What Poetry Brings to Business

For some 15 years, roughly 1996 to 2010, poet David Whyte was the missionary of poetry to business. And he was a very specific kind of missionary for poetry, as the subtitle of his book The Heart Aroused suggests: “Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America.” For Whyte, poetry could be not only a compass and guide for business but also something more than that, perhaps even a way to do business or preserve its soul.

In 2010, Clare Morgan, director of the graduate writing center at the university of Oxford, published What Poetry Brings to Business, coauthored with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick of the Boston Consulting Group. Morgan’s book doesn’t actually challenge Whyte’s for preeminence; in fact, she doesn’t even mention him or The Heart Aroused. She’s English and he’s Welsh; in might be one of those intra-Britain rivalry things (although Whyte moved to America).

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

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

“Gulliver’s Travels” Answers a Question

I was interviewed last week by the book editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about A Light Shining. The book was to be highlighted in a regular feature on the book page – Penned in St. Louis, which is a short interview (usually three questions).

However, we talked a lot longer about all kinds of subjects than the printed interview might indicate. And she asked one question that I had to think about at length before answering.

“Did you,” she asked, “have a purpose in writing this story?”

“No,” I finally answered. “I didn’t. It was simply a story to tell.” There was no motive, or goal I wanted to achieve, or hidden meaning I wanted to convey. Or, if there is one, it wasn’t intentional.

And yet.

Pastor Ron Edmondson of Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, told me a couple of weeks ago that Dancing Priest (A Light Shining’s predecessor) was one of the best explanations of relationship evangelism he had come across, and in a novel, no less. Surprised, I went back to Dancing Priest, and discovered three significant scenes and one shorter one in the book that supported his statement.

I had no idea. I think. How did that happen?

Then I read three chapters in Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me by Karen Swallow Prior, which we’re reading this month over at The High Calling. Chapter Six is about Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. The chapter answered my question about Dancing Priest.

I first read Gulliver’s Travels in high school. I was 15, and like any other 15-year-old boy might be, I was more impressed with how Gulliver extinguishes the fire in the royal palace of Lilliput than the overarching themes of the book (and to think Swift was an Anglican clergyman in the 18^th century!).

I read it again in college (I took English Literature with the English Lit majors while most everyone else took American lit). that’s when I fully understood that Gulliver’s Travels was a satire, a rather barbed commentary on society, practices and culture of early 18^th century Britain. Swift skewered society and even barely disguised individuals, and I suspect he had great fun  doing it. But the work represents far more than a satire.

“Gulliver’s Travels reflects the holistic worldview of its author,” Prior writes in Booked, “a man who could see how one idea ripples toward another, how one false notion can lead to disastrous consequences, and how one aspect of human experience touches the whole.” In the so-called Age of Enlightenment, she says, Swift knew just how limited man’s rationalism really was.

And still is.

One of the things my Christian faith has allowed, sometimes forced, me to do is to understand life is all of a piece, an entire entity, and not a collection of compartmentalized boxes that I participate in depending upon circumstances.

What this means, albeit imperfectly, is that my life at church on Sunday is my life at work Monday through Friday is my life with my family seven days a week – and is what I write in novels. My faith allows me to be the same person in all of these circumstances. It doesn’t mean I pull it off all the time; the key word is “allows.” My faith allows my life to be whole. I don’t have to wear masks; I don’t have to be a different person at work than I am at church.

When I wrote those scenes in Dancing Priest, I was drawing on my own experience. How the heroine, Sarah Hughes, is introduced to faith is almost exactly what happened to me; in fact, it’s the only deliberately autobiographical part of the entire book. The stories I write reflect my Christian faith, in its attempted wholeness.

It’s how Jonathan Swift experienced life – in wholeness.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading and discussing Booked. This week’s discussion is on the chapters covering Gulliver’s Travels, Death of A Salesman by Arthur Miller, and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Related:

My Great Expectations

How I Came to Read “Little Women”

Penned in St. Louis

I was interviewed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s book editor this past week on A Light Shining. “Penned in St. Louis” is a regular feature on local authors. It’s short, but in the print edition it runs at the top of the page and so draws a fair amount of attention.

