Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Glynn Young

Two Short Story Collections Well Worth Reading

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My interest in reading, and writing, short stories has been growing for years. It started with the five Dancing Priest novels, which provided an outlet for sections that were cut, or exploring ideas that were good in themselves but didn’t fit the larger story. In some cases, they were small spinoffs from that larger story. A few have appeared online; most have not.

But I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the short form of writing fiction. I’ve written several for the Cultivating Project. Recently, I began participating in a short story writing project, a simple, self-reporting tally every week of stories and word count (more on that next week).

I’ve also spent more time reading short story collections. Two recent ones that were well worth the time, more than worth the time, in fact, are Here It Snows in June by Eric Cyr and 13 Short Stories of Longing by Adam Nettesheim. 

Eric Cyr writes about where he lives, and that happens to be northern Minnesota. The 15 stories of Here It Snows in June are varied, but they have a fundamental theme in common. They are about men, young men, and teens looking for meaning, looking to transcend the circumstances, the family situations, or the realities of their lives. 

A boy finds a deer skull in the woods near his home. Two seminarians face a robber with a gun. A boy goes on his first hunt. A baseball game comes down to a boy facing the final strike of the final bat. A young man needs to talk with his father about attending a fine arts academy, something he suspects his father won’t like. A fishing trip. Couples playing charades. And more. Seemingly ordinary things of life become windows into hearts, uncertainties, and hopes.

Eric Cyr
Eric Cyr

Cyr writes quiet stories about quiet people. You identify with these stories, with the people they’re about. The story about the hopes for fine arts academy reminded me of a time, decades ago, when my father got so caught up at work that he forgot he was supposed to be taking me on a father-son dinner. Another story pitched me backward in time to being accused of something I didn’t do, and the angry apology that eventually followed that made the situation worse. I know these characters; I lived these lives.

13 Short Stories of Longing falls into a decidedly different category. In this collection, Adam Nettesheim writes what might seem like children’s stories, or folk stories, or fables. They could be read to children; they could also be read to adults. As the title implies, all of the stories are about the longing in the human heart.

A pixie feels the loneliness in his heart. A plant sprout seems almost desperate to be planted. A species called the Everbright, made of sunlight, seek emergence. A little house wren wants to hatch her eggs, but life might have other plans. An older couple hearken back to a classic story by Charles Dickens. Mr. Porcupine hopes for a playmate, or perhaps simply to be accepted. A mother receives a last letter from her son from a battlefield. A twinkling light watches children through the glass enclosing her filament.

Adam Nettesheim
Adam Nettesheim

The stories are simultaneously charming and striking. I didn’t expect that Dickens-connected story until the very end, and the ending changed the story. A story about musical life from the perspective of a clarinet, reminded me of how I gave objects (and especially toys) human personalities as a child. Nettesheim writes simply, moving stories, and while many project human characteristics upon animals, plants, and objects, we know what he’s really writing about is the longing within each of us.

Both short story collections are readable, engaging, and fraught with meaning. Short stories are not easy to write, or not as easy as you might think. But as Cyr and Nettesheim demonstrate, short stories are well worth the investment of time and focus to read.

Top photograph by Nong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Revisiting Longfellow with a Memory from Zimbabwe

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I employed the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) as a kind of refrain in my novel Brookhaven. A main character is well known in his family for his lifelong love of Longfellow’s poetry and his ability to recite it from memory. 

What I didn’t realize or remember was just how long I’d been reading Longfellow’s poetry myself. That is, until a recent comment on a post at Tweetspeak Poetry popped up.

A first edition of Hiawatha

The comment first arrived as an email. It’s a standard notification that Tweetspeak writers get when someone comments on a post they’ve written. I read it and looked at the date of the post – Oct. 3, 2017, almost nine years ago. Had I actually resumed reading Longfellow that long ago?

The post in question was about Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha. And the reason I’d read and written about it was an interview with two poets, one of whom had made a comment about the poem, calling it “racially insensitive.”

