Now I draw toward the conclusion of a brief, strenuous stretch of days leading up to the rigors of a long airline flight (different from prison incarceration, as I often say, mainly in that you’re likely to get out of prison ahead of schedule). Friday I drove up to Brainerd to speak to the convention of the 1st District of the Sons of Norway. Spoke twice on Viking Legacy and got a very good response. My only disappointment was that somehow I was boneheaded enough not to check my stock of the book. I had three copies to sell of the book I was promoting. Well done, Marketing Genius! I did have plenty of my novels, The Year of the Warrior and West Oversea (see the upper right, if you’d like to buy them), and they went pretty well.
Anyway, it was a good experience, though driving two hours (each way) is more of a challenge than it used to be – not so long ago, it seems.
Then on Sunday it was Danish Day at the Danish-American Center in Minneapolis. Last year I planned to go, but that was when Mrs. Ingebretsen, my poor PT Cruiser, broke down. The sequel to that, as you may recall, was three-and-a-half months without my car.
This year I crossed my fingers and made it. Nice day, and a good number of our Viking club members showed up to wear costumes and fight with blunt swords. The younger ones did the fighting – I looked on with a paternal smile. I only sold one book, but I never sell much at Danish Day. It was good to be out there again with my A-frame tent. And the young people were very good to help with the loading, unloading, and setting up. And down.
Our friend Gene Edward Veith has a fascinating post today (behind a paywall, alas, but I’ll link to it here anyway) about the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, previously unknown to me, who has quite a conversion story – out-Lewising C. S. Lewis himself. He went from being an atheist to being an environmentalist, to being a seeker, then a Wiccan:
I had known, I suppose, that the abyss was still there inside me—that what I was doing in the woods, though affecting, was at some level still play-acting. Then, one night, I dreamed of Jesus. The dream was vivid, what he had looked like. The crux of the matter was that he was to be the next step on my spiritual path. I didn’t believe that or want it to be true. But the image and the message reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed to tell me. My wife has a preternatural sensitivity that she always denies, and it wasn’t the first time she had done something like this. It shook me. A Christian? Me? What could be weirder?
Eventually he found a home in the Romanian Orthodox Church. His full account can be read on his blog here.
Dr. Veith says he’s ordering Kingsnorth’s novel Alexandria. But since it’s the third book of a trilogy, I can’t resist starting with the first installment, The Wake.