Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

A Year Away from Twitter / X

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Twitter was the first social media platform I joined, way back in 2008. I was far from being an early adopter, but I was one of the first people at work to sign up.

Even that early, you could see the enormous potential for good and bad that a social media platform like Twitter could have. What we know as cancel culture developed early.

From 2008 to 2023, I had a consistent strategy in how I used the platform. I tweeted positive stuff. I didn’t engage in politics or controversies. I highlighted good things people were doing or writing. And I have to say I was steadfast from the beginning to the end.

At one point, Twitter changed its algorithm, and I discovered my account had been suspended, caught up in some automatic change (I wasn’t alone). But I had a friend who had a friend who knew someone who was a developer at Twitter, and within about two days, my account had been restored. The suspension had been a mistake by the design of a heavy-handed algorithmic change.

That was then. Elon Musk eventually bought Twitter and fired a whole bunch of people. If your account got suspended, you were going to have to deal with algorithmic bots, and a bot is never wrong. 

I was continuing on my merry way, when, on June 12 of last year, I discovered my account had been suspended. I appealed. Several times, in fact. The length of the reviews of my appeals could be measured in nanoseconds. My remaining option was to write a letter to Twitter / X headquarters in San Francisco.

And I said to myself, “No. I’m done. I am not going to waste my time on a letter that will likely be trashed before anyone reads it. I’m done with Twitter.” And I walked away.

I have not regretted my decision. Not at all. 

Here’s what has happened because of that.

I have more free time. Like up to 90 minutes a day.

The craziness that the platform has always embraced is gone, leading to a quieter life. 

I began to add links daily to my blog for interesting articles, stories, and poems that people might like to read.

My time on Facebook and Instagram has decreased as well. I haven’t increased my time on LinkedIn.

I’m writing more. I’m writing better. 

Substack has become a more important social platform for me. I don’t have a column or site on Substack, but I follow favorite authors, writers, photographers, and artists, and it’s all positive. Negative stuff can creep in, but I ignore it or unfollow the account. 

I also discovered that journalism is still being practiced in the United States, at least on Substack. 

I miss the people I regularly communicated with on Twitter, including a lot of poets. Tweetspeak Poetry, the site I write weekly for, was born on Twitter. We hosted numerous poetry slams with the use of Twitter hashtags, but that’s long in the past. You might say Tweetspeak outgrew Twitter, or it grew in a different direction (Tweetspeak is celebrating 15 years this year.)

Overall, the suspension of my Twitter account has been a good thing. I could have created a different account and started over, but I decided it wouldn’t be worth it. 

I got some of my life back, and I’m going to keep it.

Top photograph by David Paschke via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Unexpected Ballerina

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The summer issue of Cultivating Oaks Press is live online, and the theme is courage. It includes a short story I wrote, “The Unexpected Ballerina.” The issue is chock full of articles, poems, photography, and more by Annie Nardone, Junius Johnson, Maribeth Barber Albritton, Amelia Friedline, Kris Comely, Justin Lee Parker, Amy Wevodau Malskeit, Rob Jones, and more, under the general editorship of Lancia Smith. It’s a wonderful issue.

How I Came to Social Media

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It was work that originally led me to sign up for Twitter and other social media platforms. For a number of years, social media became my work. Even when I retired, I was still managing the company’s social media platforms.

From 2003 to 2004, I spent nine months working in communications for St. Louis Public Schools, which was in dire straits. Enrollment had declined to an official 40,000 from a peak of about 100,000, and the district was still operating school buildings, a headquarters building, and an administrative staff that supported a 100,000 enrollment. A management firm was hired by a reform school board to take over and do the painful stuff that had to be done. The management firm was in place all of two days when it discovered that the district was bankrupt.

The firm wielded the ax. School buildings were closed. The central administration was slashed to the bone, and even some of the bone was removed. The communications staff was reduced from 13 positions to one half of a person. 

I was hired at the tail end of the staff reductions, but more turmoil was ahead. The total communications budget was $20,000 (down from $1 million), and it had been spent by the time I arrived in October. We had a web site in dire need of overhaul. We had constituencies that had to be communicated with. Protests were daily. I wasn’t in my office five minutes when I was informed that the media had gathered, waiting for a statement on the wildcat teacher sickout. (Fifteen minutes after that, I was making a statement in front of the assembled reporters from newspapers, television, and radio.)

