Literary Life

How I Learned the Liberal Arts Were Important

January 7, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I can remember the first time I knew for sure that something had gone wrong with the liberal arts. I had suspected some things were awry in our own public school district. Teachers and administrators didn’t like parents asking even basic questions about curricula. “Our focus in on critical thinking,” one principal said, “not rote learning.” Included in rote learning were penmanship, learning historical facts, memorizing multiplication tables, phonics, and just about anything associated with traditional learning.

But it was when my oldest son’s sixth-grade English teacher sent a note home on some class activity that I knew. The note was filled with spelling and grammar mistakes. When I asked if spelling and grammar were still taught, I was given some vague reference to avoiding harming children’s self-esteem.

We pulled the plug. We moved my oldest to a Catholic school (we weren’t Catholic). Seventh grade was a parental nightmare; we quickly learned that my son was, at best, a full year or more behind his new school classmates. That year was spent homeschooling him after he finished the school day, simply to get him up to par. And this wasn’t some high-achieving superstar Catholic school. It was basic education focused on the essentials.

We started his younger brother started kindergarten at the same Catholic school. We were not about to repeat the experience of our oldest.

As parents, we were close to heartbroken. Our public school system was one of the highest-ranked systems in the state of Missouri. We both loved the liberal arts; my wife focused on history, and my love was English literature. I had gotten a master’s degree in liberal arts at Washington University in St. Louis in 1988. And what was being taught as liberal arts was an early version of social equity and barely disguised activism.

It’s gotten worse. By the time my oldest grandson started school, public schools weren’t even considered a possibility. He was enrolled in a classical Christian education school, and his brothers soon followed. The difference is nothing short of amazing; this is a school that cherishes the liberal arts, placing them firmly into the context of Christian faith. We’ve seen the impact, and it’s stunning.

Poet, writer, and professor Benjamin Myers is a champion of the liberal arts, at a time when STEM reigns, liberal arts are in decline, and Harvard – Harvard! – has no professors left teaching Western history. Myers has written a short but important book, An Invitation to the Liberal Arts, succinctly explaining why they are important and indeed vital to society and culture.

Myers grounds liberal arts in the Bible and Christian tradition. He examines two fundamental questions that undergird the liberal arts – what is man, and why the West. He stresses the importance of the virtues of humility, patience, attentiveness, and selflessness.

He cites Plato in developing the historical cardinal virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence, which the Apostle Paul amended by adding faith, hope and love. Those seven virtues are the foundation of what we know as Western civilization, and it will simply not survive without them. Myers foes on to explore the importance of the liberal arts for leadership and how what we call qualities of leadership flow directly from the virtues of Western civilization.

And his conclusion: “When you undertake a liberal arts education, you are not just doing something for yourself. You are, rather, joining a great project of cultural renewal.” In short, the study of liberal arts is an education, and it doesn’t end with a college degree. It is lifelong education.

Myers, associate professor of literature and poetry writing at Oklahoma Baptist University, served as poet laureate of Oklahoma from 2015 to 2016. He is the author of four collections, Elegy for Trains (2011), Lapse Americana (2013), Black Sunday (2019), and At the Family Book of Martyrs (2023). Elegy for Trains won the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry, and his poetry has been published in numerous literary journals. Myers has also published A Poetic of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation (2020). He received his B.A. degree from the University of the Ozarks and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

I can’t recommend An Invitation to the Liberal Arts highly enough. As short as it is (all of 122 pages), it is packed with insight, understanding, and a love for its subject. It’s a call to action for our entire lives – a call aimed at being part of the great project of renewing the culture.

Benjamin Myers and The Family Book of Martyrs.

Benjamin Myers and Black Sunday.

Pinocchio in Nineveh: Elegy for Trains by Benjamin Myers.

Top photograph by Susan Wilkinson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Meeting the Author of “Matisse at War”

November 10, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

On Nov. 4, I had just finished reading Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France by Christopher Gorham when I received an email from the St. Louis Art Museum. In partnership with the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival, the art museum would be hosting a lecture by Gorham on Thursday, Nov. 6.

I loved the book. When news of its publication first happened, I pre-ordered the book. I suspected – correctly, as it turned out – that a book about art, World War II, Nazis, Vichy France, and Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Last year, we had seen an exhibition at the art museum on Matisse and the Sea, and many of the paintings would have been completed in the period leading up to the war.

I didn’t need convincing. I bought my ticket for the lecture.

I arrived at the art museum early, to walk through Sculpture Hall to get a quick view of the five massive paintings featured in the new Anselm Kiefer exhibition on Becoming the Sea. (Obviously, the art museum, like the rest of us. is fascinated by the sea.) I was finally making my way down the hall’s big stairs when I realized that Christopher Gorham was walking right in front of me, accompanied by an art museum staffer. No, I didn’t interrupt them to introduce myself.

