A shoot, a branch

After Isaiah 11:1-11 

From the stump

of the axed tree

comes forth a shoot,

tender and green,

emerging against

all odds, forcing

its way, tender

and green, into

the air.

 

From the roots

of the axed tree

comes forth

a branch, fragile

but growing,

soon bearing

fruit, unexpected

fruit, bursting

from the branch,

nourishing and

beautiful, into

the air.

 

Photograph by Akira via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“Ultrasound: Your Picture,” poem by George David Clark – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

How to Change Your Perspective on Time – Seth Lewis.

 

Access All Areas: Exhilarating Proximity in the Christian Bubble – Stephen McAlpine/

Piets and Poems: Martyn Hesford and "Ash Light"

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.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

St. Clare: A Sonnet – Malcolm Guite.

 

Summer Camp Highlights – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

The Ragged Hand of Winter – Sonnet by K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood.

Accepting a Short Story Challenge

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. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

 

Top photograph by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Morning Desire – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Are You Looking for Magic? – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

Dorothy Sayers Is the Answer to John Dewey – Jesse Sumpter at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

A Record of Writer’s Rush – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

Poets and Poems: Sally Nacker and "My Wild Yard"

Poet Sally Nacker lives 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.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

How a Luna Moth Grows Up – poem by Adam Whipple at New Verse Review.

 

The Weight of Time – poem by Padraig O Tuama at Poetry Unbound.

 

“On Vacation,” poem by Sally Thomas – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Sleep of Seeds – poem by Lucia Cherciu at Every Day Poems.

 

“The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life” – Steve Knepper at New Verse Review.

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie

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. 

 

Related:

 

“The Map” – a Ghost Story by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Willa Cather’s Pioneering Women – Sarah Reardon at First Things Magazine.

 

The House Does Not Need You – Nic Rowan at The Lamp on Ray Bradbury and AI.

 

Mysterious Shapes Hidden Beneath the Amazon Canopy Reveal a Sprawling Ancient Civilization Much Bigger Than Researchers Expected – Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

The Ring and a Junction on Blackfriars Road – A London Inheritance.

 

The Gables of Elsinor– Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

The right time

After Galatians 4:4-6 

Not early, not late,

but at the right time,

the fullness of time,

he came, sent

by his father,

for the right purpose

to redeem,

to redeem those

under the law,

to adopt those

under the law

as sons, followed

by the right action,

the sending of the Spirit

into our hearts,

the hearts of the sons,

the sons of the heirs

of God.

 

Photograph by Andrik Langfield via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity – Brett McCracken at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Faith over Fear: Meeting Christ in the Middle of the Storm – Mike Hernandez at Gospel-Centered Discipleship.

 

Peace is Better – Melissa Edgington at Your Mom Had a Blog.

 

Saturday Good Reads – August 8, 2026

Given the number of movies, plays, poems, and novels about the man, you would think that the entire planet knows King Arthur was obviously a real person. The actual story is that proof has never been found that the man existed. St. Gildas, a monk writing about 540 A.D., mentions an earlier figure named Vortigern who won a battle against the Saxons. That account was picked up by others, including the Venerable Bede about 731 A.D. in the early 1100s, Geoffrey of Monmouth blew those accounts up, giving us Arthur, Merlin, and the start of the legend as we’ve come to know it. At History Today, Ken Dark makes the case for Arthur as a real person. (And I know for a fact that Guinivere looked exactly like Vanessa Redgrave, and the 1968 movie “Camelot” proved it.) 

He may be the most successful writer you never heard of. Japanese author Seishi Yokomizo sold 55 million books in his lifetime, almost all detective stories. Then World War II started, and the Japanese government wouldn’t allow him to publish, because Western influences were considered verboten. After Japan’s defeat, Yokomizo was once again free to publish. And his books are finally being translated into English.

 

It may be one of the most unusual reversal stories I’ve read in a while. A young woman enters Columbia University as a liberal, and her experience transformed her into a conservative. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

The Banality of Disruption – Glen Sproviero at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Morning Leonard Cohen Explained Antisemitism – Steven Karras at Steven’s Substack.

 

The Wendell Berry Moment – Daniel Vollaro at Front Porch Republic.

 

Writing and Literature

 

I Prefer Not To: Literary Laments in the Age of AI Dead Letters – Barbara Castle at Front Porch Republic. 

 

Literature as Part of Life – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Dostoevsky Rediscovered – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

America 250

 

The Declaration of Independence in Richmond – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Jefferson & the Crucible of Peaceable Coercions – Geoff Smock at the Journal of the American Revolution. 

 

British General Benedict Arnold, Goerge Washington and the Nadir of the American Cause – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

American Stuff

 

White Haven: U.S. Grant’s St. Louis, Missouri Home – Patrick Young at The Reconstruction Era.

 

Historian blasts Smithsonian’s activism shift after first visit in over a decade: ‘Completely different place’ – Kiera McDonald and Andrew Mark Miller at Fox News.

 

Poetry

 

Village – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Beautiful Invisible: Jan Twardowski’s Poetic Lessons on Loving in Solitude – Grzegorz Ignatik at Church Life Journal.

 

“The Thrush,” poem by Edward Thomas – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

You’re Still You – Josh Groban (from Ally McBeal)

 Painting: Woman Reading, oil on canvas (1943) by Albert Reuss (1889-1975).