The New Edition of Cultivating Oaks Press: Fidelity

The autumn edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and its full of stories, articles, poetry, and beautiful photography. The theme is fidelity, defined by my Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the quality or state of being faithful” and “accuracy in details.” Synonyms are faithfulness, trustworthiness, and loyalty. 

This issue includes stories and articles by Tom Darin Liskey, Annie Nardone, Sam Keyes, Rob Jones, Amelia Friedline, Andrew Roycroft, and Lara d’Entremont, among several others. I have a poem, entitled “52,” and an article entitled “A Lock of Hair.”

 

It’s a wonderful issue.

 

Related:

 

A playlist for the autumn edition, Fidelity, of Cultivating Oaks Press.

Research for a Novel Upended a Family Civil War Legend

In writing Brookhaven, one of the sources I relied upon for research, book referrals, and general information about the Civil War was a web site called Emerging Civil War. Its official description is “a public history-oriented platform for sharing original scholarship related to the American Civil War.”  

Because the site is aimed at the general reading public (people like me), the articles include historical research, memory studies, travelogues, book reviews, personal narratives, essays, and photography. The writers include professors, National Park rangers, teachers, historical authors, and even general writers (like me).

 

I can’t say enough about how helpful the site has been to my research and my general understanding of the war and the people who fought in it. And now I’m one of their guest authors, with “Research for a Novel Upended a Civil War Legend.” 

Photograph: My great-grandparents, Samuel and Octavia Young, about 1880. The photograph was rather clumsily repaired after suffering some damage.

What Do You Do in the Calm After the Storm?

It’s the calm after the storm.

For months, it’s been days and weeks of intense writing, rewriting, editing, re-editing, adding to, and subtracting from. I thought novel #4 would be a relative slam dunk, since large chunks of it have existed for more than a decade. All I had to do was add a few thousand words and polish it up, and then it would be ready, correct?

Well, no.

What finally emerged as a completed manuscript draft bears little resemblance to the text I started with. The story idea remained the same, but along the way a supplementary narrative was added, characters changed, new conflicts emerged, and the original text was rewritten at least three times. Then it was editing and proofing and fact-checking. 

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

Photograph by Keenan Constance via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Strange and Wonderful Worlds: How I Discovered Science Fiction

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, I discovered a literary genre that I knew existed but generally paid little attention to: science fiction. As a child in the 1950s and 1960s, I had been terrified and scared witless by science fiction movies – The Day the Earth Stood Still, Them, The War of the Worlds, and even b-grade movies that aired on television late on Saturday nights, like Caltiki, the Immortal Monster. 

But between those movies and the late 1970s, I had read only a small handful of science fiction works – Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and, in college, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. My reading tending more to literary fiction and non-fiction; my major indulgence in popular fiction was murder mysteries, which enjoyed a minor resurgence in the 1970s.

But science fiction didn’t really interest me.

In 1977, I was in a bookstore in Houston, Texas, and for some reason found myself among the science fiction shelves (they were next to the mystery shelves). Shelved alphabetically by author’s last name, I noticed a book by scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It was entitled Foundation, the first in a trilogy about the alleged science of “psychohistory.” Asimov invented this “science” in his Foundation books; it claimed that the history of large populations could be predicted. 

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

Why Publish? Why Write?

My head’s swirling. I’m editing, rewriting, drafting, doing other projects, maintaining a rather hectic if not torrid pace when I’m suddenly stopped cold by a question.

Why do I want to publish?

I have three novels and a non-fiction book published. A fourth novel and a collection of stories are in the works. 

Why?

It’s not as if the novels have been so wildly successful that I can live off the royalties. So why am I doing this again, when each novel has turned out to be far more of a wrestling match than I expected?

To continue reading, please see my post at Christian Poets & Writers.

“The Old Curiosity Shop:” Charles Dickens and a Road Trip!

Perhaps the first thing you notice when you read The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens is how little of it has to do with an old curiosity shop. The opening scenes are set in the shop, a place full of old antiques, curiosities, and junk, or “junque.” References will appear later in the sprawling tale, but they are fleeting.

Slowly you begin to understand that what Dickens wrote here was a road trip.

The Old Curiosity Shop was Dickens’ fourth work of fiction. He began to be known with his stories published in newspapers and periodicals, later collected as Sketches by Boz. Almost all of his fictional works were first serialized before being published as books. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, or simply, The Pickwick Papers, were published over 18 months from 1836 to 1837, and the work catapulted the author to national fame.

That was followed by Oliver Twist (1837 to 1839) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838 to 1839). Dickens’ fame was growing in Britain and the United States. The overlap in his published serials demonstrates the demand for his work – people were reading Oliver Twist as Nicholas Nickleby began to be published. He was riding the rising tide of literacy in both Britain and the U.S. His characters captured recognizable types, and he was equally at home with humor, tragedy, violence, and even farce.

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

Top photograph: Little Nell and her grandfather begin their journey in The Old Curiosity Shop.

The Stewardship of Retirement

Original themed content at The High Calling is ending this week, with posts next week featuring each editor’s favorite post (I have to sort through five years of articles to determine a favorite.) Appropriately enough, the theme this week is “Finishing Strong,” and I have a post entitled “The Stewardship of Retirement:”

As the time approached for me to seriously considering retiring, I discovered something: retirement is not a biblical concept.

Moses led the Israelites until he died and God buried him somewhere in Moab. David was king until he died. Paul and Peter continued their ministries until they were martyred. Even the Apostle John, exiled on Patmos, the only disciple who (it’s believed) died of old age, was still working, writing down the vision given him.

The Bible has no retirement road map. But it does have a concept that applies to retirement in the twenty-first century, and that concept is stewardship.

To continue reading, please see my post at The High Calling.

Photograph by Paul Brennan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poet Focus: Mark Jarman

Last week, we featured a review of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems by Mark Jarman, here at Tweetspeak Poetry . Published in 2011, it’s a wonderful volume covering poetry collections from the 1970s through the 2000s. And what it covers thematically is an initial focus on autobiography and childhood in his early poetry to the poetry of faith and doubt in his later poems.

Jarman’s poetry is such that one gets interested in the poet – his background, his personality, where he comes from, and how all of this eventually finds its way into his poems. Jarman did that for me, and as I read about his life I began to understand why his poetry appeals to me as strongly as it does.

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