Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Reviews

“Grace Is Where I Live” by John Leax

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From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”

I’ve read Nightwatch, which is aimed at young adult audiences. It’s a coming-of-age story, focused on a boy named Mark Baker from his young childhood to his ten years. It’s a good story with an “edge” I haven’t usually seen in young adult books. 

In 1993, Leax published Grace Is Where I Live: Writing as a Christian Vocation. It describes how he became a writer, starting with believing he would be a novelist. Early on came the discouragement of teachers and mentors, who didn’t think he was cut out to be a novelist. He turned to essays and poetry, it was there he found early acceptance and success.

While Grace Is Where I Live is not a how-to guide, it is filled with a kind of humble wisdom – wisdom learned the hard way. Leax discusses holiness and craft, stewardship and witness, and story and place – all vital considerations for a writer who is also a Christian. He includes his notes from a sabbatical journal, and then distills what he’s learned about his writing, his calling, and himself in the final four chapters.

John Leax

Of all the books on writing I’ve read, this one comes closest to my own experience. “I have a sense,” he writes, “that calling is not to be confused with being a writer – one punching out the books and making a name, being read and admired. The calling has to do with sitting here and accepting silence if necessary. The silence of not writing. The silence of keeping back my poems until I have tested them in time. The silence of having the poems rejected.” 

The last silence is the worst, he says. If you consider your work a calling, rejection can mean God is not ready for you to be heard, striking “at both my best and my worst. And I cannot separate them.”

He tells a beautiful story in these essays – a story of finding his way to what he was called to do. 

Grace Is Where I Live is long out of print; even in one or two newer editions. If you can get your hands on a copy, it is well worth the time and effort.

Top photograph by Christin Hume via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Related: 

Nightwatch by John Leax.

Two More Reviews for “Brookhaven”

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Brookhaven Full Cover-confidential

Two additional reviews of Brookhaven have been published on Amazon. 

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written. Impossible to put down.

This wonder of a Civil War novel captivated me from the first page. Set ostensibly in 1915 when the only female reporter for the NEW YORK WORLD is sent south to learn details about a mysterious Confederate spy, author Glynn Young spins a family saga that details the heartache and loss not only of the war specifically but the broken relationships and twisted lives that came out of those devastating years.

What begins as a mystery to solve quickly evolves into an elderly man’s own story of the nation’s worst war. Set primarily in the town of Brookhaven, Mississippi, and the homes of a family still caught in the grasp of the war’s aftermath, the story moves back and forth between 1915 and the 1860s, taking readers on a personal tour of troop movement in the eastern border states, battles of Gettysburg and Wilderness, General Lee’s surrender, and ultimately, a very satisfying finale.

As I read, the book and its characters felt very real. Not my ancestors, certainly, but people I learned to cheer for and care about as the ways of war and the world had their effect. That turned out to be not too surprising, as the author wrote an end-of-the-book note that BROOKHAVEN was inspired by tales he heard from his own family as he was growing up.

Finally, marvel of marvels for people like me who always “want to know more” after I’ve finished a historical novel, author Young provides readers with a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book that ranges from general Civil War books, to books about the war in Mississippi, to letters and memoirs that offer personal insights into those years.

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully told, fascinating in historical detail

Glynn Young has crafted a beautiful, engrossing story that shines with historical details. I’ve always loved historical fiction and Brookhaven does not disappoint. The many twists and turns in the story made this one a page-turner for me. The author’s note at the end of the book relates how the book was inspired by an old family story, which I found to be so interesting. I could tell by the way the author handled the characters with such integrity that this story holds a special place in his heart. This book kept me company over the holidays and through a winter snowstorm. It was a very good companion.

“The Canteen” by Trevor Tipton

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Family memories passed down through the generations can create fascinating stories.

Eighteen-year-old Travis Tipton and his Indiana unit find themselves lost in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. It’s late 1863; the men are cold and they’re increasingly tired of the war. They’ve become separated from the main body of Union General Burnside’s army and need to find their way back. Travis has just gone off guard duty when the Confederates attack. The few Union soldiers are killed; Travis himself is shot directly in the heart and tumbles into the nearby stream.

When he wakes, he discovers he’s still alive, protected by the canteen he’d slung across the chest; the rest of his troop are dead; he’s floating on a log downstream; and the water is freezing. He loses consciousness and later finds himself rescued by a Union-friendly mountain family, who help him recover from frostbite and exposure.

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He finds romance, but his adventures are far from over. He eventually leaves the mountain family to find Burnside’s army but soon faces another peril: Confederate bounty hunters. 

Travis’s story is told in the short novel The Canteen by Trevor Tipton. The reason the story’s fictitious hero carries the same last name as the author is because the story is based on family history and a Civil War rifle passed down through the decades. There really was a Travis Tipton from Indiana who fought in the Civil War and married a young woman he met during the war. And one of his descendants would write a novel about the war, loosely based on Travis’s history.

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Trevor Tipton

It’s a rich story, filled with anecdotes about real events during the war, including the POW camp at Camp Cahaba in Alabama, which plays a role in the story. (Designed to house 100 soldiers, the camp housed up to 3,000 Union prisoners. Not as bad as Andersonville or some of the POW camps for Confederate POWs in New York and Chicago, Cahaba had its own horror stories.)

Tipton the contemporary author taught for 43 years, using his storytelling skills to make the past become interesting and alive. He lives in northern Indiana.

I learned about The Canteen from an unusual web site / podcast / YouTube channel called American Civil War & UK History (link below). I, too, have a Civil War story passed down through the generations that eventually became a manuscript, and will soon become a published novel.  