I decided to read the poem myself. And I learned that the poet who’d made the remark probably hadn’t read the poem, or much of it. It is not racially insensitive. In fact, the epic poem was one of the first, if not the first, to feature a Native American as the hero. In 1855, no one, and I mean no one, considered Native Americans as heroes, in literature or anywhere else. Longfellow was even criticized for doing this by literary critics.

The comment, arriving nine years after the post was published, took me in another direction. A woman briefly described reading the poem with her class in the first year of high school. And she lived in Zimbabwe. It is the first year of high school; the class was twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. She wrote that she never forgot the story that the poem told. And the post made her realize that she needed to read it aloud to her own grandchildren. 

Longfellow about 1855

And I wondered, how many American schoolchildren ever study the poem anymore, or even read it? I can remember it from my eighth grade reading class; that year, for whatever reason, reading and English grammar were two separate subjects and classes. 

I distinctly remember reading Evangeline, another spic poem by Longfellow about the expulsion of the Acadians from what is now Nova Scotia. Evangeline is part of the folklore of the region where I grew up – southern Louisiana. And it, too, did something in an American poem that hadn’t been done before – it featured a Catholic as the heroine.

And, of course, we read and memorized Longfellow’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, published as one of the poems in Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863. Not entirely accurate historically, that single poem may have shaped our understanding of the American Revolution more than any other literary endeavor. 

Critics at the time might have complained, but the American public loved Longfellow’s poems, making him one of the longest best-selling authors of the 19th century. A personal favorite is The Courtship of Miles Standish, the epic poem about the Pilgrims arrival in America that Longfellow turned into a love story. For me, that long poem is a personal favorite, because my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young, and the inspiration for the character of Olivia Montgomery in Brookhaven, is a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. They were both real people, and both on the Mayflower, and Longfellow made their love story the crux of the great poem.

So, for both Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish, I take my Longfellow rather personally. And the memory of a woman about a high school class in Zimbabwe brings it all back.

Related:

The audiobook version of The Song of Hiawatha, all free on YouTube (almost four hours of listening).

The full text of The Song of Hiawatha.

The Mythic and Heroic: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (at Tweetspeak Poetry). 

Looking Back at a Crazy Job

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I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on my incredibly short, and incredibly long, eight months with St. Louis Public Schools. What began with the strangest job interview I ever had, the weirdest first day on the job, and the ongoing chaos of every single day ended with a very quiet farewell. 

In previous jobs in corporate communications, I’d experienced periods of media blitzes and controversies. But I’d never experienced a job in which every day was a media blitz, every day was a controversy, and I had to work and publicly communicate in a highly political environment where it was difficult to know who was telling the truth, whose information was accurate, and who was trying to help or merely trying to gain an edge on an opponent. 

It’s often difficult to believe today, but I quickly learned that the news media were my most accurate sources of information. Several of the reporters had police radios and picked up reports of problems at individual schools, school bus issues, and conflicts within school headquarters itself that sometimes reached police report level.

With a budget that had been slashed from $1 million to $20,000, and that $20,000 already spent, we had to improvise how we communicated. What has been largely on paper before – newsletters, magazines, internal newspapers – became electronic – the web site, email, and message boards. I had to give myself a crash course in communicating online. I became allies with the IT team. I discovered how school parents and protesters (and they often overlapped) communicated. 

I talked and listened to everyone. I answered every media call. I never turned down a request for a statement. I learned how to piece together statements when no one wanted to go on record. I had to learn quickly how to read between the lines. I learned there was one person I could trust completely, a guy on the staff of the management team that had been brought in to try to rectify the precarious situation the school district was in – too many buildings, declining enrollments, too large an administrative overhead, and was not just facing bankruptcy but, unknown to most, was already in it.

Actions like closing schools, laying off staff, and changing the pension program are the stuff of controversy, outrage, and protest. Those had started in June of that year; I arrived in October, following the resignation of the communications director who had lost the entire staff and budget. My one-half of a headcount and I did what we had to do – improvise, think on our feet, make decisions without the benefit or luxury of time to think them through. 

