We have mobile phones, but we still have a landline. And according to caller ID, the most common caller we get on that line is someone I’ve grown rather fond of. His name is “Spam Risk.” He’s gotten crafty; he sometimes changes his name to “Medical Clinic,” or that of a local grocery chain, or just a location. But he is, and always will be, “Spam Risk.” He deserves his own short story or novel. But there might be hope for this unwanted intrusion; Gary Saul Morson describes it at The Wall Street Journal (story unlocked): A Modest Proposal to Deal with Spam Calls.
It might be because I’ve lived a long time. But what I do not get, at all, is this fascination for and support of socialism. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, and I remember when it was published. Ot the killing fields of the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. Or the brutal suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia in 1968. For those who think it could never happen here, well, they never thought it would happen in lots of places. Bradley Birzer, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, looks at the resurgence of socialism here.
Family history is rarely handed down intact, or even handed down at all. I was told a few things about my paternal grandfather, for example, mostly about the crazy songs he liked to sing and the expressions he used. A story about my great-grandfather, however, was handed down, an epic Civil War story. I based my novel Brookhaven on that story. Except the handed-down story turned out to be almost entirely wrong. But the reality told another kind of story – about a father who lost two sons and a son-in-law in the Civil War and was terrified that his youngest would be called up, so he took steps to protect that son as long as he could. At Front Porch Republic, N.P. Curtin writes about the importance of family stories, and keeping the family history alive.
I don’t know if grief is really a thing with feathers. Sometimes I think of it as a ghost, sometimes there, sometimes gone, but able to suddenly appear and startle you almost to tears. My father died nearly 40 years ago; grief didn’t hit me until three years after his death. My mother died 12 years ago; I felt it immediately. My half-sister, 11 years older, died several years ago; it felt like part of my childhood died, the time I knew her best. My half-brother, eight years older, died last year, and that one hit me harder than all the others. The best and worst conversation of my life was our last phone call, when he knew he’d die soon and was saying goodbye.
But all these griefs return, not at once and not with the same intensity. Some dull with time; some don’t. The ghosts of grief are likely a measure of the strength and depth of the relationship. What I’ve learned is that grief, with all its ghosts, can be another form of love.
These thoughts about griefs and family and ghosts came bubbling up when I read Ash Light: Poems, the latest poetry collection by Martyn Hesford. (The collection is available through both Amazon UK and the publisher, Grey Swan Press.)
Like most if not all writers, I follow several writers who post and talk about the craft of writing. Like other writers, it’s helpful, encouraging, and instructive to see what others, Christian and non-Christian alike, are struggling with, learning, sharing, and figuring out.
I published my last book in late 2024. What followed was period of exhaustion. Writing that book had been an intense experience; the research had begun in 2016 and continued through the writing of two other novels and deepened in the final two years. The published book includes nine pages of bibliography. I’d never written historical fiction before, and it was one of the most intense writing experiences of my life. Through the process, my respect for writers of historical fiction grew exponentially.
PoetSally Nackerlives in a house in or near a woods. That means her home is surrounded by nature. To experience nature, all she has to do is open her door and inhale. It was perhaps inevitable that she would find poetic inspiration here. All she had to do was walk in her yard.
Find it she did.
My Wild Yard is a small taste of living in a natural setting. The 16 poems of this chapbook are simple and direct, inspired by the landscape around her. The poems are short; the longest is four stanzas of four lines each.
I’ve been rediscovering, or actually discovering, the short stories written by Agatha Christie. Years ago, I read only a couple of collections of her stories. I focused on her novels – Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. I’ll confess to being partial to Monsieur Poirot and his famous mustaches, but I generally liked all of her novels.
A few weeks ago, when a notice showed up (Amazon and its algorithm own me) about a short story by Christie entitled “The Map,” it contained no reference to any of her famous detectives. In fact, it made no reference to the word “detective” at all. The description did suggest that it might be something of a ghost story. As it turned out, it wasn’t only a ghost story; it was downright borderline horror.
And now I’m hooked.
Agatha Christie
The Golden Ball is a story about two people who unexpectedly become an engaged couple. A young man is lectured by his grandfather about proper attendance at work, and he finds himself outside of work on a busy London street. Driving by is a young socialite, engaged to a duke, no less, and she promptly invites him into her car, they decide they should get married, and off they go to the countryside to find an appropriate home. They do, but it is there that the surprises begin, and there are more than one. It’s rather madcap, reads like something light set in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it’s great fun.
The Listerdale Mystery also concerns a house. A mother and her two adult children are formerly well-to-do gentr but brought financially low by the father’s unwise investment and borrowing decisions. They live in a cramped and rather shabby flat they can barely afford. The mother is worried that her son is becoming too interested in the nearby tobacconist’s daughter. The daughter is bewailing the interest of a well-to-do young man who wants to call upon her, but to see her living conditions would destroy any interest he might have. And then, unexpectedly, a fashionable property in Westminster in London becomes available at a ridiculously low rent, one even this down-at-heels family can afford. But gift horses are rarely what they seem.
Both stories are entertaining. They’re something of period pieces, but they show dimensions of Christie’s writing that are as entertaining as they are unexpected.
