Saturday Good Reads

Some weeks I think the good reads will lean toward poetry, and some weeks I think they’ll lean toward prose. And some weeks they lean toward both simultaneously, like they did this week.

Poetry

“American profits – when I am part of the problem” by Fred Sprinkle.

“If You Were Here” by Lesley Moon at Moondustwriter.

“Theory of Equine Economics” by Lorenzo at Crowned With Laurels.

“We were digging” and "Lightly Now” by Melissa at All the Words.

“Trouble Comes to Dry Gulch” by Rob Kistner at Image & Verse.

“Hours before the dawn” and “Silent Speeches” by Justinian at Delight and Glory and Oddity and Light.

“Cinders Path” by Pete Marshall.

“Movin on” by Nancy Rosback at Poems and Prayers.

“Eat Well, My Son” by Karen Eck at Phoenix-Karenee.

“Ode to a White Dog” by Marcus Goodyear at Good Word Editing.

Prose

“Hal” by Nancy Rosback at Poems and Prayers.

“A Summer Place” by John Blasé at Dirty Shame.

“Cairns of Enchantment” by Kathleen Overby at Almost Paradisical.

“The road is life” and “In the silence of my heart” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy.

“The Razor’s Edge” by Jeff Jordan at To My Children, If They Are Listening.

“Walker Percy and the Century of Merde” by Andy Whitman at The Image Journal.

“Change” by Duane Scott.

"I Just Couldn't Help Myself" by Billy Coffey.

“The Making of a Marriage Bed” by Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience.

“Absorbing Black” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

“Redeeming Time” by Deidra at Jumping Tandem.

God in the Yard

My wife will tell you that I read a lot of books. (She’ll also tell you I spend too much time online, but that’s another story.) Some I get from the bookstore; some I order from Amazon; and some come in from small booksellers, publishing services and various other sources. I’ve even been known to download ebooks, but I’m still not ready for an electronic reader, at least not yet. So for now, the post office loves me.

Yesterday, I got home after a very long day at work, and there in the pile of mail was what was obviously a book package, small and rather slender, a single book. I knew of a couple of orders coming but not for a while yet and there had been no emailed shipping notice. But there a package was. And it turned out that one order had shipped early.

It was God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat.

I had ordered the print version (a Kindle version is also available) but didn’t expect it until sometime in June. But there it was.

I’ve made no secret of how much I enjoyed L.L.’s Stone Crossings, or her InsideOut: Poems. I even have a badge widget for InsideOut on the lower right of this blog. So when I saw that God in the Yard was available, I ordered it.

It’s described (by the author) as a “12-week course in discovery and playing towards God.” It’s readings, meditation and thinking, and writing. Laura Boggess over at The Wellspring started it this week (I suspect she has the Kindle version). L.L. has a post about it at her signature blog, Seedlings in Stone. (The cool cover photo is by Kelly Sauer.)

I’m starting God in the Yard this coming week. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Song Has Not Been Heard

The song has not been heard in the
street or the market, nor sung in the
village or on the highway, nor flown
across the courthouse square since
before the time people remember.

The farmer in the field mourns a way
to end his day; the mother grieves
the absence of what quiets the child.
The singer stands mute, impotent; the
poet despairs with a shriveled soul.

Locked within the white tower, the
song has become a fictional shadow, a
parody of itself, preoccupied with its
form, its structure, its notes, its lack of
notes, its own self and none other.

It sits within its assigned cage, failing to
entertain a priestly few, a few deaf
priests, priests with bony fingers and
hearts of stone who poke and prod with
sticks but hear no music.


The poem above describes what I believe one of the ideas behind “Barbies at Communion” – to help celebrate the poetic in everyday life and in so doing help return poetry to people.

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, we are helping Marcus Goodyear celebrate the publication of Barbies at Communion: and other poems. I reviewed the book of poems last week; we devoted a TweetSpeak poetry jam to Barbies on Tuesday. Check out how to win a signed copy of Barbies.

You can order the Kindle edition at Amazon, and the print edition at CreateSpace. You can also order a signed copy via the book’s web page through PayPal.

Intercession

I hear the voices rising and falling;
back and forth they go although I did
not understand the language, a
Slavic dialect perhaps. Gentleness
alternated with accusation, rising and
falling, back and forth.

Waving my arms back and forth through
the linguistic fog, I understand it is a kind
of trial, although accuser and defender
share a sameness of form and sameness of
voice, as if they were brothers born
closely together.

With my hand, I grasp a stone, an arrowhead
broken and discarded long ago, and scrape my
arms back and forth, letting the blood flow
freely. Touching the blood to my lips, I find it
burns hot and acidic. The voices stop; perhaps
the judge has called an adjournment.

Christa Parrish’s “Home Another Way”

Earlier this month, author Christa Parrish’s novel Watch Over Me was named the 2010 Christian Book award winner in the fiction category by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. In Christian book publishing, this is a big deal. I reviewed the novel here in the blog back in March, and it’s a well deserved honor.

Parrish’s first novel, Home Another Way, had been nominated for the award in 2008 but another novel was chosen. After reading Watch Over Me, I had to read her first novel. Both books are published by Bethany House, one of the leading publishers of Christian fiction.