We did the only thing we knew to do. We went electronic, including a variety of email newsletters. They were designed carefully and with a lot of forethought. In fact, given how intensely disliked the management firm was, we prominently displayed “Not for External Distribution” at the top of the newsletter for administrative staff and school principals, knowing full well that it would be immediately forwarded to news media, friends, protest groups, and everyone else. It might have been one of the most effective communication tools the district had at the time – the internal newsletter we hoped everyone would leak.

This was the time when I discovered message boards and other kinds of communication tools that were being used by people opposed to what the district was doing (leaking worked both ways). 

Totally unrelated to what we were dealing with was a student up at Harvard who was setting up a dating site called Facebook. And a guy born and raised in the St. Louis area was working on a micro-media tool that eventually became Twitter.

I went back to the corporate world which, I discovered, was unaware of the existence of electronic communications outside pre-approved programs blessed by the IT department. I’d been hired specifically to deal with a bankruptcy issue affecting the company, but questions were arising about what people could see was happening online. When our department boss asked at a staff meeting if anyone knew what a blog was, people looked at each and shook their heads. I was more than familiar with what they were because of my experience with the school district. I explained what I knew. I became the immediate in-house expert.

Twitter launched in 2006, and I held off signing up until I could see what implications it might have for the company. In 2008, I signed up, embarking on the wild roller coaster ride that social media had already become. I joined Facebook a week later, and not long after I started my own blog, in addition to one for the company.

Next week: A Year Away from Twitter / X

Top photograph by Sara Kurfeß via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Works of Mercy” and Poet Robert Southwell

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On Monday, I posted a short review of the novel Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas on my Faith, Fiction, Friends blog. It is a fine novel, a little slow moving at the beginning but richly rewarding if you stick with it. I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.

The main character, an aging housekeeper named Kirsty Sain, works for the priest in a small-town Catholic parish in North Carolina. She lives a somewhat isolated life, until circumstances force a change. But what threads through the change is the poetry of Robert Southwell (1561-1595).

Southwell, who would become a Catholic saint, was one of the Catholic martyrs in the religious wars in England in the 16th century. Yes, but was the age of Shakespeare, but it was also the age of religious war. Henry VIII began the English Reformation; his son and heir carried it onward for the few years he was king. Catholic Mary Tudor represented the reaction, and she was no slouch when it came to martyring Protestants.

When Elizabeth I ascended the throne, it was the reaction to the reaction. That Catholic Philip II of Spain attempted an invasion of England in 1588 to depose Elizabeth and restore the Catholic faith didn’t cause Elizabeth to look on her Catholic subjects kindly. But when it came to martyrdoms, she was a bit more reserved than her older sister.

English-born Robert Southwell was a Jesuit priest who had been educated in France. When he returned to his native England in 1586, he did so in secret and had to perform his priestly offices underground. He was captured in 1592, interrogated and tortured, confined to solitary confinement in the Tower fort wo years, and then transferred to Newgate Prison for his trial in 1595. He was found guilty, sentenced to death by hanging, drawn, and quartered. In 1970, Pope Paul VI canonized him.

The vast majority of his writings and poetry happened in the six years between his return to England and his imprisonment. Earlier works were composed in Latin, but his poems in England were written in English. 

In Works of Mercy, Kristy Sain, raised a Catholic, recalls her college studies, readings, and the affair with her atheist tutor, who disparaged her interest in Southwell and Catholicism. She doesn’t finish her studies, and only years later do Southwell’s poems come back to her.

Because a significant part of the story happens at Christmas, the poem that becomes a part of the story is “The Burning Babe,” which is about the Nativity. In fact, it appears that author Thomas found the novel’s title in this poem.

The Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
‘Alas!’ quoth he, ‘but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shames and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
   So will I melt into a bath, to wash them in my blood.’
   With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,
   And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

It’s easy – too easy – to call Works of Mercy a “Catholic novel.” It certainly reflects a Catholic sensibility; the story is centered on a Catholic church, a Catholic housekeeper, a priest, and a number of parishioners. Yet the themes of the novel, the ideas of serving and faith, extend well beyond “Catholic fiction” and even “religious fiction.”

Intrigued by the poems, I found quite a few books on Amazon about Southwell and his poetry. The one I ended up with was simply titled Works of Robert Southwell. It includes seven of his best-known poems, including “The Burning Babe.” He’s a poet well worth knowing and reading about; his is the story of maintaining faith in a perilous place at a perilous time.