I had an excellent seat in the theater, equivalent to orchestra center at the symphony or a play. The audience had about 150 people. After introductory remarks by representatives of the art museum and the Jewish Book Festival, Gorham spoke for about 45 minutes.

For 45 minutes, he told the story in the book and of the book. If you hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t realize that he was giving an oral summary of the entire book, and his talk was just as fascinating as the book itself. He added a few details, like elaborating on the Degenerate Art Show organized by the Nazis which toured Germany in 1937 and 1938, and which included a few of Matisse’s paintings. There was much about Matisse’s art that the Germans and the Vichy French hated.

*Allied invasion of Nice and Provence, 1944*

Gorham also tracked several of Matisse’s famous scissor “cut-outs” with both events in his personal life and developments in the war. His famous “The Wolf” (or “Le Loup”) was completed about the time his ex-wife Amelie and his daughter Marguerite were arrested by the Gestapo for involvement in the Resistance. He also described the “second D-Day” in France, when the Allies bombed and invaded Nice and Provence. Increasing danger from the war prompted Matisse to move to a country house about 10 miles from Nice. Nice itself was bombed, with 500 people dying in the raid.

He pointed out the just passed Monday, Nov. 3, was the 71^st anniversary of Matisse’s death.

After the lecture and a question-and-answer period, Gorham signed copies of the book just outside the main gift shop next door to the theater. I’d brought my copy with me but didn’t intend to get his autograph. As I was leaving, the signing was just getting underway, and only one person was in line. I thought, “Well, why not?” and joined the line, which quickly filled up after me.

I told Gorham how much I’d enjoyed the book. We chatted for a minute or so, and then I mentioned I’d had no idea how important Pierre Matisse had been to the art scene in New York City until I read the book.

“Pierre essentially started modern art in New York,” Gorham said. “And much of it had to do with the artists who’d fled Europe for safety in the United States. Otherwise, they would have been killed outright or sent to a death camp. Instead, they created an art movement in America, and Pierre Matisse was at the center of it.”

Pierre did more than simply organize exhibitions of these artists’ works. He found apartments for them, often paying their rent. He paid them stipends so they could feed themselves and their families and still paint. He helped them establish their names and reputations.

Matisse’s daughter Marguerite put herself in personal danger. She carried coded messages, including one to Brittany in the spring of 1944 that provide information to the Resistance about the coming D-Day invasion. That was when she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was imprisoned, tortured, and then deported by train to a camp in Germany. Miraculously, she survived the war.

Gorham’s lecture was every bit as fascinating as the book. I loved the book (my review posted today at Faith, Fiction, Friends), and I’m glad I made time to attend the lecture. The author expanded my understanding of both the book and its subject. And I learned a little about the history of modern art in America.

What Happened to the Fireside Poets?

June 24, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

When I first envisioned my novel Brookhaven, I focused on a family story passed down through generations, which turned out to be a legend, as in, almost entirely untrue. But two things shifted my focus.

First, in 2022, I had the old family Bible conserved. It had seen better days; my father gave it to me wrapped in grocery store bag paper and tied with strong. My contribution had been to remove the paper and string, wrap it in acid-free paper, and store in an acid-free box. It sat on a closet shelf for years, until I brought it to a book conservator in St. Louis. He discovered something tucked in the Book of Isaiah that both my father and I had missed – a yellowed envelope containing a lock of auburn hair.

For various reasons, I believe the hair belonged to my great-grandmother Octavia. She died in 1888 at age 44. Unusual for the time, my great-grandfather Samuel never remarried. He died in 1920. And I thought to myself, “There’s a love story here.”

Second, also in 2022, we saw a movie entitled “I Heard the Bells.” It’s a snapshot of the life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) during the Civil War, including both the tragic death of his beloved wife and the near death from a war wound of his oldest son Charles. Both events contributed to Longfellow’s writing the poem that became a Christmas hymn, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

To continue reading, please see me post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

About Those 10 Books

August 21, 2024 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

There was a thing last week, I think somewhere on Substack, about “10 books that changed my life.” I tried to find the specific article again, but Google produced an abundance of listings about 10 books, 37 books, 100 books, 20 books, 23 books, 77 books, 25 books, 40 books, well, you get the picture.

I asked myself the question. Could I identify 10 books that had changed my life?

My answer was no, I couldn’t, at least, not in the sense of some transformational change from what I was before reading the book and what I was after reading the book. But I could identify 10 that had influenced me, in some cases profoundly.

