I’d heard that, as you age, you often become more interested in art. What I didn’t expect was to discover how that growing interest in art would affect my fiction writing.
I wasn’t a stranger to art, but I can’t say it was a major preoccupation, either. I had two semesters of art history in college; I took two, because the same textbook was used for both, and it was more expensive than the tuition. I’m also not an artist.
I know when my connection of art to writing fiction started. It was some 50 years ago. We were young twenty-somethings living in Houston, and we saw two exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts. One was the works of Paul Cezanne, and it was stunning. But the one that captured me was “Master Paintings from the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum, Leningrad.” Houston was one of five cities hosting it.
To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.
Painting: Lumpeguin, Cigwe, Animiki, by Anselm Kiefer, from collection of the artist on display at the St. Louis Art Museum.
A few weeks ago, I looked by Bone Country, the recent poetry collection by Linda Nemec Foster. It was like a travel guide to Europe, but not what you expected from a travel book. She explore through both real and imagined stories, and you came away with a strong sense of what the people and places are really about.
Since then, I’ve looked at two of Foster’s previous collections, Talking Diamonds, first published in 2009 and reissued in 2023, and Bue Divide, published in 2021 and republished in 2023. In both cases, the first publisher had closed its doors and the collections were reissued by Cornerstone Press of the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. It’s not difficult to see why. Both Talking Diamonds and Blue Divide are excellent, with sharp imagery, moving stories, and an original voice.
If you had told him three months before, DCI Harry Grimm would have laughed. He’s on loan (or “secondment”) to the police in Yorkshire, and he first couldn’t wait to return to his base in Bristol. But now, the landscape and the people are growing on him; he’s even tried the local preference for cake with cheese and discovered it’s not too bad.
Grimm and his team are called into to handle a missing person report. A bestselling London author, in York to promote his newest book, has driven off into the dark. They soon discover the people attached to the author – his agent, his editor, his personal assistant, his accountant, and two “friends” – may have al had axes to grind. But where is the author?
David Gatward
He soon turns up, or his body does. It appears to be suicide by shotgun, except both triggers were pulled in succession. Suicide it wasn’t, and the list of suspects grows to include a woman who made a scene at a local bookstore author event, accusing the man of stealing someone else’s words. And if a murder investigation isn’t enough, Grimm’s criminal father shows up with two thugs, attempting to bring his son “into line.”
Shooting Season is the fourth novel in the DCI Harry Grimm series by British author David Gatward. Rather than a slow development toward the conclusion, this one finds Grimm and his team stymied at every turn, chasing leads that go nowhere – and that lasts for most of the book. What that means is that the story is less about the mystery and more about Grimm’s own development – and setting the stage for his possible permanent assignment to York.
In addition to the DCI Harry Grimm series, Gatward has published children’s and teen fiction, taught creative writing sessions, worked as an editor, started a small publishing firm, and returned to writing when the COVID pandemic arrived. He grew up in the Cotswold’s and Yorkshire in England (including the town for the setting of Grimm Up North), and he’s also lived in Lincolnshire and the Lake District.
The image that come to mind when I think of the American Revolution are the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, crossing the Delaware, Bunker Hill, the winter at Valley Forge, Paul Revere’s ride, the Declaration of Independence signed at Philadelphia, and Yorktown. Do you see what’s odd about that list? Except for Yorktown, the story in my head centers in the northeastern colonies. Alan Pell Crawford, writing for The Coolidge Review, talks about another war – the Revolutionary War that history forgot, one that just as important as what happened in the North.
I like the writing of William Faulkner. My wife does not. “Didn’t the guy ever hear of punctuation marks?” she says. Well, yes, there is that. Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review asks a very pertinent question for writers: how long should a sentence be? To be fair to my wife’s criticism, Miller points out that Faulkner has one sentence in Absalom, Absalom that is almost 1,300 words long. But Faulkner is a piker compared to last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Hungarian Laszlo Krasznahorkai, who has a novella of 17,800 words – all in one sentence. The mind boggles.
J.P. Moreland, professor of philosophy at the Talbott School of Theology (Biola University), has a relatively short article adapted from a longer paper. It’s about how three worldviews – Christianity, postmodernism, and scientific naturalism – view government. It will be no surprise that two of the three almost by definition favor big government. If you’re interested in the longer paper, you can download it here.
