Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Characters

A Leprechaun for Christmas (a short story)

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It was the worst Christmas ever.

Eight-year-old Chris Hunter was facing the first Christmas without the person he loved most in the world, his Grandpa Malcolm O’Brien. His grandfather had died two months before from a heart attack. 

His grandparents lived in a large, two-story stucco home on East Ardennes Avenue, one of the oldest streets in Stonegate, a close-in suburb of St. Louis. Built in the 1910s, the house had tall ceilings and Frank Lloyd Wright-type mantles, lighting, and overall design. It was utterly unlike the large, contemporary ranch home his own family occupied in Woodfield, a far western St. Louis suburb some 20 miles from Stonegate and 35 miles from downtown St. Louis.

Chris loved exploring his grandparents’ house. From the attic to the basement, the home was filled with boxes, trunks, and old wardrobes full of magic. At least, that’s what his grandfather always told him. Magic was everywhere. And he’d let Chris loose to search, and sometimes join him, for the leprechaun’s pot of gold. 

Since the time when Chris was old enough to listen, his grandfather had told him stories about the leprechauns, the small little people who loved to commit mischief and kept a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Together, Chris and Malcolm would search the lawn for shamrocks and especially the four-leaved clovers. His grandfather would read stories about leprechauns. 

Of the three Hunter children – Ross Jr., Emma, and Chris, the youngest – it was only Chris who would listen avidly. The two older Hunter children would roll their eyes and slip away, looking for something else to do. Chris alone would stay, grinning and laughing at the Irish accent his grandfather affected when reading the stories 

“This is our secret, Chris,” his grandfather would whisper. “You and I are the only leprechauns left in St. Louis, and we have to find our pot of gold that someone’s hidden from us.” 

In looking for the gold, they’d find old clothes, books, toys, and photographs from decades earlier. Each new find prompted new stories from Grandpa Malcolm. And Chris was captivated.

Ross Jr. was older by six years, and Emma by four. Ross Jr. was tall and blond, like their father. Emma and Chris looked more like their mother’s side of the family. His father often called Chris “Little Malcolm,” which Chris wouldn’t understand until years later. The youngest Hunter strongly resembled his grandfather, with black hair and brown eyes so dark and deep they looked almost black. He didn’t know why, but Chris knew that his father and his grandfather did not get along. The boy wasn’t quite sure what to make of his father’s regular references to “Little Malcolm,” but knew his father didn’t mean it in a nice way.

The annual Christmas feast was always held at the O’Brien’s house. Chris’s mother was an only child, so the celebration would usually be his grandparents and his family. The Hunters would arrive by noon, everyone would open presents, and then they’d eat at 2 p.m. sharp. Chris’s mother and Emma would help in the kitchen, Ross Sr. and Ross Jr. would head outside to throw a football or play basketball at the hoop Grandpa Malcolm had had installed for Ross Jr. in front of the garage. Chris had once asked to play with them, but his father said that he was too little, and he could watch them.

When his father had told Chris he could watch but not play, Grandpa Malcolm had frowned.  He took Chris by the hand and led him back inside the house. “I have a story to read to you,” he’d told the boy. And that started the leprechaun stories.

Grandpa O’Brien would read from the big book of Irish folklore he kept on the shelf in his study. Except at Christmas, when he would read an original leprechaun story he’d written himself, with the main characters being Chris the Leprechaun and his sidekick Old Malcolm. And every story was about Old Malcolm always getting them into trouble, and how Chris the Leprechaun would rescue them from a fate worse than death.

Whenever Chris was at their home in Stonegate, he and his grandfather managed to find the time to explore for that mythical pot of gold, which Grandpa O’Brien insisted was hidden somewhere in the house. They never found the gold, but they would often find peppermints, candy bars, and packs of gum. Once, on Chris’s seventh birthday, they found two silver dollar coins, which Grandpa O’Brien said meant they must be getting close to the gold. “And that’s one each for Chris the Leprechaun and Old Malcolm,” he’d said.

His parents thought his grandmother, still grieving her loss, might skip the Christmas feast this year. After the funeral, she spent several days with the Hunters at their home, usually with Chris by her side. He had her smiling and even laughing when he read the Christmas stories to her, using an Irish accent like his grandfather, and told her the stories of their escapades searching for the pot of gold. 

But she insisted that the Christmas feast at her house in Stonegate would continue. The only change was that they ate at 1 p.m. and would open presents afterward. 

They arrived at 11. Ross Sr. and Ross Jr. went straight to the basketball hoop outside. Chris followed and watched them for a time, but then went inside. Emma was helping his mother and grandmother prepare the meal, so he went exploring on his own. But it wasn’t the same without his grandfather. No new leprechaun story. No searching high and low and finding something sweet to eat. No pulling of pranks on the rest of the family. The boy felt almost desolate.

