DeVries | Nov 19, 2017 | 0 comments
“Merdarth, general of the Dark Lord’s army, stood, terrified, before the Orb.”
by Ben DeVries | Oct 18, 2017 | 0 comments
If nothing else then, the Illinois Regional College Fair confirmed for me what I already knew: I would make a terrible salesperson.
by Ben DeVries | Sep 18, 2017 | 0 comments
The smoothies are revoltingly healthful. One recipe, dubbed “The Beginner,” calls for pear, banana, pineapple, avocado, and a full six cups of kale.
by Ben DeVries | Aug 18, 2017 | 0 comments
Like any good sci-fi tale, then, Orphan Black is finally far less interested in predicting what might be, than it is in describing what exists now.
by Ben DeVries | Jul 18, 2017 | 0 comments
The cheese cube relish, while very much not my thing, had a sort of melt-away pickle flavor that was not wholly unpleasant.
by Ben DeVries | Jun 18, 2017 | 0 comments
Two weeks ago, in the lead-up to a concert, I got to read poetry off a video screen that was larger than the end zone of a football field.
by Ben DeVries | May 18, 2017 | 0 comments
Toward the end of the graduate bible study my wife and I led this past academic year, two things were almost always certain: cheesecakes and IRB forms.
by Ben DeVries | Apr 18, 2017 | 0 comments
I’ve found that the mundanities of teaching quickly and quietly bleed a name of its import.
by Ben DeVries | Mar 18, 2017 | 0 comments
But as much as this story would insist that Link is the star of this latest quest, the real star of the show isn’t a person at all. It’s Hyrule itself.
by Ben DeVries | Feb 18, 2017 | 0 comments
The number nineteen appears with such frequency in this deposition, it begins to feel rehearsed.
by Ben DeVries | Jan 18, 2017 | 0 comments
The show excels in precisely the same way as its source material: it approaches its subject matter with a pitch-perfect ear for dark humor, and with an impishly ironic attitude toward storytelling.
by Ben DeVries | Dec 18, 2016 | 0 comments
If this is grace, it’s as lovely as it is disconcerting. It takes the very ugliest of us and says, “I can work with this. Child, I can work with you.”
by Ben DeVries | Nov 18, 2016 | 0 comments
and when it bursts I imagine in my place a heap of broken bylines allusions clickbaits hottakes jpegs gifs intros outros all spooled out on the floor
by Ben DeVries | Oct 18, 2016 | 0 comments
If anyone in contemporary America can sympathize with the frustration of first-century Christians awaiting the imminent return of Christ, it’s we Cubs fans.
by Ben DeVries | Sep 18, 2016 | 0 comments
Specifically, I want to suggest that irrespective of the cloak-and-dagger politics it portrays, The X-Files does an excellent job of exposing our secret pleasure in conspiracy theories.
by Ben DeVries | Aug 18, 2016 | 0 comments
More crucially, the Time-Turner plot that comprises the latter two-thirds of the play codes almost as a kind of high-level fan-fiction.
by Ben DeVries | Jul 18, 2016 | 0 comments
Gollum’s torture reminds us of the hand that we the good, we the kind and generous-minded, have in producing “bad character.” We call forth the best and worst in each other.
by Ben DeVries | Jun 18, 2016 | 0 comments
Jessica, meanwhile, cut against the interpretive grain. She saw in Stephen’s lurching movements, his silent fury, his body at war with itself, something that looked like her.
by Ben DeVries | May 18, 2016 | 0 comments
I drag around furniture, scramble on top of kitchen counters. I dust, I sweep, I wipe. I also bleach and mop, neaten, vacuum, air, fluff, and polish.
by Ben DeVries | Apr 18, 2016 | 0 comments
During a Friday morning panel at the 2016 Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, writer Jessica Mesman Griffith said something that would later come to trouble me.
by Ben DeVries | Mar 18, 2016 | 0 comments
In contrast with games like Mafia, which lives and dies upon its players’ intuition, Secret Hitler introduces a mechanic that brings reason (or maybe reason’s bastard, hunch-prone son) to the table.