Writing

When Family History Doesn’t Work Out as Expected

August 26, 2026 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

When I began to write my historical novel Brookhaven, my jumping off point was a family story. My father often told me about my great-grandfather, Samuel Young, and his Civil War experience.

The story was this: Samuel was 13 when the war began in April of 1861. He was too young to enlist, so he signed up as a messenger boy. He had been in that position for a good deal of the war. When the war ended with the surrender of General Lee’s Army at Appomattox Courthouse to General Grant and the surrender of General Johnston’s army to General Sherman at Greensboro, Samuel found himself in the East, with no way to get home except by foot.

The story went on, When Samuel arrived home in Brookhaven, he found his family gone. Told they had fled to Texas rather than live under federal control, he continued his trek west, across Louisiana, until he found them in East Texas. A key part of the story was that the family had never owned slaves; they had been shopkeepers.

It’s a great story. A teenager, going off to war, too young to fight but finding other ways to serve, finds himself stranded at war’s end and has to walk home. He would have had to walk across Georgia, with its devastated 60-mile swath thanks to General Sherman’s march. He would have found more devastation in Alabama, and financial and social upheaval everywhere. Law and order would have broken down; soldiers and freed slaves alike would have been pillaging. People, especially people passing through, would not have found it easy to find food.

I held on to that story for more than half a century, and then I decided to write about. A historical novel, to bring my great-grandfather’s story to life.

Considerable research was required – battles, social conditions, the home front, political history. I found some wonderful web sites that focused on historical research. I read other novels, speeches from the era, and spent a lot of time with records from the family Bible, which took me in unexpected directions. I researched genealogy sites like Family Search and Ancestry.com.

I went through data bases of Confederate soldiers, looking for any reference to Samuel. I didn’t find one. That was the first red flag. Then I learned what the term “messenger boy” really meant – the equivalent of a Western Union messenger who delivered the telegrams or bad news to families. I rechecked birth dates and accounts of how the Confederacy took the enlistment age down to 16 officially and lower unofficially. The story of “too young to enlist” wasn’t holding water. For Samuel, that wouldn’t have been true in the last three years of the war. The unraveling of the family story, the family legend, was underway fully.

Then I found another account, by Samuel’s oldest son Hugh (my grandfather was Samuel’s youngest son; how we ended up with Samuel’s family Bible is unknown but still a source of controversy). It’s based on the story Samuel told Hugh’s children.

The story was that Samuel’s two older brothers enlisted, and their father didn’t want his youngest and the last son at home to stay. He paid to keep Samuel out of it, including paying another young man to take his place in an enlistment. When even that no longer worked, and Samuel had to enlist, his father arranged for his to be sent to a regiment in Texas, far from the horrific battles in the East. Samuel supposedly told his grandchildren that he “never saw a Yankee the entire time; all I did was chase Injuns.”

That story rang true. There was no messenger boy working in the Confederate armies. No long trek home from Appomattox. No finding the family gone in Brookhaven. They had fled to Texas, but Samuel, being in Texas himself, knew that.

The unraveling got worse. I found the census records for Mississippi for the years 1830 to 1860, and for 1870 to 1910. The Youngs were there. The entire time, their occupations were listed as farmers, not shopkeepers. They didn’t live in Brookhaven but in Johnston Station, south of Brookhaven. And, through 1860, the records included the names of their 17 slaves.

This was never the heroic, romantic story my father told me. I don’t know whether he invented it, or my grandfather, or even whether I misunderstood or misheard. But it turned out to be a real story, the true story. Samuel did survive the war; his two brothers and a brother-in-law did not. His father was right to be concerned, just as concerned as fathers and mothers all over the North and the South were. It’s estimated that 10 percent of the population of the United States – combined North and south – died during the war. Samuel could easily have been part of that statistic.

I stuck with the story as I heard it from my father for Brookhaven. But the real story was just as important.

Top photograph: Samuel Franklin Young and his wife Olivia Montgomery Young.

Accepting a Short Story Challenge

August 12, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Like most if not all writers, I follow several writers who post and talk about the craft of writing. Like other writers, it’s helpful, encouraging, and instructive to see what others, Christian and non-Christian alike, are struggling with, learning, sharing, and figuring out.

I published my last book in late 2024. What followed was period of exhaustion. Writing that book had been an intense experience; the research had begun in 2016 and continued through the writing of two other novels and deepened in the final two years. The published book includes nine pages of bibliography. I’d never written historical fiction before, and it was one of the most intense writing experiences of my life. Through the process, my respect for writers of historical fiction grew exponentially.

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

Top photograph by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Two Short Story Collections Well Worth Reading

August 5, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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.

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.

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

July 29, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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.

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.

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 19^th 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).

The Viking Christians: The Day Valhalla Died

July 13, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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).

