The Pleasant Company of Strangers
Like most people around the world, I have not attended a live performance in months.
Courtney Zonnefeld graduated in 2018 with a degree in writing. She currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works for Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking, and saving up for more herb plants. You can usually find her wandering a farmer’s market, hunting for vintage books, or browsing the tea selection in coffee shops.
Pondering Punctuation, from Least to Most Delightful
I’ve arranged this top ten in a completely subjective, completely nerdy manner: how excited am I to write with it?
With Love from a Cat Aunt
When you work with children’s books, cats are inescapable.
Flour-covered Rhythms
After a month of stay-at-home orders, suddenly everyone’s a baker.
Prayers for Now
How do you speak confusion to God?
New Kid and the Power of a Gold Sticker
I remember kids’ delight in the graphic novel section, the way they stacked book after book in their arms. But I also remember parents’ reactions when their kids reached that shelf.
No One to Thank and the Myth of the Lone Genius
While the myth of the lone genius is dangerous for the successful artist, it is absolutely cruel to the aspiring artist.
The Same, The Truth
We tell the stories as we want to know them, withholding the details that would round them into truth.
Read Your Food: Beyond Recipes
With every bite of these foods, we eat our history, and we inherit the ingenuity of immigrants, slaves, presidents, and chili queens who crafted the foods we love today.
Remembering
When we cannot speak to God, cannot even say the barest “I love you,” we are carried.
O is for Out
Several things happen at once: ba-boom. Flicker. Shatter.
Confessions of a Birdwatching Hypocrite
While the pace of change has slowed down, my identity is still catching up.
Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Inevitable
In the many centuries of death and love and loss since this story was first told, when would we not return to this story?
Fireflies and Drafting Days
On paper, on screen, will you see my words?
Table for One
Living alone doesn’t have to mean eating alone.
On Val/Galentine’s Day
A craving for apples doesn’t vanish just because you planted an orange tree.
Unpacking the Bookshelf
Each title is an era trapped in amber, a fossil record of a former self.
The Weather Outside is Frightful
Thick, globby specks of white dotted the sky, like Impressionist brushstrokes viewed too close up.
18 Steps to Lemon Meringue Pie
14. Whip the egg whites until “stiff peaks form,” a description that—even after over ten years of making this recipe—you still can’t confidently identify.
Teach Us to Pray
Teach me the quiet virtue of janitors and night stockers. Of saints who wake and sleep and live—and that is enough.
On Your Marks, Get Set, Bake!
When the show released its most recent episodes on US Netflix earlier this month, I of course hit play as soon as I could. But I—like hundreds of others tweeting and otherwise panicking on social media—immediately noticed a difference.
Solitude and I-80
And then—after all that hectic activity—all I had to do was drive. For five hours. On the same road. Beside a repeating pattern of corn and soybeans.