Related:

Trevor Tipton talks about The Canteen with American Civil War & UK History.

“Ushers” by Joe Hill

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Martin Lorensen is a young man who’s been extremely lucky, or he’s extremely guilty. Twice he’s narrowly escaped death – a train wreck and a school shooting. Both times, his escape was a last-minute thing – a panic attack kept him from boarding the train and an upset stomach stopped him from entering school and returning home. In the train wreck case, he warned a mother and daughter not to board.

The FBI is interested. Very interested. To the two agents interviewing Martin, it seems like there’s a strong possibility that Martin knows what’s going to happen before it does. And perhaps he’s not the lucky bystander. Perhaps he’s the cause.

Joe Hill

Ushers is a short story by best-selling writer Joe Hill, and it’s one creepy story. You’re sucked into what may or may not be a tale of a serial killer. The story is structured in two parts – an “informal” interview of Lorensen by the agents and then a meeting in a bar between the suspect and one of the agents, where all is made clear.

Hill is the author of The Fireman, Heart-Shaped Box, and Strange Weather, among many others. Several of his stories have been adapted for movies; his Locke & Key stories became a popular series on Netflix. He’s also written several graphic novels, and he has a not terribly active blog at Hill’s House (the title possibly being a nod to Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House).

Ushers begins as a police procedural type of story and ends as something entirely different. And Hill nicely builds the tension right to the breaking point.

“The Blackbird & Other Stories” by Sally Thomas 

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A little girl tries to lead a normal life – dance revues, school – while the shadow of her mother’s illness seems everywhere. If she focuses on dancing “The Blackbird,” she’ll be fine.

A couple try to make sense of their grown son’s suicide, even if you can never really make sense of that kind of tragedy. Or you’re traveling with your grandparents, trying to escape, or deal with, a family breakup. Or a spouse dies, that “little cough” having turned into something fatal. Or your youngest child is born with a skin condition that essentially makes him allergic to sunlight, and you have to re-orient everything you know and do. Or you take refuge from your spouse’s beach house, the one in your family for three generations, the one containing memories of every childhood vacation. 

These are a few of the stories in The Blackbird & Other Stories, the new collection by Sally Thomas. Comprised of eight stories and one novella, Thomas explores life in contemporary America, where marriages flounder and fail, children die, someone you know and love is going to be on the autism spectrum, and dementia and its annihilation of memory always threatens. Underlying all the stories is the subject of faith, or lack of it, never overtly there but only a subtle presence, almost a reminder of something lost. 

But being lost doesn’t mean unimportant. In one of the stories, “Not Less Than Everything,” faith has an important part to play.

Three of the stories and the novella (“The Happy Place”) are about members of the same family, especially the mother Caroline and the daughter Amelia. You read how their lives unfold, and you ache, all the while sensing that there is something here to hold on to while life throws everything at you. These are people you know; they may even be your own family.

Sally Thomas

Thomas is a poet and fiction writer. She serves as the thesis advisor for the M.F. A. program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. She’s published two poetry chapbooks and collection Motherland, with a second collection being published this year. Thomas served as co-editor (with Micah Mattix) of the anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. Her writing and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Plough Quarterly, North American Anglican, Dappled Things, First Things, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Public Discourse, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. With Joseph Bottum, Thomas is the co-editor of Poems Ancient and Modern, a poetry newsletter on Substack.

The Blackbird & Other Stories is a collection that asks, how do we make our way in a broken, fallen world? Or conversely, how can we make our way without faith?

Related:

Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas.

Top photograph by Nick Fewings via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Write & Publish Organically” by Catherine Lawton

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Sometimes I think more people write about writing than actually write. I follow several writer blogs, web sites, online magazines, and Substack listings, and just keeping up with those can be overwhelming. I’ve read and read lots of books on the subject. This is all in addition to the writing itself.

But it is a good idea to step back from time to time and think critically about what you do and how you do it. And to figure out if you can do it better. A new book on writing that is aimed at Christian writers but easily applies to all writers is Write & Publish Organically by Catherine Lawton. And it is a gem. 

Lawton uses a rhyming scheme to explain what she calls organic writing and publishing.

First is “soak.” All writers are soaked in modernity; Christian writers have to strive for being soaked in God’s presence. It’s not easy; she points out that the idea of faith has been shifting from an institutional framework to “unmediated experience.” For Christian writers, grounding in God’s presence is essential.

Second is “spoke.” Lawton details what she learned about writing rom “being practically raised in a church pew.” That understanding include the power of words, the joy of writing and publishing, the importance of being heard or getting the word out, and the value of reading and sharing books.

This is “evoke,” or letting one’s imagination awaken. That’s followed by “provoke,” or stopping playing it safe and getting out of one’s comfort zone. And fifth is “stoke,” where she describes marketing strategies for both writers and publishers.

Catherine Lawton

She includes three useful appendices – publishing models; the publishing process; and marketing for introverts, which likely describes the majority of wrtiers. 

Lawton has been writing and telling stories since childhood. She’s published fiction, poetry, essays, and non-fiction. She’s also the founder of Cladach Publishing, a Christian publisher of memoirs, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The firm is based in Greeley, Colorado.

Write & Publish Organically is a guide not only for young writers beginning their careers but also established writers. Particularly helpful is the idea of being centered (for Christians, that means centered in God). It’s a work filled with insights and helpful advice; Lawton works both the writing and publishing sides of the business. She’s distilled what she’s learned into a highly readable book.

And reading it is a good way to think about writing.

Note: The book will be released on Monday, Sept. 9.

Top photograph by Andrew Neel via Unsplash. Used with permission.