Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Glynn Young

A Classic for the 20th and 21st Centuries: The Gulag Archipelago

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Fifty years ago, I was a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas Enterprise. In December of 1973, we began receiving a series of alerts from the New York Times News Service, saying the Times had acquired a manuscript of worldwide importance and would be publishing soon. The manuscript was The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

Solzhenitsyn was living in the Soviet Union at the time. The manuscript had been circulating in samizdat there, and apparently the KGB had gotten its hands on a copy or a portion of a copy. A considerable amount had already been smuggled out to the West. To protect his friends and family, Solzhenitsyn gave the green light to publishing the work in the West, and it would soon be published in French, its first published language, and an English translation was underway.

A few weeks later, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the KGB and taken to the Lubyanka, the infamous prison in Moscow. The world held its breath to see what would happen, but Western governments were urging the Soviets not to do anything stupid. In February, he was officially expelled and put on a plane for Germany. His family, including his wife, their three young sons, and her mother, followed some weeks later. He would not return to Russia for 20 years.

Under the glare of international attention, the Russians did nothing stupid, however much they may have wanted to.

I had started reading Solzhenitsyn’s novels in high school – Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I read August 1914 while a junior in college. Shortly after Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and expulsion, we moved from Beaumont to Houston, where I was working for Shell Oil in its downtown headquarters. When I heard that the English language edition would soon be published, I walked a few blocks to the downtown Cokesbury Bookstore and ordered a copy. When the call came that it had arrived, I think I might have been the first to rush to the shop and buy mine.

I stopped reading whatever it was at the time and started immediately on The Gulag Archipelago. Having read his novels of camp life (for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature), I was surprised to discover that the novels themselves were based on real stories of real people, including Solzhenitsyn himself. He had done something no Russian or Soviet author had ever dared to do: he’d told the real stories of the zeks, or prisoners. And his real point, and the one for which the Soviets couldn’t abide, was that the Gulag had started not under Stalin but under the saint of Communism, Lenin. Stalin had not corrupted communism; he had built upon what Lenin had already been putting in place.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago (Volume 1) is 50 years old this year. It remains a classic of the 20th century; in many ways, it tells the story of the 20th century, particularly in Russia. Professor Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University calls it “a masterpiece of our time.” And it is still a contemporary story, with a warning. Governments as they grow and become more powerful have an itching desire to control, and they will use any means at hand to establish that control. I can already see the impulse in our own government, with the desire to control what is communicated on social media, for example, and a press that’s become extremely compliant to elitist thinking. 

Yes, Solzhenitsyn was a man of his time, and The Gulag Archipelago was a book for its time. It’s also a book for our time.

“The Storied Life” by Jared Wilson

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I’ve had many conversations with Christian writers about the idea of “calling,” that writing is a calling from God. Most will agree; some even will identify a specific time when they experienced the calling. 

I can’t. Writing has been a part of my life since I can remember. I was raised in a culturally Christian home, but I had been writing for almost 12 years by the time I became a Christian. I wrote my first story when I was 10; I don’t remember much about it except it was a mystery, involved a group of kids, and featured a grandfather clock that opened to a secret passage and a cave.

Jared Wilson has had a far different experience. In The Storied Life: Christian Writing as Art and Worship, he develops the idea of writing as a specific calling (a kind of ministry, for those unfamiliar with “calling”) and goes so far as the suggest a theology of writing. He tells a good story, and he’s created a solid case for writing as one of those endeavors God would see as good.

The Storied Life is divided into two parts. First, Wilson provides reflections on story. What makes writing good? Does writing have its own liturgy? (Wilson would say yes.) And then he explores writing as a spiritual act.

Part Two is how Wilson explains cultivating the spiritual life. This moves the narrative into areas more familiar to all writers – finding your voice, excellence, the promise and perils of platform, and writing as a calling. Yet even here, he retains a Christian perspective. Writing can be a vocation or an avocation (for me, it’s been both). He explains there isn’t just one kind of calling to writing; the calling can be a call to grow, to emphasize, to recognize limitations, and even to worship.

Wilson suggests that, like the characters we create in fiction, we, too, are characters in God’s story. And just like our fictional characters seem to have a mind of their own (which I’ve experienced many times in fiction), so, too, do we. The calling to be characters in God’s story, and the call to write, is “a call to be his,” he says.

Jared Wilson

Wilson is an assistant professor of Pastoral Ministry and author in residence at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. He also serves as staff pastor for preaching and director of the Pastoral Training Center at Liberty Baptist Church, also in Kansas City. He received a B.A. degree in English from Middle Tennessee State University and an M.A. degree in ministry service at Spurgeon College. He’s currently enrolled in the D.Min. degree program at Midwestern. 

The Storied Life is written for Christian writers. Others can read it and benefit, but it is aimed squarely at those of us among the Christian community who are called to write. Wilson offers his own experience, encouragement, and deep insights into the writing process. Christian writers need a book precisely like this one.

Top photograph by Etienne Girardet via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Do You Outline, or Do You Write into the Dark?

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A problem developed while I was writing my fifth novel. The problem had to do with what I conceived as a minor character – a four-year-old boy who would grow to adulthood during the story. But he wasn’t the main character; far from it, in fact. He was supposed to have a bit role.

Unfortunately, he had a different idea.

