Some Wednesday Readings

How Novels Carried Me Through Suffering – Lara D’Entremont at A Faithful Imagination.

Gustav Klimt – Painting the Land – George Bothamley at Art Every Day. 

 

How American Educators Are Conning Kids – Frannie Block at The Free Press.

 

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai by Diane Ashton – reviewed by James Hill Wellborn III at Emerging Civil War. 

 

One of the Best Fiction Books I’ve Read – Erik Raymond at The Gospel Coalition

 

Face of a Saint: Thomas Aquinas’ Appearance Revealed After 750 Years – Alyssa Murphy at National Catholic Register.

 

The Ruthless Elimination of Paragraphs – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies. 

 

The Prophet of Trump’s Second Term – Matthew Continetti at The Free Press.

 

The Codevilla Tapes – David Samuels at Tablet Magazine (from 2019; related to The Free Press article immediately above).

 

Vision in February – poem by Daniel Mark Epstein at The New Criterion.

 

Painting: Church in Unterach on the Atttersee, oil on canvas (1916) by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). 

The Character of Michael in the Dancing Priest Novels

After Dancing Priest was published in late 2011, I received an email from a reader in Seattle. He liked the book. He liked the book so much that he said it should be required reading for young men under the age of 20.  

He said this, he said, because the character of Michael was all about standing firm and true in the face of adversity. “There’s a nobility in the character of Michael Kent that we should all aspire to.” That character is demonstrated in large things, like an Olympic tragedy, and in smaller things, like taking in a motherless eight-year-old boy.

 

By the second Novel, A Light Shining, Michael Kent has become Michael Kent-Hughes, husband of Sarah. He wears his wealth lightly. Finding his family in Italy, instead of doing the legal thing, he does the right thing. And he faces the great personal adversity of any in the five novels, when he nearly dies. In fact, for a significant section of the book, Michael is unconscious, and the focus shifts to Sarah. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Top photograph by Benjamin Rascoe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Five Things You Can Do After the Writing Storm

The manuscript sits with the publisher. A fifth novel, it’s the last of a series. The story arc that began with listening to an airplane music program in 2002 is coming to an end some 18 years later.

You’ve lived with the characters for almost two decades. Sometimes it feels like you know the characters better than your family and friends. You know their history, their quirks, and their strengths and weaknesses. You know their pasts. You know their stories because you’ve written their stories, and you’ve written the ongoing story they’re part of. You know how an agnostic, what today might be called a “none,” became a believer. You know when the hero was ridiculed and disparaged. You know when characters had nothing but faith and courage to go on. 

Now the story is ending. The story you had to tell, that dominated your waking hours and many of your sleeping hours, that story that often drove you crazy, is now finished. The characters who seemed so real to you and your readers are now turning out their lights.

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

Photograph by Radu Florin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Christmas, Romance, and Food

Christmas celebrations are known for all kinds of foods – main courses, baked goods like pies and cakes, cookies (especially cookies), and more. It’s no surprise that food will often play a role in Christmas romance stories.

It may be food at big family gatherings. It may the food at Christmas dinners and lunches with work colleagues. It may the food featured at holiday time in cafes and restaurants. It may also be date meals for the hero and heroine.

In food romances and Christmas food romances, authors will also often include a recipe or two at the end, suggesting a real-world connection to a romance novel. Occasionally, the reader might be forgiven for suspecting that the story actually was inspired by the recipe. 

Here are two examples of Christmas romance novels that use food in very different ways (but both have a recipe at the end). 

The Christmas Cookie House by Jennifer Griffith

In The Christmas Cookie House by Jennifer Griffith, Leela Miller is a 20-somethig determined to keep her mother’s Christmas legacy alive. That legacy was largely based on work each Christmas on a fundraising event for the local ladies’ auxiliary – the Christmas Cookie House where thousands of homemade cookies are sold. The event is always held at the home of the auxiliary chairwoman, Una Mae Coldicott. Except this year, Una Mae plans to deep-six the event; she won’t have it at her home any longer and no one is stepping up to take charge. Leela does, even though she’s only a provisional member.

The ideal place to have the event would be the old Layton mansion, now owned by Jay Wilson, a newly minted veterinarian who is interested only in selling the mansion as fast as possible to get the funds needed to buy a veterinary partnership. Things between Jay and Leela seem to start off on a bad footing, when he discovers her trying to look into a back window of the house and instead falling into a bed of roses. Jay has to achieve one condition for the house in his uncle’s will – to sort through everything in the attic. It’s a lot to sort, and to speed access to the house for the cookie fundraiser, Leela volunteers to help.

We know where this is likely headed. But can the growing romance endure Jay’s desire to sell the house and move to another town? We’re not sure how this story will end, but Leela’s gingersnap cookies certainly won’t hurt (recipe at the end).