Home Another Way is an unusual book; unusual, that is, for Christian fiction. Fromthe first page, the reader meets Sarah Graham, who must be the most unlikely heroine ever encountered in a Christian novel. She’s rude, crude, conniving, obnoxious and totally unlikeable, as in, this is one offensive character. She comes to the small town of Jonah, New York, to claim an inheritance from her deceased father, whom Sarah had despised and hadn’t seen for more than 20 years while he was in prison – for murdering her mother (and you thought your family was dysfunctional). She finds a room at a local inn, gets something to eat, finds a pub – and promptly picks up a one-night stand, whose name she can’t remember the next morning.

I told myself that, if this novel was going to work, there was going to be one massive act of character redemption before the book was over with.

Sarah learns that her inheritance has a catch – she has to live in the town for six months. Since her car’s been stolen and she’s broke, she decides to do exactly that. And in those six months, she finds people she comes to love, values that have been alien to her, someone she’s attracted to romantically, and, ultimately, the truth about her father.

It is a tribute to Parrish that she doesn’t take this story into a clichéd and predictable direction. She could have, and easily. There were several points at which I wanted her to do exactly that. But she didn’t. She kept the story real.

She’s also created a cast of unforgettable characters. From the crotchety Doc who knows more about Sarah’s father than he’s telling, to a very large woman named Memory with a brain-damaged son, Parrish has made what could have been stereotypes into originals.

When I finished reading it, I wanted to say “Sequel! Sequel!” And perhaps there will be, one day. But Home Another Way is the kind of novel that is sufficient without one. It’s a rough, hard story to read. But it’s also a true one.

The Writing Heart Is Not a Lonely Hunter

In The Right to Write, Julia Cameron talks about loneliness, and the common perception that writing is an inherently lonely occupation. And yet, she says, this is not her own experience, and she feels like something of a heretic: “So much has been written about the loneliness of the writer’s lot that it feels like heresy to report the truth as I know it: in my experience, not writing is a lonely business. The minute I let myself write, everything falls into balance.”

She could be describing my own experience as well.

It doesn’t matter what I write. It could a short story, a poem, a speech, a blog post, a letter, work on a novel, or a news story, it really doesn’t matter. I never write alone. And it’s been that way as long as I can remember.

There may not be another person in the room, but that doesn’t mean I’m alone. And that’s because when I’m writing, I’m inside a character’s head or the middle of a scene; between the lines of a poem pulling out what will be coming; thinking about the people who may be reading a blog post or article; or, if I’m writing a speech for someone, that person is figuratively sitting on my shoulder so I can hear the voice, how it sounds, what it says well and what it mispronounces, and what will communicate with listeners.

I have interior conversations with all of these people and scenes. I play with words and silently yell at them when they don’t work or don’t string together like they should. I puzzle of where a new character suddenly erupted from. I watch a scene in a story unfold, and I don’t think of myself as the director but more as one of the actors in the scene.

I didn’t say it wasn’t weird; all I said was that I don’t feel lonely.

Frustrated, out of sorts, short-tempered when I can’t write? Absolutely. And also lonely.

But lonely when I write? Never. For a writer, it's not writing that's one of the heights of loneliness.

(And yes, my apologies to Carson McCullers for adapting the title of her novel for this blog post.)

Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Cameron’s The Right to Write. Take a look and see what others are saying, commenting and posting. Last week’s discussion was about going deeper in your writing. This week’s discussion is about loneliness, writing as witness and where a writer writes.

Related:

Love.Letters by Nancy at Poems and Prayers.

Out of Sorts by Nancy Kourmoulis.

Lyla Lindquist's A Little Help from Mr. Fusion.

Day 21: Right Day, Right Time by Melo.

Erin Straza's Let's Be Brave.

Morning Pages by Cassandra Frear.

Witness by Laura Boggess.

Saturday Good Reads

It was a good week to be reading posts on the web.

Poetry

“Paperback Mood” by Heather Truett at Madame Rubies Writes.

“I thirst” by Melissa at All the Words and “Planning in Prose” at The Far Blue Hills.

“Journey’s End” by Pete Marshall.

“Dad” by Bob at Wilderness Fandango.

“Noisy Nature” by Nancy Kourmoulis at Treasures of Darkness.

“Reality” by Erin Kilmer at Together for Good Poetry.

“What the Renaissance Forgot to Renew” by Fred Sprinkle at I Force It to Rhyme.

“Beaten-Broken-Bleeding” and “Memorial for Love” by Leslie Moon at Moondustwriter.

“A Kiss – Grace This” by Anne Lang Bundy.

“The alchemist” and “The dark” by Justinian at Delight and Glory and Oddity and Light.

“I Called” by Mike Bullock at Versical Rhymes.

Prose

“The Story We Write” and “Where's the Fountain Free?” by Jeff Jordan at To My Children, If They Are Listening.

“Want to get to know somebody? Understand their story” by Don Miller.

“A Boy Named Day” by David Griffith at The Image Journal.

“The 60s and the Evolution of Liberalism” by David Koyzis at Evangel.

“Stealing Time” by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

“Let Go” by Jeanne Damoff for The Master’s Artist.

“The miracle in seven years” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy.

“Interview with Artist Harold Sikkema” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

"Mike and Sarah" by Billy Coffey.

And the post that had me checking the back of my head for thinning hair: “From Hair to Eternity: The Summer Sky Mall Catalog” by Kathy Richards.