Writing

How Scott Adams Made Me a Hero

January 14, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In the fall of 1995, I was helping the company’s IT function plan for its annual conference in March. They needed a keynote dinner speaker, and they looked to me to see if it were at all possible to get Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic.

It’s hard to understand now, but the Dilbert carton was growing in popularity, and Adams – himself a former IT person – was considered the patron saint of IT. He wasn’t as well known outside of the function, not yet, anyway. But he soon would be.

How I came to be on this committee is a story in and of itself. Earlier that year, I’d asked IT for help in setting up a company web site. I was told they couldn’t help, and by the way, the web was just a flash in the pan, because the future was – I am not making this up – Lotus Notes. So, I’d gone to an outside firm.

We were a week away from launch when the company hired a new VP of IT. At his first senior staff meeting, he had everyone introduce themselves and what areas they were responsible for. When they finished the roundtable, he asked, “Who’s in charge of web development?” No one said a word, until one person volunteered, “Well, there is this guy in PR.”

I was descended upon by IT people suddenly anxious to help. I remember saying, “Please, just stay away. We’re ready to go live.”

I mention that story because it’s a Dilbert cartoon if there ever was one.

As a result, the new VP made sure I was on the planning team. And they were looking to me to see if we could get Scott Adams as the keynote dinner speaker. Everyone agreed it was a long shot.

In late October, I contacted his representative, who in turn passed me to a speaker’s bureau, which did call me back. He had had a cancellation for the time we were requesting in the spring, and he would do it. I couldn’t believe it; it had been relatively easy, and the fee was well within our budget. They faxed the contract, which I quickly signed and faxed back.

The people in IT were overjoyed. They thought I was some kind of magician, but it was really only a combination of circumstances.

Then, on Nov. 9, 1995, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, announced he would be discontinuing the comic strip at the end of the year. As newspapers everywhere looked for a replacement, the choice was obvious – Dilbert.

Scott Adams and Dilbert suddenly rocketed to household names. At first, I worried that they might cancel, but, no, it was full steam ahead.

We arranged for transportation from the airport to the hotel, and he said he would find his way to the convention center. Dinner was at 7, and he arrived at 6:15. I met in the lobby and introduced myself. I then took him into the dinner room, where servers were still setting up. He had requested an overhead projector, and he checked the equipment and the microphone.

At dinner, he sat with the Chief Financial Officer, who was over the IT function, the VP of IT, and several other senior executives who had apparently arranged to attend the dinner to hear him, including the company’s CEO. I worried a bit about the CFO; he was a stern, dour figure, not known for having a sense of humor and often frowning at anything not connected to the business. I was sitting nearby in case of an emergency, and all seemed to go well.

As dessert was served, the chairman of the meeting introduced Scott. A senior IT manager, the man was literally bubbling with excitement. In the room were almost 500 people.

Scott’s presentation was “The Cartoon Strips That Didn’t Make It Past the Censor.” He showed the strips, telling the story associated with each one. I don’t think anyone on the room stopped laughing. The dour CFO was laughing so hard I thought he’d fall off his chair. When Scott finished, he was mobbed, and he spent at least an hour autographing Dilbert books people had brought to the speech. Including me, and you can see my personalized one above. (I still have the book.)

The CFO made a point of congratulating me for the arranging what he called “the best after-dinner speech I’ve ever heard.”

I walked him back to his hotel. We talked about Dilbert, drawing cartoons, and the presentation. He said that when Bill Watterson made his announcement, he and his cats did a conga line to celebrate. I told him that his cartoon strip had manage to capture the idiocies of corporate life (and corporate life in the 1990s was saturated with idiocies). I also said that a few months ago, I had stuck a Dilbert cartoon on the door of my office, and it had become something of a shrine, with people sticking up their favorites on the door. (HR tolerated it. Barely.)

That was Scott’s genius: He captured corporate life as millions of us were living it.

People said afterward it was the highlight of the conference. Scott Adams was the perfect speaker, and a perfect gentleman. He was funny, and he knew how to use self-deprecating humor (the only safe kind). He struck me as someone who loved his work, and he was still somewhat bewildered by what seemed like instant fame. And as the years went by, he never lost it that sense of surprise and wonder.