Keep Me at Christmas by Lucinda Whitney

Keep Me at Christmas is one of Lucinda Whitney’s novel series about the Romano family. Luciana Romano, partially to escape wedding activities for her cousins and comments about her own wed-less condition, agrees to be a last-minute substitute for a museum curation project in Hudson Springs, New York. She flies from her native Portugal to New York, to help the museum prepare for an exhibit of local 19^th century textiles, and historical textiles in Luciana’s specialty. Arriving too early for her room to be ready at the local inn, she’s dropped off by the taxi driver at the Italian café and bakery operated by Jack DiLorenzo, his mother, and his grandmother. 

Two years after his fiancé broke off their engagement, on Christmas Day, no less, Jack is determined to date no one; the hurt was too great. And then Luciana walks into the café. Food becomes the initial bond; readers may gain weight simply by reading about all of the mouth-watering foods served by the café – paninis, traditional Italian dishes, desserts, and more, not to mention the hot chocolate drinks with real chocolate. (The recipe featured at the end, however, is one Jack makes for Luciana, and it’s the Portuguese dish of sweet rice, a kind of risotto pudding.)

Jack has to overcome his reluctance to take a risk on love; Luciana, no matter how strongly she’s attracted to Jack, knows that a long-distance relationship won’t likely work. She’s has only two weeks in Hudson Springs, until a snowstorm delays her return to Portugal.

Top photograph by Brooke Lark via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Curious Responses to Faith-Based Writing (Including My Own)

I’ve published three novels, all faith-based, and I’ve had an unusual experience with all three – readers are roughly divided 50-50 between Christians and non-Christians. Equally interesting is the gender divide. I expected more women than men to read the novels simply because women tend to read more faith-based fiction than men do. And yet my readers seem split 50-50 here, too. 

The element of the novels that all readers seem to respond and react to is the role that faith plays. It’s a significant role, especially in the first and third novels (the three form a trilogy). In Dancing Priest, the first novel, faith forms the central tension between the hero and the heroine – he has it, and she doesn’t. They’re in love with each other, but faith is the stumbling block – and it eventually drives them apart.

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

Both of My Novels Free on Amazon Kindle Today

It's free ebook Friday on Amazon today and each Friday in January. Both of my novels, Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, are free on Amazon Kindle today.

Dancing Priest has been called "required reading for young men," "moving," "emotional, sweet, heartfelt and uplifting," "a wonderful story," "captivating," and "I couldn't put it down."

A Light Shining has been described as "a story filled with mystery and intrigue," "totally engrossing," and "do not start reading unless you intend to stay up way past your bedtime." (One reader sent me an email, saying "you better not kill off Michael Kent.")

If you'd like more background on the books, you can read "'Dancing Priest:' The Writing Process" and  "The Story of 'A Light Shining,'" both of which were published here at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

Do You Surround Your Writing? And with What?

My wife and I have likely always been interested in art, but it’s become something more than an interest in the last few years.

In 1999, during a belated 25^th anniversary trip to Holland and France, we made sure to see the Rijksmseum in Amsterdam, if for no other reason than to see Rembrandt’s the Night Watch, then simply on display but today in its own special gallery. In Paris, we had to contend with the state workers (including museum workers) staging wildcat strikes (we quickly learned what “en strike” meant) but through constant rearranging of our schedule and a careful eye for what looked opened still managed to see The Louvre, the Musee D’Orsay and the Picasso Museum. Later that same year, on a business trip to Brussels, I hurried on arrival to see the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, despite severe jetlag.

In 2005, our week in Montreal included the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Three years later, while in Chicago to see my wife’s favorite singing duo Chad & Jeremy, we managed to find time for a joint exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago – Edward Hopper and Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light.

For the last three years, we’ve spent two weeks in England, mostly London, and discovered that art and new exhibitions never stop in that great international city.

In 2012, it was Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye at the Tate Modern; the Turner collection at the Tate Britain; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the Ashmolean in Oxford; and the National Gallery. Perhaps the highlight of all of it for me was finding a painting I fell in love with at the Tate Modern: Marguerite Kelsey by Meredith Frampton (1928). In 2013, we were able to see Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure at the National Gallery on its closing day; The Queen: Art & Image at the National Portrait Gallery (and the gallery itself); and L.S. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life at the Tate Britain.

This year, we were able to Late Turner: Painting Set Free at the Tate Britain; the Wallace Collection (including The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals); and the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art. We had planned to see the John Constable exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum but my back problems (and the subsequent two days of vacation plans lost) forced us to drop it from the itinerary. We did manage to get to Blenheim Palace and not only see the palace but the Ai Weiwei exhibition there as well.

And this year, we didn’t have to travel at all to see a wonderful exhibition at our own St. Louis Art Museum, Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from LeGray to Monet.