I kept floundering with the manuscript because this kid kept sticking his head in. It was as if he was demanding a bigger part of the story. I was hitting dead end after dead end, and my writing was going nowhere.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog. 

Photograph by Steven Houston via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness

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The entire spring issue of Cultivating Oaks is devoted to the theme of grace. Published are stories by Lancia Smith, Malcolm Guite, Annie Nardone, Junius Johnson, Adam Nettesheim, Amy Malskeit, Steven Garber, Corey Latta, Tom Darin Liskey, Nicole Howe, Amelia Freidline, Lara D’Entremont, and several others.

For me, reading a very familiar Bible story – the account of Joseph in the Book of Genesis – led me in an unexpected direction of grace. You can read the story, “Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness,” at Cultivating Oaks Press. 

Photograph by Michael Olsen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Things That Shape Our Writing

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I read last week that Netflix has attempted to do what I thought was impossible – turn One Hundred Years of Solitude into a 16-episode television series.

I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez when I was in college in the early 1970s. It had been translated into English and published in the U.S., and I bought the paperback edition at the LSU Union Bookstore. It might have been near exam time; I had a habit of buying riveting novels at exam time, when I should have been studying.

I read the novel two more times, both in the 1980s. I was in a masters program at Washington University at St. Louis, with the seminars held at night for those of us who were working (which was all of us). I took a course in the Latin American Novel, mostly on the strength of what I remembered about One Hundred Years of Solitude. We read that, and we also read The Green House and The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, and several others.

That class was organized to coincide with visits to the WashU campus by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes, and our class got to hear both authors speak. The talks added immeasurably to our reading.

Two years later, in the same masters program, I took a class called “The Nature of Story.” Our first assignment was to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. And in that class, something personally revealing happened.

The professor opened the discussion by asking what we thought of the book. Fifteen of us, all working people with me being the youngest at 35, looked around at each other. Finally, one person said she found the story to be ridiculous. And thirteen other people suddenly erupted in agreement.

The story was unreal. How could you take flying carpets and children born with pigs’ tails seriously? The use of the same names for different characters was confusing, as was the use of different names for the same characters. 

The class went on a group rant. Nobody seemed to have liked the book.

“Did anyone like it? Anyone at all” the professor asked.

“I did,” I said. “I know it’s one of the fathers of magic realism, and story often goes off into the strange and weird. But reading this is like reading about my own family. I grew up hearing stories like these.”

A rather stunned silence followed. I don’t look Latin American, and, in fact, I don’t contain an iota of Hispanic DNA.

“Where did you grow up?” the professor asked.

“I was born and raised in New Orleans.”

He smiled. “The northern rim of the Caribbean culture.” He then launched into a discussion of what that meant and what the territory surrounding the Gulf of Mexico / Caribbean Sea shared as a common culture. And you could see understanding appear on the faces around the table. One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t only a novel in the magic realism genre; it was an introduction to countries, peoples, and cultures that shared more in common than people realized. 

I don’t write magic realism. But that day, I understood that, as Anglo (with a bit of French thrown in) as I was, I had been raised in an American / Caribbean culture, and it affects how you think, how you understand the world, and how you write.

Even with the children with pigs’ tails and the flying carpets.

Top photograph: The Cocora Valley in Colombia, photo by Christian Holzinger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“A Shining” by Jon Fosse: It Does Have Punctuation, Which Helps 

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In 2023, Norwegian author Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He’s a novelist, playwright, essayist, and author of children’s books; in fact, he’s likely better known for his theater plays than his novels. 

When I read about the Nobel, I checked Amazon to see what of his works might be available in English. At the time, there wasn’t much; the situation now is considerably different. There was a short story available in translation, A Shining, translated by Damion Searls. 

A Shining is a short story, longish as in – coming in at 43 pages in the e-book version. It tells the story of man who drives from him home with no destination in mind. He simply keeps driving until his car gets stuck in a narrow forest road. After debating what to do, he decides to try to find help in the forest.

The man moves through a series of dreamlike sequences; the shining of the title happens two or three times, when some kind of shining presence is watching him, then walking with him. He also sees his own parents. By the end, he’s in the presence of his parents and the shining presence, still walking through the forest, barefoot. (And it’s cold and snowy; he shivers from the cold several times and wishes he’d stayed in his car.)

The entire story is a metaphor for death; he never says his parents predeceased him, but they’re barefoot, too. The presence is something of a God-like guide, not directing toward any particular end or goal but just being there.

Jon Fosse

It’s an unusual story. It’s also a 43-page story with one paragraph. While the indent feature on his keyboard might have been broken, the effect of a single paragraph is essentially to compel the reader to keep reading; there’s no good place to stop or even pause. The story does have punctuation (another Nobel Prizewinner, William Faulkner, could often be bad about that), and punctuation helps.

The story is rather haunting. It builds a sense of frustration; how long is this guy going to continue to wander in the dark and not find help? The help does come, of course, but it’s not what the reader’s expecting. It’s a story about death, but it’s also a story about faith. The story may have been influenced by his own childhood when he suffered a serious accident and came close to death. He speaks of seeing “a shimmering presence.” He was raised in the Quaker and Pietest traditions, and he’s now a practicing Catholic.

His Nobel lecture is entitled “A Silent Language.” It’s available to watch on YouTube (he’s introduced in English but his lecture is Norwegian) and it can be read in English here.

Top photograph by Casey Horner via Unsplash. Used with permission.