They ate their dinner, with dessert being the favorite of Grandpa O’Brien and Chris – mincemeat pie with a big dollop of whipped cream on top. Then it was on to the Christmas tree and opening presents.

Even that wasn’t the same without Grandpa O’Brien. Chris liked his presents, mostly toys and books, including a set of Hardy Boys mysteries. But he could remember sitting next to his grandfather, listening to him utter a smart quip about each present. And smelling the ever-present Old Spice aftershave. 

“Well,” Grandma O’Brien said, “we’re done. Anyone for coffee or tea?”

“Wait,” said Ross Jr., sitting closest to the tree. “There’s one more.” He reached underneath and retrieved a smallish present, wrapped in a dull green paper and green ribbon. “It’s for Chris. And there’s a message. It says, ‘Look Hard.’” He handed it to his brother.

“What on earth,” Grandma O’Brien said to their mother. “I don’t remember you handing it to me when I put the presents under the tree.”

Chris’s mother shook her head. “We didn’t bring it. I’ve never seen it before.”

“It wasn’t there,” Emma said, somewhat red-faced. “I looked at all the presents before we ate. It wasn’t there.”

Ross Jr. handed the present to Chris. “Well, open it up and see what it is.”

Chris looked at the present in his hands. He handed it to his grandmother, pointing to the gift sticker. 

Grandma O’Brien gasped. “That’s Malcolm’s handwriting. I’d recognize it anywhere.” She handed the present back to Chris.

The boy carefully removed the ribbon and paper, and then he opened the plain cardboard box. 

Inside was a small metal kettle with a lid. Chris lifted it out of the box and removed the lid.

The kettle contained several chocolate coins wrapped in the gold tinfoil. Chris stared in wonder, and then grinned. “It’s the pot of gold, the one Grandpa and I were always looking for.”

He looked closely at the candy coins. He pulled out one, and then he saw something else glinting among the pieces of candy. He pulled it out and held it up between his thumb and index finger. 

“It’s a gold coin,” he said. “A real one.”

“What?” his mother said.

“Let me see it,” Ross Sr. said, and Chris handed it to him.

“It’s a $2.50 gold coin,” his father said, “with a Liberty head, dated 1842.”

“There’s another one,” Chris said, extracting a second coin. He emptied the kettle on the floor, but no other coins were mixed with the candy. 

Ross Jr. was looking at his mobile. “I googled it. People are selling them for anywhere from $2,000 to almost $100,000, depending upon the condition and where it was minted.”

“Did you say 1842, Ross?” Grandma O’Brien said.

He nodded.

“That was the year the O’Brien family came to America, fleeing the potato famine.”

The family stared at each other.

“And there are only two coins?” Ross Sr. said.

Chris examined the coins again and looked at his father. “Just two.” And then he smiled, remembering. “One for Chris the Leprechaun, and one for Old Malcolm. They always split whatever they find.”

The worst Christmas ever had become one of the best Christmases ever.

Top photograph of a leprechaun via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission. 

Photograph of shamrock by Amy Reed via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Character of Michael in the Dancing Priest Novels

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After Dancing Priest was published in late 2011, I received an email from a reader in Seattle. He liked the book. He liked the book so much that he said it should be required reading for young men under the age of 20. 

He said this, he said, because the character of Michael was all about standing firm and true in the face of adversity. “There’s a nobility in the character of Michael Kent that we should all aspire to.” That character is demonstrated in large things, like an Olympic tragedy, and in smaller things, like taking in a motherless eight-year-old boy.

By the second Novel, A Light Shining, Michael Kent has become Michael Kent-Hughes, husband of Sarah. He wears his wealth lightly. Finding his family in Italy, instead of doing the legal thing, he does the right thing. And he faces the great personal adversity of any in the five novels, when he nearly dies. In fact, for a significant section of the book, Michael is unconscious, and the focus shifts to Sarah. 

In Dancing King, with Britain in physical shambles, Michael could have walked away from family responsibilities and the royal invitation that’s fallen to him. But he doesn’t take the easy way out. Months before the coronation, he learns that he’s facing serious opposition and a pile of dirty tricks. He and the staff he’s selected to work with him meet each one head one, turning potential adversity into advantage. 

Michael, as head of the Church of England, finds himself engulfed in a church mega-scandal in Dancing Prophet. The church scandal begins to erupt at the same time the Greater London Council reaches a political impasse, budgets expire, and the transport and sanitation workers go one strike. Michael is all of 30 years old in the story, but his sense of responsibility carries him forward. 

