Tent Revival

My dad dreamed of a tent staked to the ground:
preachers at the pulpit like batters at the plate,
soles in the dirt, coaxing souls from the dirt.

My husband slept in a tent, his dreams
the drums of a Cherokee reservation,
his church pew the buffalo grass.

With bedsheets, I build a tent for my sons.
Flashlight like an acolyte’s flame,
I teach them only to kneel.

Copyright 2026 by Heather Cadenhead. All Rights Reserved.

What It’s Like Underneath by Joshua Alan Sturgill

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

I Believe in Beef and Beer: Mr. Hecht says we eat far too much, and further and especially that we eat too much meat. Both of these propositions are erroneous. The truth is that we don’t eat enough, and that we don’t eat enough meat. There is a subsidiary error to the effect that food may be defined as body-building substance. The definition is bad, inasmuch as it is accidental instead of being essential. Good food is stuff that we like eating: bad food is stuff that we hate eating.

NEW POETRY

The Institution by Joshua Alan Sturgill

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

Beer and the Present Discontent: When are going to have an end put to all this nonsense? The nonsense, I mean, of watering good English ale, and talking about “specific gravity” and those “d——d dots,” which no one understands or is meant to understand, and selling the lieges inferior and melancholy wash with a smack of ditchwater about it at a scandalous price, and turning everybody into the street at half-past nine as if they were little children who ought to be in bed.

POETRY NEWS

Joshua Alan Sturgill will be teaching a course for The Symbolic World, entitled The Art of Imitating Heaven: Structure and Meaning in Ancient Cosmology. Enrollment is now open. This week, Sturgill offers Some Fell Among Thorns.

Jesse Keith Butler, the author of The Living Law, has published a new Arthurian poem, The Last of the Longships.

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

What the Anglo-Catholic Congress Means: The Anglo-Catholics now in Congress desire, no doubt, to reform the Church, so that, in all essentials, it would be pretty much the Church of the Middle Ages. The Protestant party would prefer to see it not unlike the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland. What will the end be?

NEW POETRY

Automated Imitation by Joshua Alan Sturgill

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

Beer Rations: For the Low Latin for ale is cervisia, which must be derived from the Welsh cwrw, and thus it may probably be inferred that at the time of the breaking up of the Roman Empire and in the wild days afterwards, it was the Britons who were notable for the making of beer.

AN ARTHUR MACHEN CALENDAR:  WHY NEW YEAR?

NEW POETRY

The Story And The Lens by Joshua Alan Sturgill

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

The Spirit of Christmas—According to Dickens: It often amuses me, in reading comments on Dickens and, more especially, on Dickens’s conception of Christmas, to see that most illustrious man kindly excused and let down gently, as it were, on account of the things in him which are his chiefest and his rarest merit.

From the December 24, 1920 edition of the Evening News:

NEW POETRY

Joshua Alan Sturgill returns with Things.

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

Scrooge 1920: Scrooge was undoubtedly getting on in life, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Ten years had gone by since the spirit of old Jacob Marley had visited him . . .

MACHEN MISCELLANEA

How Will Mr. Machen Spend Christmas Day?

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

Folk-Lore, Water Babies and Mermaids: The last reported appearance of a mermaid is so recent as the end of April 1910. Several people, including Martin Griffin, my informant, saw what they are firmly convinced was a merwoman in a cove a little to the north of Spanish Point, near Miltown, Malbay. She was white-skinned, and had well-shaped white hands. The party tried to make friends with her, giving her bread, which she ate. Then a Quilty fisherman got frightened, said she was “something bad,” and threw a pebble at her, on which she plunged into the sea and disappeared.

NEW POETRY

Melancholia by Joshua Alan Sturgill

MACHEN MISCELLANEA

A Welsh Mystery: Perhaps Mr. Arthur Machen is at the back of it all.

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

Six Weeks’ Drought: Six weeks’ drought, with a few slight rainfalls that are hardly worth mentioning; I thought I should find a brown desert; such as I saw in travelling from London to Harwich on a day in August 1914; the day when the news of the Namur was announced. But there was nothing like this.

NEW POETRY

The Dream About My Grandmother by Joshua Alan Sturgill

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

A Strawberry Idyll: And so the best berry that God made is scarce and dear this year. I am sorry for it. The strawberry is a great part of our English summer; it is part of the splendour, with sunlight and wild roses swaying from hedgerows, and cool cups and asparagus and solemn, scented nights.

NEW POETRY

Abandoned by Joshua Alan Sturgill

MARTINMAS: Arthur Machen on the High Holy Day

THE WEEKLY MACHEN

Through a Door Off Oxford-Street: Here is another face of the everlasting wonder and enchantment of London. You stray into some new, red, raw suburbs, all plate-glass shops, cheap goods, shiny villas, and the rest of it; and at a corner here is a mansion that deny with one voice that Queen Anne is dead.