The interview lasted about 30 minutes and covered how both A Light Shining and Dancing Priest came to be written, the difficulties in writing and publishing fiction today, and quite a few other topics. You can see how it all boiled down by checking the Post-Dispatch story, “Penned in St. Louis: Glynn Young.”

Voices: Smoke and Snow

Smoke of a thousand candles

shade its walls, a rising incense,

sweet offering rising, glimmering

hope, giving warmth. Voices

rise as one voice from one body,

sweet offering of choral incense.

Outside, snow falls, whitened

rain of jacketed insulation

offering song across the earth.

Photograph by Sylwia Mazurek via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Guest Post on “Dancing Priest”

Two weeks ago, I received a message from Ron Edmondson, pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. He had recently read Dancing Priest, my first novel, and had several people at his church reading it. And he had recommended it to his deacon board.

In his message, he said the book, even though a novel, had presented a very clear picture of relationship evangelism.

I was surprised (and gratified), but I had to think about his comment. And I realized that I had unintentionally done exactly that, in three different sections of the book.

Ron asked me to do a guest post for his blog on where the book came from, and he published it today. You can read it at Ron’s blog -- Dancing Priest: How a Book Was Born. 

Tomorrow, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is publishing a short article, "Penned in St. Louis," about A Light Shining.

Saturday Good Reads: Soul-Stirrers

We saw Les Miserables last night at the movie theater. As we drove home, my wife asked me if I liked it or The Hobbit better. I said they were both different movies, but Les Miserables stirred the soul. 

What a movie. That’s all I can say. What a movie. 

What it reminded me of was other things, the things I’ve read and seen that stirred my soul. 

Like Don Quixote by Cervantes. 

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. And perhaps David Copperfield. (My wife prefers A Tale of Two Cities.) 

They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis and Arthur Greeves.  

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown. 

Chariots of Fire. Slumdog Millionaire.  

The War of the End of the World and Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa. 

The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. 

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 

The Poems of Rupert Brooke. 

The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor.  

There are other films and books, of course. Things come first to mind for me. There is something about all of them – a certain nobility of spirit, an aspiration for something higher, a reach inside ourselves for something that touches and wraps our hearts. 

I considered something else, too. This soul-stirring business – it’s likely why I write. 

What stirs your soul?

Athol Dickson’s “January Justice”

I’m a fan of Athol Dickson’s fiction: River Rising, The Cure, Winter Haven, Lost Mission, The Opposite of Art. They are extraordinary novels that are officially classified “Christian fiction” but go well beyond the genre with their broad appeal.

In the 1990s, before Dickson wrote these novels, he wrote several mystery stories – the Garrison Reed series. And now, with January Justice: The Malcolm Cutter Memoirs, he’s back to mystery and suspense.

It’s a complex story, and a great story, comprised of several interconnected sub-stories that weave together in an intriguing, entertaining narrative.

Malcolm Cutter has just been released from a mental hospital. His wife, the much-loved and admired actress Haley Lane, is dead, driven to leap from a cliff by an overdose of LSD, the same overdose that caused Cutter to nearly lose his mind.

Virtually no one knew they had been married. Cutter had been her driver and bodyguard, and he wanted to keep their marriage quiet because of his past. A former U.S. marine, he had been involved in an insurgency in Guatemala and military duty in the Balkans, and had been dishonorably discharged because of an incident in Afghanistan.

His mind still fragile, he agrees to look into a kidnapping from years before. The more he looks, the more his own past comes forward. In short order, he survives a bombing attack, a vicious beating by a street gang, his own attempted murder, and arrest and jail. And then things get really interesting.

Dickson draws his characters well. Even the villains are painted in detail, to the point that the reader’s skin crawls whenever the villains show up (and there are a lot of villains and possible villains). The more Cutter deals with them, the more the story seems confusing, with any number of possible outcomes. And then he learns that the death of his wife is a factor in the case.

We watch Malcolm Cutter, a broken and brokenhearted man with old-fashioned ideas of honor, try to make his way and find out what is really happening, and what happened to his wife and himself. And somehow, he’s going to have to come to terms with it, or die in the process.

January Justice is an action-packed thrill of read by a fine writer who brings formidable talents to his storytelling.

Related - my reviews of books by Athol Dickson:

River Rising.

Lost Mission.

The Opposite of Art.