As the last of the series, Dancing Prince, begins, Michael is 35. He’s effectively the nation’s czar, parliamentary government having collapsed some years earlier. His sense of responsibility is still carrying him forward, but there are cracks, especially in his family life. He and Sarah have grown apart; trouble is brewing in their marriage. The flashpoint becomes their youngest child, Thomas, and one incident will haunt the family for the next 20 years. 

This is a somewhat different Michael than the theology student and cycling enthusiast in the first story. He knows that the pressures of his position are allowing his family to slip through his fingers. He’s physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. People are talking about Sarah avoiding evening activities at the palace. And one person, their youngest child, will bear the brunt of the estrangement.

Much of the younger man remains, but this is a man who’s been shaped, and sometimes mauled, by the job. In the previous stories, he was something of an idealized character. In the last one, he becomes more real. 

Top photograph by Benjamin Rascoe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing Priest: What You Learn at a Group Book Discussion

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In February, a woman at church asked me if I would be interested in talking with her book discussion club about Dancing Priest. She had read it, and the three published after it, and said she had recommended it to the club. The question became, how fast could I say yes?

Then came coronavirus, and everything went into hibernation. But Dancing Priest hadn’t been forgotten, and once our county emerged from lockdown (or sort of emerged), the discussion was back on. Last week, I sat for two hours with the club’s members, about eight or nine people in all, and talked about Dancing Priest, its successor novels in the series, and the new and final novel in the series, Dancing Prince. 

Virus note: Yes, we wore masks and sat in a socially-distanced-approved manner.

The members are people who love to read. They’ve been meeting for several years and have become good friends. They take their books seriously, and they read a broad range of fiction and non-fiction. (Their next book is Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.) Two of the people in the group had read all five of the Dancing Priest novels. Two had read the first two, Dancing Priest and In A Light Shining. The rest had read only the first one.

Any author loves to talk about his or her books. The best part of a discussion like this one is to hear directly from readers, particularly readers who love books. They ask questions, they make observations, and they offer deep insights and comments. They take what you’ve written very seriously. 

Here are a few of the questions and comments.

Where did the idea of Michael Kent come from? A song, “Luna Rossa” by Mario Frangoulis. I heard it on an airplane flight to San Francisco, and the song evoked the image in my mind of a priest dancing on a beach (it’s an older song, popular in the 1950s, sung in Italian; I have no idea what it’s actually about). Music infuses all five of the books. The first two were written while I listened rather incessantly to two Frangoulis CDs, “Sometimes I Dream” and “Follow Your Heart.” The last three owe a debt to two instrumental albums by Michael W. Smith, “Freedom,” and “Glory.”

How many times have you been to Edinburgh? Since a good part of Dancing Priest and the others have a significant Edinburgh component, it’s a good question. The answer is – I have never been to Scotland or its capital city. But I have spent so much time on the internet doing research, and especially visual research, and I feel live a virtual resident. The home where Michael is raised outside Edinburgh is based on a real house, An Calla, just transported from an island on the western side of Scotland to the eastern side of the country. I used real buildings at the University of Edinburgh, real coffeeshops, and real theater venues. 

In the last three novels, the scenes in London were all based on first-person visits – my own. During trips in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017 to London and England, I took a ton of photographs. I stood at the front of Southwark Cathedral and imagined what it would be like to preach a sermon there. I’ve done the tour at Buckingham Palace twice. I’ve stayed at a hotel on Buckingham Gate. I know the bus lines and the tube lines, and how to get from Hyde Park to Kings Cross Station. We had considered going to Edinburgh in 2020, but the virus disposed of that idea. Perhaps next year.

Who was your intended reading audience for Dancing Priest? My original idea was to write a romance that men could read. Yes, men. And, for the first two books, readers were about evenly divided between men and women. The reality is, though, that it’s mostly women who read fiction, including both Christian and general fiction. Interestingly, most of the emails and social media messages about the books have come from men. 

Have you thought about turning Dancing Priest into a movie script? Yes, actually, I have, but I have zero experience in scriptwriting. In fact, it was the publisher who first brought the subject up, back in 2011. He even sent the book to a film production friend in California, who read it and said, “It’s a novel. I thought you were sending me a script.” The question comes from how visual the book seems to be. Even when I reread it, it seems like I’m watching a movie. But that’s how the book was born – in my imagination. I wrote the manuscript in my head for four years before the first landed on the computer screen, and in that sense, it was a visual story. This has been noted by some of the very first readers almost a decade ago. 