The Job in Which No Day Was Like Any Other

July 1, 2026 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

I worked as director of Communications for St. Louis Public Schools for seven months. I’d gone through the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and I had a first day on the job unlike any other I had had or anyone I knew had had. But I figured that, after that tumultuous first day, things would settle down.

I figured wrong.

Things would never settle down. Every day would be unlike every other day.

One ongoing source of turmoil was the Board of Education itself, the seven people elected by voters to oversee the district’s operations. Four had been elected on a reform slate. Three had not. Most of the turmoil generated by the Board came from those three.

One constantly leaked confidential board information to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, especially if it might embarrass or “expose” the reform members. One day she went further. She showed up at a middle school with reporters in tow, announcing she was firing the principal. I had to drop what I was doing and rush to the school, deal with the reporters, and explain that Board members could not fire staff members. But she got the coverage she wanted on the 6 p.m. news; she wasn’t happy that I did, too.

Another Board member had been a perennial candidate for every elected office in the city of St. Louis and had managed to get on the school board because of a lack of challengers. He called me one day and asked me to set up a press conference; he was going to demand that the acting superintendent resign. I explained I couldn’t do that.

The third was likely the most intelligent member of the board. It was amazing to watch her focus like a laser on misstatements, inconsistencies, and contradictions form the administration. She also didn’t leak to the media; she said whatever she had to say publicly.

But there was a problem. One day, I was sitting in my office when I heard a splash. I saw the board member, who thought she has disguised herself by wearing a baseball cap, rush from my boss’s office next to mine and carrying an empty water pitcher. She had thrown the water on my boss at her desk.

I called security. They responded immediately. So did the police, because the board member had barricaded herself in her small office. The administrative area was evacuated. It took several hours, but the police eventually prevailed and removed her for charging and booking for assault. Yes, I had to hold an impromptu press conference to explain what had happened. I also had to give a witness statement to police. There had been rumors she had a bomb; she didn’t.

It was the reporter for Channel 5 who explained why the Board member had done it. She’d been inspired by a scene in The Wizard of Oz, and she believed my boss had become a witch. The reporter did not make that up. It was true.

A second source of turmoil was the public anger over the district’s restructuring. Downsizing had occurred across the district, with hundreds of people losing their jobs. The third floor of district headquarters in downtown St. Louis had been full of people six months before. Now it was empty and unused, except for the broadcast studio and the Board’s conference room. A major chunk of the second floor, the area adjacent to where I worked, was also empty.

Several schools had been closed, angering parents and teachers like. School bus routes had been consolidated and removed from influence by the Board and top district officers. Food service contracts had been consolidated and removed from political oversight. The nepotism rule was being enforced. Full-time activists were drawn to the turmoil.

All of it would coalesce around Board meetings. Thy were held at a middle school near downtown, because it had been built with the largest auditorium. Every Board meeting saw a filled room – 450 people who were not shy about screaming. Another 500, often more, would be outside in the parking lot.

I had attended school board meetings in my own suburban school district. Feelings might run high at times, but meetings usually stayed calm.

Not with St. Louis Public Schools

I sat next to my boss at the first meeting I attended in October. The room was packed. The crowd had to be continuously warned to calm down or be expelled. Board members yelled at each other, and at members of the crowd. People were often shouted down. It was a circus of noise. One activist charged the stage where the Board was sitting, and was wrestled to the ground by the police, handcuffed, and arrested, literally two feet from where I was sitting.

When the meeting ended, my boss smiled. “You must be a good luck charm. This was a good meeting.”

Shocked, I stared at her. “This was a good meeting?”

She nodded, smiling again. “We only had one arrest.”

The third source of turmoil was the normal workings of an urban school district. All the reporters covering the district had police radios. There would be reports of weapons on campus, gang fights, campus intruders, school bus incidents, and other problems.

Once, I was at a meeting hosted by the school district and held at the high school that specialized in information technology. Hundreds of people were attending a presentation by the State Board of Education. I received a text message – food poisoning at an elementary school near the city’s old and famous food market. The incident was odd because only one class had been affected, and the children had eaten different things in the cafeteria. But the teacher had also been affected, and that moved the situation from possible hysteria to serious issue. The food service vendor was sending people to collect samples and provide a statement to the media.

The vendor’s representatives showed up, collected samples, and promptly slipped out a side door. They would not be providing a statement. Reporters turned to me. I had to invent a response on the spot, explaining what we knew and didn’t know and expressing our surprise that the vendor had not made a statement as promised.

The vendor was not happy with my response. That made us even. I wasn’t happy with their response.

Like I said, no day was like any other day. No such thing as a “typical day” existed. I might try to plan, but I always had to be prepared to junk the plan and go by the seat of my pants. That was the only typical thing about the job.

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph, St. Louis Public Schools headquarters building. All photographs via St. Louis Public Schools.by St. Louis Public Schools.

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