And now he’s gone. The creator of Dilbert, the Boss, Catbert, Dogbert, and Ratbert belongs to the ages.

The Scott Adams School 01/13/26 – Scott’s final message.

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.

“A Month in Siena” by Hisham Matar

December 10, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Hisham Matar won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for The Return, the story of his search for his father, who’d been kidnapped and presumably killed by the Libyan government. His first novel, In the Country of Men, won several recognitions and awards. Virtually every book he writes wins awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel, My Friends, in 2025.

There’s one exception, and it’s a gem of a story.

In 2014 or 2015, Matar traveled to Siena, Italy, as something of a retreat or rest. He was still recovering from the intensity of writing The Return, not to mention the number of widespread accolades it received. Siena was meant to be a respite, and it was. He describes that respite in A Month in Siena, a non-fiction work about his own life, the churches in the town, and the artwork contained in those churches and the local museum.

“I found something in Siena for which I am yet to have a description,” he writes, but for which I have been searching, and it came at a resonant juncture: the time between having completed a book and seeing it made public; but also at that strange meeting point of two contradictory events—the bright achievement of having finished a book and the dark maturation of the likelihood, inescapable now, that I will have to spend the rest of my days without even knowing what happened to my father, how or when he died or where his remains might be.”

His father had been a Libyan diplomat who became a dissident. The family was living in exile in Cairo when agents of the Qaffadi regime in Libya kidnapped his father, who disappeared inside Libya.

Matar finds solace in art, and specifically, the art of the Sienese School, which flourished largely in the 13^th and 14^thcenturies. (The National Gallery in London hosted an exhibition this year on “Siena: The Rise of Painting.”) The writer visits churches for specific paintings and spends so much time at Siena’s art museums that museum guards come to see him as something of a fixture. He could sit for an hour or more, and it was often more, simply absorbing a particular painting. Some of the artists may be familiar, like Caravaggio; others are well known in the art world but perhaps less by the general public, like Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

It’s a small book, about 130 pages, and it includes reproductions of the paintings Matar studied. It’s also a quiet book; Matar conveys the sense of retreat and rest he was seeking through his style, the words he uses, and the stories he tells.

In addition to his numerous literary recognitions, Matar divides his time between New York and London. He teaches literature at Barnard College, Columbia University.

A Month in Siena will likely instill a similar desire that Matar had – to walk the streets of this ancient walled city, meet its people, eat its food, and explore its churches and museums. But you especially want to sit and study its art.

Top photograph: An aerial view of Siena by Patrick Schneider via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Christmas Nobody Wanted

December 8, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The Christmas issue of Cultivating Oaks Press is now online, and I have a short story, “The Christmas Nobody Wanted.” It includes essays, reflections, and even a recipe by Andrew Roycroft, Amelia Friedline, Annie Nardone, Junius Johnson, Matthew Clark, Adam Nettesheim, Marbieth Barber, Hillevi Anne Peterson, and several others.

The theme of the issue is “Making Room to Receive,” and you can access all the posts here.

Photograph by Jessica Fadel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“White Week and Other Stories” by Wojciech Chmielewski

November 19, 2025 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

The Polish writer Wojciech Chmielewski isn’t exactly a household name in America, and for a very good reason. Up to now, none of his writing has been published in English. Wiseblood Books has changed that with the publication of White Week and Other Stories, translated by Katarzyna Bylow.

Chmielewski is best known in Poland for his short stories, which have won awards in his home country. But he’s also an essayist, literary critic, and playwright for Polich Radio Theatre. This collection of stories, many previously published in Polish literary journals and anthologies. Re largely about Warsaw, a Warsaw that is there and the city that used to be. (Much of the city was destroyed during World War II and then rebuilt under communist rule.)

The stories are, in a word, haunting. The opening story is about the area near Grzybowski Square, with its church on one side and construction underway nearby. We see scenes of a marketplace, a boy selling strawberries (“Polish strawberries…all freesh”), an alleyway full of peonies, a group of drunken men arguing, a young woman waiting for someone, and the empty park with its playground. The story contains no named characters or dialogue; the character is the urban landscape itself. Slowly the reader comes to understand that this area was once part of the Warsaw Ghetto, which tens of thousands of Jews were confined before deportation to Auschwitz.

