Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Music

The Marvelous Burning Edge of Dawn

Leave a comment

Andrew Peterson just released a new album,  The Burning Edge of Dawn. It’s marvelous. He sat down with Jeffrey Overstreet this weekend to talk about it. Overstreet enthuses over the friend.

Peterson’s songs and lyrics are full of sweeping metaphors, making his songs accessible enough for people of all ages and all experiences, even as they are specific enough to speak of his own specific pilgrimage as a musician; as a novelist (his fantasy series had the same editor and publisher as mine, and was released at the same time, which is how I was blessed to meet him); as a Nashville “community organizer” . . . as a sort of folk pastor; as a “book guy” . . .

Hear some of the new music and what the artist has to say about it on Listening Closer.

Authors, Writing

Evil in All of Life

Leave a comment

J. Mark Bertrand has a brief interview on The Gospel Coalition today, in which he talks about being a writer and says this.

“Because I write crime novels, one of the themes in my books is brokenness. Sometimes we feel the pressure not to tell the whole truth about the brokenness, or to soften the blow in some way. Evil, however, affects all of life.”

Authors, Non-fiction

The Greatest Biography

Leave a comment

Joseph Epstein states, “The world’s greatest biography was composed by a depressive, a heavy drinker, an inconstant husband and a neglectful father who suffered at least 17 bouts of gonorrhea.” That biography is filled with quotations like this: “Depend upon it, that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.”

And this: “The Irish are a very fair people—they never speak well of one another.” (via Prufrock)

Authors, Fiction

Eve Through the Eyes of Young

Leave a comment

The author of The Shack, William Paul Young, has a new novel on creation. Ann Byle interviews Young on what responses he expects to receive.

Some might argue that you are recasting Scripture from a more feminine perspective.

Yes, some might argue and others will likely insist, but I reject the notion. I am not trying to recast the Scriptures from a more feminine perspective. I am doing something much more sinister than that. I am recasting Scripture from a more “human” perspective. How sad is it that any conversation about the emergence of true humanity in the world, which includes submission, generosity, kindness, strength, integrity etc., is seen as a feminist conversation?

Authors, Poetry

Kieron Winn, All Will Be Well

Leave a comment

Poet Kieron Winn has the curious role of being a “freelance teacher of creative writing and English literature.” That’s probably like being a gunslinger, only with pens instead of guns–more lethal. He has released his first collection of poems, The Mortal Man, in the U.K. One of them is available this month in The New Criterion, called “In the Garden” and others through his website.

In one about his aging father, he writes:

I cannot bring a bucket of rock-pool creatures
And have him beam at me and understand,
But it dies hard, wanting someone to say
All will be well, with the power to make it so today.

Authors, Non-fiction

Opposites in Common

Leave a comment

Rod Dreher writes about his hesitation over a potential proposal to work with a man on his memoir.

He had read my 2013 memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, and saw potential for us to collaborate. Knowing Wendell [Pierce]’s formidable reputation as an actor, I was flattered that he had read my book—and humbled that he thought it good enough to consider hiring me to help him write his own. So why my skepticism?

Wendell and I come from the same state and are of the same generation, but we grew up in different worlds. He is a black liberal from the Crescent City; I am a white conservative from the rural hills of West Feliciana Parish. How could we possibly have enough in common to work together?

Dreher’s wife told him that he does work on the book, it’ll be good for him spiritually. Find out what happened with Dreher and Pierce in The American Conservative.

Authors, Non-fiction

The Man Who Did Not Run for President

Leave a comment

“The idea of writing a book about a presidential campaign that never happened had not occurred to Don Cogman,” write Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. “He had spent two years trying to get Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, to run for president in 2012. His effort—and it was no small effort—had failed. Daniels had moved on, right out of politics. He’d become president of Purdue University.”

But someone in what would have been the Mitch for President campaign encouraged Cogman to write a book about it. It’s history, no matter what happened. Or didn’t.

2012 Republican Presidential Candidates

Authors, Fiction

How Doctor Who Saved A Writer

Leave a comment

Doctor Who and the Giant Robot - Penguin styleScottish author A.L. Kennedy says writing a Doctor Who novel alongside another novel for grownups saved her faith in childlike imagination.

It’s sad that so much of the air has gone from literary endeavour, that academic theorising and categorising have come to decide which novels are acceptable and reviewed, that literary publishing has squashed itself into more and more predictable boxes more and more often. Storytelling, company, human solidarity – they never go away, but they do seem to be moving away from the mainstream. It will be the mainstream’s loss. Readers will always go where they can find the joy they knew in childhood, the joy they deserve.

Authors, Fiction, Publishing

Call me ‘Mushroom,’ ‘cuz I’m a fun guy

Leave a comment

I have in my hands the latest issue of a handsome publication called Fungi: A Magazine of Fantasy and Weird Fiction. It includes a “spotlight” section devoted to Your Humble Servant, which includes:

-“Lars Walker Biography”
-“Lars Walker Bibliography”
-“Laxdaela Saga,” a critical essay by me which first appeared on this blog
-“Song of a Grumphy Dwarf,” a poem by me, also originally published here (though they leave off the last verse for some reason, which kind of spoils it in my opinion)
-“Harbard,” my favorite of my own short stories, first published in “Amazing Stories.”

The bibliography was penned by our friend Dale Nelson, who also recommended me to Fungi’s publisher, Pierre Comtois.

The issue is available at Amazon, here.