I first read four of the books in high school: Great Expectations and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and Don Quixote by Cervantes. The two by Dickens were both class assignments (9^th and 12^thgrades, respectively). I’d read Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 11^th grade American literature, and I bought Four Quartets to read on my own (I even remember where I bought it — the long-gone Dolphin Book Shop at Lakeside Shopping Center in suburban New Orleans).

Don Quixote was also a class assignment, but we had the option of reading the abridged or unabridged version. Two of 30 in our all-boy English class decided to bite the bullet and read the unabridged version – me and Jesse Stephenson. Our teacher said it was the kind of book you should read three times in your life – when you were young, middle-aged, and old. I read it was I was 17; I read it again when I was 35, and I discovered it was not the book I remembered it to be. I’ll have to wait a few years to read it when I get old.

I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings four times, and each time I’ve been blown away by the story. My first reading was in high school – the pirated Ballantine editions. After college, I read the official family-approved versions. Some 25 years later, I read the whole saga again, in anticipation of the Peter Jackson movies. And then, a few years ago, I reread the entire series.

The 1970s were the period that shaped my reading the rest of my life. I read the crime novels Dashiell Hammett, like The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest, and loved his writing style. A friend at work introduced me to Flannery O’Connor, and I read everything she wrote. In high school in the 1960s, I read the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, and Cancer Ward, and I was more than ready for the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974 (ordered from Cokesbury Bookstore, downtown Houston, Texas). Reading John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was like going back to my roots; no one before or since captured the New Orleans accent as precisely as he did. October Light, a novel by John Gardner, remains one of my favorite works of fiction.

I’d previously read The Screwtape Letters and Surprised by Joy, but what really opened my mind to C.S. Lewis was They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, published in 1980 and edited by Water Hooper. The letters formed their own kind of biography, from the time the two were boyhood friends to near Lewis’s death in 1963.

In 1986, in the middle of my master’s program at Washington University, I took a seminar in the Latin American novel. The assigned readings for me were one wow moment after another. I was so blown away by Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World that I did my seminar project on his Conversation in the Cathedral, not the easiest work to read, and discovered the intricate underlying structure. A later course in the history of the early Christian church found me reading Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown, which is still one of the best, if not the best, biographies I’ve ever read.

Two recent influential books I’ve read fundamentally changed my understanding of the Civil War. I read them as research for a historical novel project (more on that later), but together they stripped away any notion of romance about the conflict. Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil Wars Final Campaign in North Carolina (2022) by Ernest Dollar describes the barbarism of the last spasm of the war, one in which neither side covered itself in glory. Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (2023) by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant estimates that about 10 percent of the soldiers on both sides were under the age of 15.

That’s my list of influential books. As important as they’ve been to me, there’s nothing like writing a book that will change your life. That’s a story for another day.

The Poetry of the Best Job You Ever Had

August 25, 2020 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

It started with a phone call from a friend. “Did you see the job ad in the paper?” he said.

“What job ad?” I said.

“The city school district is looking for a communications director. You’d be perfect.”

“Do you hate me or something?” I said.

The city school district was indeed looking for a communications director. The district was in organizational chaos. A reform school board had brought in a management consultant firm from New York to reorganize the district. Schools had been closed. Central office staff had been laid off – some 800 people. Management of cafeterias, school buses, and other services was being outsourced. The management firm was doing what had to be done, but the district was so strangled by its own politics and so intertwined with city politics that it was impossible to try to make the changes from within.

To give some scope to the problem: the district was staffed and resourced for 100,000 students. Officially, something slightly less than 40,000 attended. The real number was closer to 30,000. The day the management firm arrived, it was learned that the district was so in spending deficit that bankruptcy might be required.

And this was the organization I would be perfect for? Not to mention the ongoing issues, problems, and violence associated with virtually all urban school districts?

I ended up applying for the job. I ended up getting the job. It was the best job I’d ever had. It was also the worst. I was living the opening of A Tale of Two Cities.

It was performance poetry. It was improv poetry. It was epic and it was free verse. Everyone knew exactly how communications had to be run.

I received daily phone calls from the mayor’s office, giving me instructions on what I was supposed to do each day. I ignored them, every single time.

I learned about police radios and how the news media used them to track district news, like when a school board member threw a pitcher of water on a district official because she had seen The Wizard of Oz and knew that water melted witches.

School board members leaked each other’s emails.

My budget – which the previous year had been $1 million with a staff of 12 – had been cut to $20,000 and a staff of 1/2, and the budget had already been spent before I arrived. I had to invent communications out of whole cloth, with no money.