And so the stories go. Chmielewski will return to this theme of the Warsaw Ghetto, but along the way we’ll experience a religious procession (with a man dreaming about snakes), a woman working on her new novel (with some of the characters becoming parts of other stories), a man with an unfaithful wife who finds solace in eating dog food, a village that exists beneath the sand of a beach area, a man who pays a visit and seems to enjoy reading in a madhouse, conversations in a restaurant during a rainstorm, a saint awake in the dark, a young man in love with a girl whose face experiences allergic reactions, the title story about remembering a religious confirmation celebration, and others.

Like that opening story of the visible landscape not seeming to remember the history, all of the stories have that sense of “missing the context.” We’re there, but we don’t understand. We undertake our daily life, but we’re ignorant of what these streets and buildings have seen, what’s come before us, what has shaped this landscape just as it’s shaping us.

Yes, haunting is the operative word for these stories.

Top photograph: A scene of Old Town Warsaw by Victor Malyushev via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Single Dads in Non-Fiction and Fiction

November 12, 2025 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

It was only coincidental. I read Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood: A Memoir (2015) and the next in my reading pile was Unconditional: A Novel by Stephen Kogon. Both books, one non-fiction and the other fiction, told the stories of young men suddenly finding themselves single fathers.

Luzzi is a professor of Italian and teaches at Bard College in New York. In 2007, just as his lecture class was about to begin, he noticed a security guard come into the room. The message was awful; Luzzi’s wife Katherine had been in an automobile accident and was seriously injured. Katherine was also eight-and-half months pregnant. The baby, a little girl, was delivered and survived. Katherine didn’t.

And thus began a journey of grief, the loss of his wife, navigating funeral and death arrangements, caring for a newborn, and eventually dealing with lawsuits filed against Katherine’s estate and countersuits filed against the other driver. And that on top of trying to resume a “normal” life, as if life could ever be normal after that.

Luzzi turned to the poet Dante and his Divine Comedy. Like Virgil serves as Dante’s guide in the great poem, Dante served as Luzzi’s guide. He tells a moving, heartbreaking story, a man overwhelmed by loss and grief and with the responsibility of a child. If there is a hero in this story, Luzzi might be the first to admit it was his Italian mother, who essentially moves in to care for her granddaughter.

In addition to The Divine Comedy: A Biography, Luzzi has also published Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (2008), A Cinema of Poetry: The Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (2014), My Two Italies (2014), In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (2015), and Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (2022). He received his Ph.D. degree from Yale University, and he teaches literature, film, and Italian Studies. He is also the founder of the Virtual Book Club, which focuses on the world’s great books and storytelling.

Writer and filmmaker Stephen Kogon has previously published a young adult novel and two children’s stories, and Unconditional is his first aimed at adult reader. It tells the story of Matthew Russell, a 35-year-old bachelor who is a photographer for the Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix. He’s attending the retirement part of his best friend (and football team member) Kenny when he receives the telephone call that changes his life.

The Albuquerque police explain that Matthew’s estranged brother Paul and Paul’s girlfriend have been killed in an automobile crash. Apparent suicides, they’ve left behind a premature baby girl who’s in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit. The only note they left behind read “Please take care of the baby.”

And Matthew is the only person capable of doing that. Overwhelmed with loss, not to mention having to manage his brother’s death and funeral, he has to decide what to do with Allie, his new niece. What he decides is that he will take care of her, even if it means radically changing his life.

It’s a moving tory, sometimes borderline sentimental, but that’s of little account when you become engrossed with the story. Matthew surrenders his life to fatherhood, and that includes changing jobs and putting aside his relationship with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Monica.

Kogon previously published Max Mooth, Cyber Sleuth and the Case of the Zombie Virus and two children’s stories, Squiglet the Ryming Piglet and Squiglet the Piglet Goes on a Nature Hike. His first film, Dance Baby Dance, was released in 2018. He’s also written screenplays, comedy sketches, and comic strips.

Related:

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi.

Top photograph by Illia Panasenko via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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