Yes, art has become increasingly important to us. I’ve read that this is not uncommon s you get older. Perhaps it has to do with more leisure time (and grown children). But, for me, it also has to do with something else, and it took me a while to figure it out.

Art surrounds my writing.

Music has been a powerful influence on my two novels, but art surrounds virtually everything I write. I read a lot about artists; I love non-fiction works on painting thefts and frauds (not to mention movies like The Monuments Men). I just finished reading a book on the art of Anselm Kiefer and am currently reading one on the paintings and life of Edward Hopper. And it was not a coincidence that the Sarah, the heroine of Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, is an artist, and that her painting gets caught up in her crisis of faith.

This idea of what surrounds your writing is not an idle one. In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Charity Craig (co-author with Ann Kroeker) says this: “If I’m not surrounding myself with people and books and experiences that inspire and connect with me, I may be left wondering what to write about.”

For me, it’s art that surrounds my writing.

Illustrations: Top, Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, oil on canvas by Claude Monet (1874, St. Louis Art Museum); lower right: Marguerite Kelsey, oil on canvas by Meredith Frampton (1928; Tate Modern); lower left, The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals (1624; The Wallace Collection). 

Husband, Father, Grandfather, Deacon, Editor, Team Leader – and Writer

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig ask this question: To what extant have you arranged your space and time to honor your writing?

I joke with my wife that Billy Collins is one of two poets in the United States who makes a living from poetry. When she asks who the other one is, I tell her I can’t remember.

Expanding from poetry to writing in general, how many novelists actually support themselves by strictly writing? Likely more than you find in poetry, but it’s equally likely that the number can be counted – it’s not huge. James Patterson. Stephen King. Some romance writers.

The number is finite and knowable.

For the rest of us, we likely write whenever we can cram in a minute or 30 minutes or an hour. I write whenever I find a moment to write.

I've told the story of how my first novel, Dancing Priest, came to be written. for the first four years of its existence, it resided inside my head. Initially, I never intended to write it down. It started with a song I heard, and the image of a priest dancing on a beach. I developed the story as a mental narrative, and delved deeper into it once I started biking. A number of scenes in the novel were created and elaborated while I rode Grant's Trail in St. Louis. 

I was also doing a lot of traveling, including a regular monthly trip (sometimes more frequently) to Alabama. Airline flights and nights in hotel rooms afforded the time for writing. Two hotels in Oxford, Alabama, provided the physical space for the writing of Dancing Priest from 2004 to 2007, the mental and physical narratives overlapping during this time.

I started writing the story down in the fall of 2005. Hurricane Katrina, and getting my mother and aunt out of New Orleans, had something to do with it. Perhaps it was seeing the destruction of the place I was born and grew up. Whatever it was, it was Katrina that spurred me to starting writing the story down.

I immediately discovered that thinking a story in my head was infinitely easier than writing it down. The mental narrative included images – what the characters looked like, the settings, even the weather. The written narrative had to account for these things in words. The time required multiplied exponentially.

So I crammed it in whenever and wherever I could – early mornings, late nights, trips. There was no set time, because I was also a husband, a father (and soon a grandfather), a church deacon, an editor, an occasional freelancer – and I had (and have) a full-time job that, like most jobs, is something more than full-time. 

So to answer Ann's and Charity's question, I have no regular time to write. I have only what becomes available, or what time I can make available. So far, that "schedule" has allowed the creation of two published novels (Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light Shining), the non-fiction book Poetry at Work, this blog, a weekly column at Tweetspeak Poetry, and occasional article for The High Calling. Come the spring of 2015, the time available will radically change – I'll be retiring form the day job sometime in April or May. 

But there’s a second consideration to that question asked by Ann and Charity – the idea of honoring your writing.

I could come up with a longwinded answer, but I think it’s tied to the time devoted to writing – I honor my writing by making the time for it.

I’ll ask you the same question – how do you find the time to write, and how do you honor your writing?

Photograph by Holly Chaffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Fourth Manuscript

I was talking with my oldest son, who had asked copies of Dancing Priest and A Light Shining for a promotion he’s trying.

“So,” he asked, “if I understand all of this, you’re working on a non-fiction book right now?”

“Correct,” I said. I told him what it was about. The manuscript is due to the publisher in July.

“Well, is there going to be a third volume in the Michael Kent saga?”

“I’ll figure it out in July,” I said, “after I turn the non-fiction manuscript in. There is a manuscript for the third volume, but it needs work.”

I was silent for a moment and then said, “And then there’s the fourth book. That manuscript is largely completed. And it’s the one that’s the most personal.” I paused, “And I think it’s the best. There’s one character in it that I identify with.”

I didn’t mean for that to happen. And it began with a bike ride.

When I started biking in 2004, I mostly biked around our suburb of St. Louis. I gradually started taking longer rides, finding back streets to get to Grant’s Trail, a nice long stretch of several miles.