We also had to deflect interference. The mayor’s office called daily, with instructions what we should be doing for the day. Yes, there was no official connection between the mayor and the school district, bit it happened. I’d listen politely and go back to my work. One School Board member would find a new public relations firm each month that had the ideas and plan that would immediately solve all the communication problems of the district. I would dutifully go to hear a presentation, usually, just a consultant spouting platitudes. I’d thank them and go back to work. Almost all of the members of the Board understood communications and weren’t shy about what we needed to do, and I’d listen politely, wondering how soon that member would be leaking the Board’s confidential information.

This was not an environment that inspired trust.

As I started my eighth month, I was hitting full-on physical exhaustion. And right at that point, I received a phone call, from a good friend I knew at my former corporate employer. The business that the company had spun off in 1997 had finally gone into bankruptcy, and under the terms of the spinoff, the environmental liabilities had returned to the former parent to manage until bankruptcy was resolved. 

The relationship between the bankrupt spinoff and the former parent was not optimum. For months, in fact, it was being fought in the news media. I’d see the reports and shake my head, knowing how much the people in the parent company would hate the publicity. Then I’d go back to whatever crisis or chaos the school district had that morning.

Then came the call. The friend from the parent company chatted a bit and then asked a question. “Have you ever thought about coming back?”

My answer was immediate. “No.”

“Would you like to think about it?”

“Doing what, exactly?”

The job involved the parent company and the bankrupt spinoff. Managing media inquiries, developing positions, help manage the environmental issues that had returned with the bankruptcy, and work with my counterparts at the spinoff.

The fact that I had been on television – a lot – didn’t hurt. They’d noticed, and when they tried to figure out what to do, I kept showing up on television. 

I interviewed. I got the job. 

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

The Scenes That Stick from a Chaotic Job

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I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for eight months. It was the position I worked for the least amount of time in my entire career, the most chaotic job I ever held, and the one that likely remains the most vivid in my memory. 

Perhaps it was the political battles inside the district, the arrests at school board meetings, the ongoing protests, my boss getting doused with a pitcher of water by a member of the school board, the typical chaotic day of an urban school district. It might have been the constat media exposure, starting my first day (eight separate interviews on a teacher sick-out) and continuing until my last day. I did more media meetings and discussions in those eight months than the rest of my career combined.

A lot of scenes have stuck with me; a few even got worked into my five Dancing Priest novels. 

One came very early. I’d quickly gotten to be good friends with one of the three people from the outside management team hired to fix what had become a huge, and bankrupt, mess. This guy was brilliant, the kind of person who gives consultants a good name. One evening, he rode with me to my first School Board meeting (the one with only one arrest). And he said something that floored me. When the 10 candidates for the position were being evaluated, the people doing the evaluations came across my religious affiliation. At the time, I was attending an Evangelical Free Church in St. Louis County. They had looked into the church. We were still in the parking garage when he said it. I looked at him and said, “But that’s illegal. You can’t do that.”

He agreed. It turned out to be important, he said. The evaluators saw it as a positive, because there were so many practicing Christians at headquarters and in the individual school administrations, and they figured I would be better able to work with them.

It rankled, but it turned out to be true. The word was actually spread as a kind of rumor or gossip about the Christian guy in communications. People who might have kept me at arm’s length (“part of that horrible group wrecking everything!”) did give me the benefit of the doubt. People would talk to me when they wouldn’t be as forthcoming with Board members, the management team, or helpful advisors from the Mayor’s office.

Another scene concerned a single school. Someone had organized a site visit by administrators to an elementary school in north St. Louis. It was not an upscale area; in fact, the neighborhood included a considerable number of abandoned buildings. 

The entrance was a steel door; entry required approval by video and the familiar buzzer sound of the door being unlocked. A tall fence surrounded the property. The first-floor windows were barred. The second-floor windows were blocked with barbed wire. The building looked like a prison, but it was more of a fortress against break-ins and vandalism. 

