Prodigal
February 27, 2011
A woman–you might know her–had two daughters. There came a time when the younger one said to the mother just what the mother had been expecting (not looking forward to, you understand, but expecting nevertheless) to hear.
“Look,” said the girl, “I need the Visa and the keys to the Volvo. And I’ve been meaning to mention, Mom, it’s time we talked early inheritance. Here’s how it is: I’d like to see this dusty old town in nothing but my long-term memory. Need a place that’s got more to offer on Sunday mornings then Baptist preachers and monster truck pull, a place where banjo’s not the only beat to move to. But I’ve got this cash-flow problem, see, and people say you’ve got more money than god. And I figured if you divided the estate… So what about it, hmm?”
Please find the rest of the story below, from Grit & Grace
To order: Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman’s Life (Wheaton Literary Series)
The Chicago Tribune described Grit & Grace: “Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman’s life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising.”
Stuck for Words? Me, Too. Poet-Priest Hopkins to the Rescue
February 23, 2011
If you’re wrestling words today like I am–on deadline to write a song, maybe, or feeling crazed to get that story keyed out, or compelled to come up with something new and insightful to say to a classroom or congregation of faces–here’s help for you. And for me, too.
Meet–if you’re not already intimate friends– poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).
This was the Victorian era, of course, a time when conventional poetry kept to precise, predictable rhythms and rhymes (think of big, bush-bearded Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his galloping “Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death....
Hopkins would have none of it.
Instead, he played with what’s known as “sprung rhythm,” which was both a throwback to early Anglo-Saxon poetry and also allowed for all kinds of new and original acoustic sensations.
And there’s what he does with imagery, too, taking two objects that seem to have nothing in common and comparing them, or grafting them into one word. Inscape, he called his way of examining all the complex characteristics that makes a thing unique, and seeing straight into its heart.
A person of passionate faith, Hopkins was no stranger to doubt or depression–suffered, in fact, from both. But if you’re like me, his poetry will leave you changed and re-charged. Will make you see a fallen leaf or a bird’s flight or a trout differently from now on. Will loosen your own seized-up frustration for words.
“The Windhover”
| To Christ our Lord |
Inventiveness, surprises in its patterning, sounds that mimic the sweep of the falcon, alliteration, vivid imagery… it’s all there.
May you write today–compose, teach, type and tell stories–with originality and passion.
And keep in touch
1 Hour + 2 Pages Per Day (+Coffee) = Kate DiCamillo
February 19, 2011
If you have children in your house, or if you’re a godparent, grandparent, aunt, uncle or mentor who invests time reading to a child (and therefore invests in the future), you’re surely familiar already with children’s writer Kate DiCamillo.
Her splendid books, including The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (my personal favorite), The Magician’s Elephant, Tiger Rising, Because of Winn Dixie deal beautifully with love and loss and human growth in ways that children can understand, but that also take the breath away of any adult with pulse. If not, there’s no time to waste. Jump in the car this moment, pajamas still on or not, or stumble to your laptop and track down her books. Without ever being pedantic or preachy, her books explore forgiveness and mercy in ways that will have you not only reading the stories again and again (with tissue box nearby), but also wanting to own them in hard back so you can pass them down.
If you’re a writer yourself, or someone still trying to carve out the time to begin, you’ll find encouraging the interview below in which Kate discusses her schedule: stumbling out of bed at 5 o’clock for coffee, then writing just one hour a day, stopping after two pages, no matter what kind of roll she’s on.
One hour.
Even that’s a challenge for most of us, sure, to capture an hour all to ourselves. But it does shoot down the excuse for many of us that we’d produce heart-warming stories, too–if only we could quit that job, hire that staff of household servants and pay someone to dress like us and show up at our meetings.
One hour. Two pages. Coffee.
And an alarm clock that will deride, ridicule and beat us over the head–whatever it takes.
It’s possible…. Don’t you think?
Enjoy the interviews with Kate DiCamillo below. The first is an amateurish quality, but it’s worthwhile: brief and to the point about her writing schedule, self-discipline…. The second is about 20 minutes and focuses more on her themes and development as a writer from, in her words, an arrogant, disdainful writer wannabe to the humbled, listening, “better self” who tells these beautiful tales.
