Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Fiction

Eve Through the Eyes of Young

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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

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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

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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

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“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

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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

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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.

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction

Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer

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Flannery O'Connor and peacock
What did Flannery O’Connor pray for? To be guided toward the right people.

The Georgia Center for the Book has O’Connor’s prayer journal on the list of books all Georgians should read. The list for adults started in 2002. The Center’s coordinators started with a list of 25 books. They now add ten new books to the list each year. See all of their selections here.

Regarding the prayer journal, Betsy Childs describes it, saying, “O’Connor wasn’t a writer sitting at her typewriter crafting prayers; she was a girl pouring out her heart in longhand.”

As a small example, the young Georgia woman, while in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1946, prayed, “I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery.”

If only all Georgians would follow her Lord and heed this warning.

Authors, Religion

Spurgeon Walking the Dark Valley

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Christian George is Curator of the Spurgeon Library at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written about Charles H. Spurgeon’s depression in this article, “Spurgeon Almost Quit,” and talks to Charles Morris of Haven Today about the subject here.

George quotes the great preacher as saying, “I have gone to the very bottoms of the mountains, as some of you know, in a night that never can be erased from my memory . . . but, as far as my witness goes, I can say that the Lord is able to save unto the uttermost and in the last extremity, and he has been a good God to me.”