And then the trail was extended to about a mile south of my house. A few minutes on the bike, and I could start a 20-mile roundtrip. It was great.

The route to the trailhead took me past an aging apartment complex – eight or so brick buildings of eight units each. I rarely paid attention to the apartments, focused more on the hill I had to descend (or ascend, on the way back) alongside the complex.

This was the complex where police found Michael Devlin, a man who had kidnapped a 12-year-boy in a rural area near St. Louis. They also found a 16-year-old boy – who had been missing for four years. He had been kidnapped, too.

The news sent shock waves from our little suburb across the country. Film crews arrived. City fathers were mortified at the bad publicity.

I was horrified. This was the place I rode my bike past nearly every day, weather permitting. While I couldn’t have expected to know what was happening there, my reaction was profound, and deep, and I can’t really explain why.

I started writing. I literally wrote out my reaction in the form of a story. One character inserted himself, and ended up playing a critical role in the story.

When I reread the manuscript, I realized what I had done. I had written myself into the story, and I didn’t realize it until I had finished the draft. He had burst unexpectedly from my head and my heart.

In Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, Madeleine L’Engle explains very succinctly what happened to me as I wrote that story and created that character: “In the act of creativity,” she says, “the artist let’s go the self-control he normally clings to, and is open to riding the wind.”

I don’t know if that particular wind will ever see the light of publication, but I do think it’s one of the best stories I’ve written. 

The Business Case for Reading Fiction

I’ve written speeches for (at last count) 12 CEOs. I’ve asked most of them this question at our first meeting: what do you read outside of the office that has nothing to do with business?

I ask the question because it gives me insights and ideas for quotations and stories. Most of the CEOs have given me blank looks.  The only thing they have time to read is usually work-related. Some read hobby magazines. One admitted to being an avid fan of mysteries. Only one of the 12 read general fiction, and it likely had something to do with starting his college career as an English major before he switched to a technical (and better paying) field. His favorite author was John Updike.

I’ve been reading fiction – stories and novels – since I was six years old. My mother read stories to me when I was too young to read, stories like Grimm’s Fairy Tales in all their splendid horror and goriness. I read Trixie Belden and the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift and children’s mysteries for 25 cents from Scholastic Book Club.

Over time my reading graduated, and while I would read history and biography and other non-fiction genres, my heart belonged to fiction. I had the blessing of English teachers in middle school and high school who were passionate about books and reading. My most memorable books from those years were Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (8^th grade), Great Expectations (9^th grade) and David Copperfield (10^th grade) by Charles Dickens, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (11^th grade) and Don Quixote by Cervantes (12^th grade).

In college I took two semesters of English literature (with the English majors; everyone else had to take two general literature courses). That’s when I seriously met Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot. A course in Russian history introduced me to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol. I found Aleksandr Solzhenitysn on my own; my Russian history professor was notoriously pro-Soviet Union and didn’t mention him in class.

I’ve continued reading fiction, old and new, serious and popular. I love fiction. (And I love poetry, but that’s another story). I’ve even written a novel myself.

At work, I know very few people who read fiction. If they read, it’s non-fiction – business books, and perhaps a bit of history and biography. No one reads poetry. That I read (and write) both makes me a bit odd. Well, more than a bit.

Now I find out there’s a business case for reading fiction.

Anne Kreamer, a columnist for Harvard Business Review and author of It’s Always Personal, published an article last week with the intriguing title “The Business Case for Reading Novels.” It’s about an article she read in Scientific American, entitled “Fiction Hones Social Skills.” You can see the promo here (you have to buy the issue to read the whole thing).

Kreamer writes that various studies have shown that people who read fiction discern people’s emotional states better, better interpret and respond to those who are different, and understand others’ points of view better. They empathize better. They may even be a physiological reason for all of this. “Over the past decade,” she writes, “academic researchers such as (psychologist Keith) Oatley and Raymond Mar from York University have gathered data indicating that fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness.” One study even showed fiction reading stimulated the part of the brain involved in setting goals.

She finishes the article with some practical suggestions – reading novels that are about business and organizational behavior, like JR by William Gaddis, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. A lot of poets like to point out that Wallace Stevens spent his entire working career in the insurance business, even turning down a professorship at Harvard because the insurance job paid better. (I wouldn’t recommend Stevens to business associates, however; I love his poetry but it is high modernism. A poet like David Whyte is more approachable and he’s also written a lot about business and organizations.)

I have to be honest – I’ve never read fiction to advance my career. I’ve read it and still read it for the pleasure and enjoyment it offers. But that there may be some unexpected advantages is intriguing.

Illustration: A scene from Bleak House by Charles Dickens; drawn by Hablot Knight Brown ("Phiz") for the original publication of the novel.