“What We’re Teaching Our Sons” by Owen Booth

Owen Booth has done something interested with What We’re Teaching Our Sons. The title first suggested that this was a self-help book of some kind, aimed at fathers trying to raise sons in a society and culture that is a veritable mass of mixed signals and messages. Then I saw the endorsement by poet Luke Kennard, saying the book “reduced me to tears of laughter and painful recognition.” Self-help books don’t usually do that. 

Intrigued, I bought it and started reading. It took getting through only a few of the short chapters for me to realize that Booth is using the structure of fathers teaching sons (or not teaching them, as the case may be) to examine many of the events, subjects, themes, anxieties, thrills, disasters, and rhythms of everyday life that are our culture today. Booth is British, but what he writes about applies equally to the United States and I suspect most Western countries.

Some of the things being taught to sons are physical: the outdoors, whales, geology sport, mountains, and food, among others. Others are about relationships: women, heartbreak, ex-girlfriends, grandfathers, and teenage girls. There are entries on feelings, like empathy, guilt, crying, romance, nostalgia, and emotional literacy. Or mythical figures like pirates, Vikings, and the Abominable Snowman, and Martians. He includes dangers, like drowning, plane crashes, being struck by lightning, and spiders. And historical events like exploration of the South Pole. 

Owen Booth

And, yes, all of these subjects can, in their own strange way, affect and characterize the relationships between fathers and sons. In Booth’s hands, one does have to wonder whether it’s the fathers or the sons who are the adults in the room (the mothers usually know). But the book goes beyond whether or not you should teach your sons to climb trees (the answer is yes) to consider what weights modern society adds to what is already not the easiest of relationships and responsibilities.

Booth has experience here, being the father of two sons. He’s a writer and journalist and won the 2015 White Review Short Story Prize. His writings have been published in numerous magazines, anthologies, and literary journals. He and his family live in London. 

So if it’s important for your sons to know about gambling, food, books, crime, and glaciers, among a lot of other subjects, What We’re Teaching Our Sons can provide a road map that’s both insightful and wry. 

Poets and Poems: Leon Stokesbury and “You Are Here”

It’s unusual to find myself laughing out loud while reading a book of poetry, but that’s what I did with You Are Here: Poems New & Old by Leon Stokesbury.

Stokesbury doesn’t write comic poetry, but he manifests a sense of mischief and a willingness to poke fun at even some of the most serious of poems and poets, like Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Morte d’Arthur

Higgledy-piggledy

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Lost his pal Hallam to

Fever and flu.

“One-hundred thirty-one

Ultramemorial

Verses, and man, I still

Can’t bury you.”

In eight short lines, Stokesbury takes on two of Tennyson’s famous poems – “Morte d’Arthur” and “In Memoriam,” playing off the first name of Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of “In Memoriam.”

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

McMillian Moody’s “Ordained Irreverence”

Elmo Jenkins is a seminary student, and one the requirements for graduation is a six-month internship with a church. Ditched by his date at a fancy party, Elmo meets one of the ministers of the fabled First Church, and lands his internship.

First Church’s denomination isn’t mentioned. It could be Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or a similar group. If you’ve grown up within the boundaries of Protestant Christianity in the United States, the church is instantly recognizable – the megachurch with the big tall steeple usually located right in the middle of downtown.

Elmo’s office is (literally) a transformed broom closet in a large complex of offices. He begins to navigate his way through both the building and the church’s labyrinthine internal politics, politics that extend to the local business community, the seminary, and the country club. All-too-human frailties have to be dealt with. A minor 100-year-old mystery needs solving. And there’s even the possibility of romance; actually, there’s more than a possibility.

Ordained Irreverence is the first of four Elmo Jenkins novels and four novellas by McMillian Moody. Moody, who lives in Tennessee (where there are any number of First Churches to choose from), has taken a humorous yet rather fond look at institutions like First Church and the characters who inhabit them – the senior pastor, the trusted assistant pastor, the worship leader, and all the other people who comprise the staff of a large church.

McMillian Moody

Moody’s intent isn’t to poke fun and puncture balloons, but he clearly knows enough about churches to know that First Church isn’t a completely fictional creation. What keeps the book from drifting into sarcasm is the understanding that, despite all the egos and foibles on display, God’s work is somehow getting done.

We can laugh at the inside church jokes and punctured egos, but Moody keeps returning us to the purpose of the church, and to the fact that even large churches, once you’re past the glitter and theatrics, can serve good purposes. Elmo may be irreverent, but he knows what he and the church are called to do.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.