How Sarah Hughes comes to faith is exactly how it happens for a lot of people. In Dancing Priest, Sarah and Michael have a major conflict over faith; it’s the central conflict of the story. When she returns to Los Angeles, her experience at UCLA is lifted almost exactly from my own experience at LSU. For the book club members, this deeply resonated; some have had similar experiences or have family members with similar experiences. One called it “completely realistic.” 

Photograph by You X Ventures via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Do Your Characters Talk to You?

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The news report made quite a splash. Researchers at Durham University in the U.K. teamed up with The Guardiannewspaper and the Edinburgh Book Festival to do a study of authors. And the study reported that two-thirds of authors hear their characters speak while they’re writing. 

My first thought was, this is news?

The study was more of a survey. Some 181 authors who participated in the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2014 and 2018 were asked an array of questions. The biggest surprise, at least to the researchers, was that 63 percent of the authors hear their characters speak, and 61 percent say their characters can act independently. 

I’ve been listening to my characters speak since I’ve been writing. I’ve experienced characters getting a mind of their own and doing both the expected and the unexpected. Other writers I’ve talked with say they’ve experienced the same thing. Of course, characters speak. Of course, authors hear them speak. Of course, characters get themselves totally out of character and screw things up, at least temporarily. This is part of what makes them real to the author and the reader.

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

“Dancing Prince” – the Fifth Novel in the “Dancing Priest” Series

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The news is rather bittersweet.

The sweet news: The fifth novel in the Dancing Priest series is in editorial production. Tentatively entitled Dancing Prince, it’s the story of the youngest child of Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes. The story covers almost two decades, from the time Thomas Kent-Hughes is four until he’s 23. It’s also the story of Tommy’s father, Michael, and the relationship the two have over the course of those two decades. 

This story was never planned. Early in 2019, it began as something entirely different. But this young boy nicknamed Tommy kept sticking his head in the narrative. He wasn’t being very helpful, because I was having a lot of trouble with the writing. At first, I fought the writing and the unwanted character; I told myself that Tommy could wait until later. As a sop, I gave him a small part. That was a mistake. Or perhaps it wasn’t.

Dancing Priest

I don’t recall a specific “Aha!” moment, but sometime in the early spring, I realized Tommy was the story. I went back and rewrote the draft. That’s when I realized that Tommy had been lurking there the entire time. The story clicked in my head, and more than that, my understanding of the entire series clicked at the same time.

And that’s the “bitter” part of the bittersweet news, for me at least. Dancing Prince is the last in the Dancing Priest series. It’s the right conclusion to the idea that started in 2002 on an airplane to San Francisco and was first published in December 2011. It’s coincidental, but the 18-year development of the Dancing Priest series almost exactly tracks the 18 years of Tommy’s life covered in this final series entry. 

I’ve lived with these characters for a long time. Michael Kent-Hughes first started as an image, an image of a Catholic priest dancing on a beach in Italy. In my head, he became an Episcopal priest for a short time, and then I moved him to Scotland and made him an Anglican theology student who was also an ardent cyclist. Sarah Kent-Hughes was originally imagined as a young woman in a tour group, who are sitting at dinner when they’re joined by a priest. Gradually she became an American exchange student at the University of Edinburgh, trailing in the wake of her twin brother David Hughes.

David has always been a relatively minor character. But I always inherently liked him, and I wanted to do more with him. He gets a much larger and more important part in Dancing Prince than he’s had in the earlier books. He comes into his own as a character.

Dancing Prince also has something of a pleasant problem. One of the characters writes a story. The story is about novella-length, and it’s too long to include in the main narrative. We’re trying to figure out what to do with it. It might become a bonus section at the end of the novel, or it might be a standalone. The subject is unrelated to the main narrative to the Dancing Priest novels. The writing of it plays a significant role in the development of two characters. I think I wrote it to get it out of my head.

Look for the new book in late spring.

What’s next after Dancing Prince? There’s a possibility of a collection of short stories and two novellas. I also have four standalone novels in various stages of development, ranging from a long outline to 40,000+ words. They’re unrelated to and completely different from the Dancing Priest series and each other.

I will say this: I’ll miss Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes and their friends and families. You don’t live with characters for almost two decades without coming to learn a lot about them. And learning a lot about yourself.

Top photograph by Jenny Hill via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Ring

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“How do I say I love you,” Michael said, “that I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you in Fitzhugh’s class? That I want to be at your side for always. I want you painting in that artist space in the loft and then coming into my arms and making love with me? I suppose I just said it, didn’t I?”

Sarah nodded.

“So, Sarah Hughes,” he said, “if you’ll have me, I’m asking you to marry me, to join me in whatever God has in store for us.” He placed the ring box in front of her.

Photograph by Esther Tuttle via Unsplash. Used with permission.