The annual student turnover was 110 percent. The school served an area dominated by transients and the homeless, who would enroll children for a few months (or even weeks) and then move on. The student body was mixed, with no racial group predominating. 

When the visit ended, I left shaken. How do you teach when your classroom was constantly in flux? And yet, for many of these children, this might be the best experience of their young lives, because they at least got to eat lunch.

Photograph by Chuttersnap via Unsplash.

A third scene involved another School Board meeting. I had been working at the district since October; this meeting was in March. I remember it because it was still cold. I don’t remember what the controversy of the day was, because there was always a controversy of the day. But for this meeting, it had attracted people who were angry. The members of the Board and ket staff people had been bused in, escorted by police and taken through a back door. The middle school auditorium where it was held could hold 400, and you had to pass through an x-ray check. The room was filled.

I didn’t rate police protection or the bus ride, so I drove and parked at the very back of the school’s parking lot. The lot itself was filled – about 2,000 angry, chanting people. I stopped for a moment, knowing that to reach the entrance, I was going to have to navigate that crowd. And it was almost entirely a Black crowd, and I was going to look more than obvious. 

I stood at the back of that chanting, shouting crowd, and I decided to make my way through it. I might have been praying.  As I said “Excuse me” and began to make my way through, something unexpected happened. People recognized me (thanks to all those media interviews). The chanting stopped, and the crowd literally parted to let me walk through. People nodded in recognition. No one smiled; there were no warm greetings. But they parted and nodded, a sign of respect. 

I still don’t know how that happened. As I walked up the back steps to the door, I turned and looked back. The crowd was still watching. I nodded. The police officer at the door looked at me and simply said, “Wow.”

Wow was right. And I was over-wowed.

Related:

Communicating Through the Chaos.

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other.

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building by St. Louis Public Schools.

Decision on the Stairs: New Short Story at Cultivating

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The Summer 2026 edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online today, and the theme is “renewing charity.” My new short story, “Decision on the Stairs,” is fiction, but it’s based on something that happened to my wife and I in London in 2012. We were getting ready for our day when fire alarms went off, and the hotel had to be evacuated. The elevators were not an option; we were on the 14th floor, and the hotel was nearly full. There was no panic, but there was rising anxiety, and people were rushing to get out.

What happened on the stairs became a short story 14 years later. You can read the story here. You can access the entire issue here.

Photograph by H&CO via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Viking Christians: The Day Valhalla Died

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Six years ago, I published the last novel in the Dancing Priest series, Dancing Prince. A good deal of it is set on a fictitious island named Broughby in the Orkneys, off the northern coast of Scotland. One of the characters, Erica Larsson, becomes the romantic interest of Thomas Kent-Hughes, the reclusive son of King Michael who has gone his own way and avoided the royal limelight.

Thomas, or Tommy, leads an archaeological team that discovers what looks like a Viking tomb, except that it is carved with a cross, a very Christian cross. And Erica writes a story, of novella length, entitled “Island,” which imagines how such an anomaly could have happened. Vikings destroyed churches and abbeys; they didn’t get buried as Christians. Or did they?

I read a lot about the Vikings as research for Dancing Prince. If I’d included everything I learned, it would have made another book. But I did write the story that Erica would tell, and the publisher agreed to include it as an addendum with the novel. And I explained the story and how it came to be in a post entitled “The Story of the Novella ‘Island’”. Dancing Price, like it four predecessors, is classified as “alternative contemporary history.” Island is historical fiction, and it was the first time I attempted anything in the genre.

As it turns out, considerable information exists about the Viking Christians, or how the Vikings turned to Christianity. This past weekend, I stumbled across this short video, which describes what happened rather succinctly. It’s a fascinating story.

The Viking Christians: The Day Valhalla Died.

Top illustration: “Ansgar Preaches the Christian Doctrine in Sweden” by Hugo Hamilton (1830).