In Search of “Farsanna”
February 16, 2011
Thanks to an Internet-savvy reader, it looks like I’ve gotten launched
ON A MISSION
–which, okay, makes me think Blues Brothers and shades.
But this mission starts with tracking down an old friend.
If you’ve read Blue Hole Back Home–and we can still be friends if you haven’t, I promise–then you know a central character in the story is a Sri Lankan Muslim young woman who has moved to an all-white town in the American South.
And if you read through the AfterWords pages in the back of the book, or if you grew up on Signal Mountain, Tennessee, in the 1970s and early 80s, you’ll know that Farsanna Moulavi is based on a real teenage girl by just this description, though different name.
The book is, as it says, a work of fiction–but based on some actual incidents: A cross-burning at the Sri Lankan family’s house, for example. A brutal shooting of five African-American women down in the valley on a main street, for which two white boys were let off without so much as a slap on the wrist, and a third served only nine months in jail. A swimming hole deep in the woods….
I tried over the years looking for the real woman–in her 40s by now–behind the character Farsanna. But no luck. Google and Facebook and White Pages–all of it surfaced nothing. And who knew if her last name was even the same? Or if she ended up living anywhere near where her family was headed after they gave up on our little town and moved North.
But then, in a book club that read Blue Hole Back Home recently, a member mentioned that she did geneological research, and belonged to several Web sites that allowed for more sophisticated searches for people and names. Within the week, she’d emailed me with my old friend’s name, an age that matched perfectly, and several locations of where she may have lived over the past many years–all of them residential addresses within fifty miles of where her family said it was moving three decades ago, before we lost touch.
So I’ve procrastinated long enough now, and noodled too much with the wording. (How,
exactly, do you apologize for a cross burning? Do you launch right in with a warm howdy after thirty-some years–and oh, by the way, you helped inspire a story, and I hope it was okay if the story got published….) Enough putting it off, thinking somehow I’ll get the wording just right. Sometimes, it’s just time to move forward, and hope the wording will do. Today, I’m mailing four letters off, exactly alike except for the four different addresses.
And we’ll see what comes of it all. I’d be honored and grateful if you’d like to join me….
So, here’s to a new day in American culture.
And here’s to the people of courage and faith who helped bring about a new day. Thank you.
Here’s to hate never getting the last word.
And here’s to hope.
Watch a television interview about Blue Hole Back Home and the story behind it.
If you’d like to find out more about or purchase the novel: Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel
For a reading from the first chapter:
Please Repeat After Me These Outrageous Words
February 14, 2011
“…For any couple contemplating marriage, I often wish I could hold up a picture of Paul on that late-October morning at Boston City Hospital. I wish I could place Jan’s I-told-him-he-was-sexy as a caption underneath. I ‘d like to say to the couples that unless they are ready to accept that kind of ugly glitch in their dreams, unless they are willing to look tragedy in the face and hold its hand, then they’d better not take another step forward–invitations in the mail or not….”
From Grit & Grace, my first book. Full text of this chapter on marriage below.
Phyllis Tickle and Donald Miller on the Need to “Story” Ourselves
February 10, 2011
Memoir-Writing, Anyone? Or…Everyone
Phyllis Tickle (author and founding religion editor of Publishers Weekly) and Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years) discuss the risks of telling our stories and why we MUST tell them–that to “story” oneself is to be truly human.
Storytelling and Sermons: Wordsmithing Tips from the Pulpit
February 9, 2011
I’m wondering today… What can novelists and songwriters and scriptwriters and memoirists learn from the process of writing a sermon?
I’m musing over some fine, floor-shaking sermons I’ve been privileged to hear (and also some real sleepers, but we won’t go there). And I’m wondering what good preachers know about images that stay with us, about stories that hold their listeners’ interest, about how to flesh out big, radical, counter-cultural concepts (wait…the last shall be WHAT?) for a roomful of people too jaded and despairing and distracted to see past next Tuesday.
Granted, some of us reading this work with words in ways that can’t often cross the line into, well, “preachiness.” But the best preachers are careful crafters of words. They’re close observers of life in all its pain and suffering and joy. They pay attention to sounds and metaphors. They understand that we’re drawn into stories–and that we learn the hard stuff best when we don’t know we’re being taught.