There was never a work day without multiple crises. The work followed me home at night and on weekends – I once did a television interview on a Saturday outside the car dealership where my car was being serviced. I did another one in my family room. I did interviews at schools, meetings, on sidewalks, at lunches, in hallways. I was on television so much that a crazy anomaly developed: an aging, white male Baby Boomer became the public face of an urban school district.

I was there almost nine months, the most tumultuous nine months of the district’s history, my career, and even my own life. I left because I could sense I was burning out; no one could handle communications in constant chaos.

I did get to see and experience the best and worst of human behavior – and sometimes from the same people. I was personally tested for what I could handle, and I knew I had not been found wanting. I loved and hated that job, and I would never do it again. But I was thankful that I’d done it.

From Poetry at Work:

First day on the job

It’s only 9 a.m.
Channel 5 is waiting, cameras
filming in expectation
of a statement, any statement,
it doesn’t matter what it says;
school board members
are leaking emails on each other,
the teacher on the phone
is correcting my pronunciation;
the newspaper uses police radios
to follow the school district news
while the consultant is calling
about “a better brand for the schools”;
the parents protest is scheduled
for 5:30; the mayor’s office
is sending PR instructions
and I’m told the teachers have
a sick-out today because they
can’t bank sick days anymore
and it’s only 9 a.m. and
my first day on the job. I’m
going to love this place.

Top photograph by Mesh via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Speechwriting

August 20, 2020 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

The most solitary job in corporate America is not the position of CEO. It’s the position of the CEO’s speechwriter. It can be the loneliest job as well.

I spent about two thirds of my career in speechwriting. Forty years ago, no one aspired to be a corporate speechwriter. You would find people who wanted to be presidential or political speechwriters, but most people who ended up in corporate speechwriting did so by accident. In my own case, I was 25 years old and assigned to a huge issue threatening to disrupt the company. The executive in charge of marketing needed a speech on the topic. The regular speechwriters are unavailable, so I was asked to do it. My strength was, in this case, knowing the subject matter. I had written speeches for myself; I had taken a course in American speeches in college. But I hadn’t written for someone else.

The speech went well. After the speech, the executive said, “I thought the audience was going to be jumping up and down on the tables. They told me that no one had explained how an issue in Washington, D.C. affected them and their businesses before, at least in language that made sense.” From that point on, he wanted no one else to write his speeches. I was moved to the corporate speechwriting group.

Later, I was hired by another company to do general PR work, not speeches. But the VP for my division was unexpectedly put on the speaking circuit by the CEO. No one else in our group had experience in speechwriting. My career was becoming known as “speechwriter by accident;” it wasn’t long before I was moved to the corporate speechwriting group. The same circumstances repeated themselves for my next two jobs, until I was put in charge of corporate speechwriting.

Most communications people don’t like speechwriting, and it’s no surprise. Someone else always gets the credit for your work, unless it goes badly; then it’s your fault. You often find yourself dealing with temperamental CEOs and occasionally being yelled at. The hard work of writing a speech never happens in teams. What happens in teams is various vested interests wanting control or wanting to insert a favored program or idea. You don’t win popularity contests by refusing to cite someone’s pet project. It takes a long time, but eventually, if you’re good at what you do, people come to respect and rely on your judgment. Usually.

A speech is unlike any other kind of communication. It’s created on paper or on a screen, to be read or referred to, for people to hear it and understand it. You write for the eye to be read by the voice to be heard by the ear. It’s tricky.

I attended a number of speechwriting seminars and workshops, but nothing helped me like reading and reciting poetry. The best speeches have a quality of poetry about them – the rhythm, the cadence, the pace, the ideas coming at you in orderly but unusual ways. I relied heavily on three modernist poets – T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas. They were my guides and mentors. When I had trouble with writing, I turned to Four Quartets or “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

I started writing key sections of speeches – the critical emotional parts – by hand, and often in free verse form. The best-known speech I ever wrote was first written almost entirely in free verse form. It helped make the executive famous and turned an industry on its head. Seven years after it was first given, four years after the executive had retired, requests for copies of the speech were still being received by the company. That’s unheard of in most speechwriting circles, including political; it remains unique in corporate circles.

And it was poetry that infused that work.

From Poetry at Work: “Speechwriting is a solitary profession, devoted largely to reading, writing, search, and study. It may be the closest thing we have today to the monastic life outside the monastery, except that at critical stages, the whole world seems to step in. Speechwriting requires ongoing interaction with executives, content experts, librarians, academics, PR people, attorneys, outside consultants, and even other speechwriters. To do it well, the speechwriter must manage all of those people and not let them get in the way of what the executive has to say.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life Book of the Month discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Alem Omerovic via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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