So I’m hoping some of you who are clergy yourselves, as well as those of you who’ve heard enough sermons that you qualify as experts on what works hermeneutically speaking (and what doesn’t) will tell us what you’ve learned—and maybe are still learning.
What do YOU think?
What CAN novelists and songwriters and scriptwriters learn from an excellent sermon?
And what can preachers learn from novels and lyrics and film?
[Coming soon: Storytelling and Songwriting:
What Can Be Learned From a Good Song;
Anne Lamott on Resurrection;
Phyllis Tickle and Donald Miller on the Human Need to “Story” Ourselves
Hear the Creator of the “Lost” TV Series Speak About Mystery and Suspense
February 8, 2011
J.J. Abrams on “The Mystery Box”
If you’ve not heard of the TV series “Lost,” no doubt you’ve been ice-climbing in Greenland for the past several years, or you swore off TV in order to devote more time to creative pursuits or spiritual disciplines–good for you! But for the rest of us, even if we caught just a few episodes and followed the buzz surrounding the show, we know “Lost” became workplace water-cooler fodder for its ever-unfolding story and backstory. Some found it marvelously addictive and others, just plain maddening.
Whether you were a devoted follower, an addict or just a baffled bystander, you’ll find intriguing J.J. Abrams’ ideas about creating mystery in the stories we tell. Here is his presentation to TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design).
For the last scene of the last episode of “Lost”….
Roald Dahl: Make ‘Em Laugh, Make ‘Em Squirm, Make ‘Em Have to Hear the Story
February 7, 2011
“My main preoccupation when I am writing a story is a constant unholy terror of boring the reader” –Roald Dahl
If you don’t recognize Roald Dahl’s name, be assured you do, at least, know his work: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(Willy Wonka); Matilda; James and the Giant Peach; The BFG; Fantastic Mr. Fox…. So you’ve at least seen one of the movies, right? And maybe read all the books–as a child yourself, or with a little one curled up and chortling in your lap.
Here are some of Dahl’s best storytelling tips–in his own words:
“A story idea is liable to come flitting into the mind at any moment of the day, and if I don’t make a note of it at once, right then and there, it will be gone forever. So I must find a pencil, a pen, a crayon, a lipstick, anything that will write, and scribble a few words that will later on remind me of the idea. Then, as soon as I get the chance, I go straight to my hut and write the idea down in an old red-coloured school exercise book.
The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by. Every month they get scarcer and scarcer. Any good story must start with a strong plot that gathers momentum all the way to the end. My main preoccupation when I am writing a story is a constant unholy terror of boring the reader. Consequently, as I write my stories I always try to create situations that will cause my reader to:
!) Laugh (actual loud belly laughs)
2) Squirm
3) Become Entralled
4) Become TENSE and EXCITED and say, “Read on! Please read on! Don’t stop!
All good books have to have a mixture of extremely nasty people–which are always fun–and some nice people. In every book or story there has to be somebody you can loathe. The fouler and more filthy a person is, the more fun it is to watch him getting scrunched.”
So… what’s YOUR favorite Dahl book, and what is it about his storytelling that makes his characters so utterly unforgettable?
Harry Potter, Failure, Imagination and Compassion
February 2, 2011
The Benefits of Failure?
The Role of Imagination in International Affairs?
Any of us who are or have kids who are Harry Potter fans have heard something of J. K. Rowling’s personal story: welfare single mom-to-billionaire. I’m ashamed to say that what I didn’t know–and am hoping that you already do–is the depth of her humor and compassion. In her commencement address to Harvard University, she speaks of the rich benefits of failure, and the role of imagination as a key–perhaps THE key–to human beings who are safe, secure and comfortable being able to picture and and want to take action on behalf of those whose lives are anything but.
Enjoy. And let us hear YOUR stories of Failure, Imagination and Compassion….
(Please note: the YouTube version below is less sharp visually, but the audio is sufficient, or for a sharper image and audio, find the link to Harvard’s Vimeo version at the bottom of the page.)
Connect with Joy