A Classic for the 20th and 21st Centuries: The Gulag Archipelago

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Fifty years ago, I was a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas Enterprise. In December of 1973, we began receiving a series of alerts from the New York Times News Service, saying the Times had acquired a manuscript of worldwide importance and would be publishing soon. The manuscript was The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

Solzhenitsyn was living in the Soviet Union at the time. The manuscript had been circulating in samizdat there, and apparently the KGB had gotten its hands on a copy or a portion of a copy. A considerable amount had already been smuggled out to the West. To protect his friends and family, Solzhenitsyn gave the green light to publishing the work in the West, and it would soon be published in French, its first published language, and an English translation was underway.

A few weeks later, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the KGB and taken to the Lubyanka, the infamous prison in Moscow. The world held its breath to see what would happen, but Western governments were urging the Soviets not to do anything stupid. In February, he was officially expelled and put on a plane for Germany. His family, including his wife, their three young sons, and her mother, followed some weeks later. He would not return to Russia for 20 years.

Under the glare of international attention, the Russians did nothing stupid, however much they may have wanted to.

I had started reading Solzhenitsyn’s novels in high school – Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I read August 1914 while a junior in college. Shortly after Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and expulsion, we moved from Beaumont to Houston, where I was working for Shell Oil in its downtown headquarters. When I heard that the English language edition would soon be published, I walked a few blocks to the downtown Cokesbury Bookstore and ordered a copy. When the call came that it had arrived, I think I might have been the first to rush to the shop and buy mine.

I stopped reading whatever it was at the time and started immediately on The Gulag Archipelago. Having read his novels of camp life (for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature), I was surprised to discover that the novels themselves were based on real stories of real people, including Solzhenitsyn himself. He had done something no Russian or Soviet author had ever dared to do: he’d told the real stories of the zeks, or prisoners. And his real point, and the one for which the Soviets couldn’t abide, was that the Gulag had started not under Stalin but under the saint of Communism, Lenin. Stalin had not corrupted communism; he had built upon what Lenin had already been putting in place.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago (Volume 1) is 50 years old this year. It remains a classic of the 20th century; in many ways, it tells the story of the 20th century, particularly in Russia. Professor Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University calls it “a masterpiece of our time.” And it is still a contemporary story, with a warning. Governments as they grow and become more powerful have an itching desire to control, and they will use any means at hand to establish that control. I can already see the impulse in our own government, with the desire to control what is communicated on social media, for example, and a press that’s become extremely compliant to elitist thinking. 

Yes, Solzhenitsyn was a man of his time, and The Gulag Archipelago was a book for its time. It’s also a book for our time.

“The Storied Life” by Jared Wilson

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I’ve had many conversations with Christian writers about the idea of “calling,” that writing is a calling from God. Most will agree; some even will identify a specific time when they experienced the calling. 

I can’t. Writing has been a part of my life since I can remember. I was raised in a culturally Christian home, but I had been writing for almost 12 years by the time I became a Christian. I wrote my first story when I was 10; I don’t remember much about it except it was a mystery, involved a group of kids, and featured a grandfather clock that opened to a secret passage and a cave.

Jared Wilson has had a far different experience. In The Storied Life: Christian Writing as Art and Worship, he develops the idea of writing as a specific calling (a kind of ministry, for those unfamiliar with “calling”) and goes so far as the suggest a theology of writing. He tells a good story, and he’s created a solid case for writing as one of those endeavors God would see as good.

The Storied Life is divided into two parts. First, Wilson provides reflections on story. What makes writing good? Does writing have its own liturgy? (Wilson would say yes.) And then he explores writing as a spiritual act.

Part Two is how Wilson explains cultivating the spiritual life. This moves the narrative into areas more familiar to all writers – finding your voice, excellence, the promise and perils of platform, and writing as a calling. Yet even here, he retains a Christian perspective. Writing can be a vocation or an avocation (for me, it’s been both). He explains there isn’t just one kind of calling to writing; the calling can be a call to grow, to emphasize, to recognize limitations, and even to worship.

Wilson suggests that, like the characters we create in fiction, we, too, are characters in God’s story. And just like our fictional characters seem to have a mind of their own (which I’ve experienced many times in fiction), so, too, do we. The calling to be characters in God’s story, and the call to write, is “a call to be his,” he says.

Jared Wilson

Wilson is an assistant professor of Pastoral Ministry and author in residence at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. He also serves as staff pastor for preaching and director of the Pastoral Training Center at Liberty Baptist Church, also in Kansas City. He received a B.A. degree in English from Middle Tennessee State University and an M.A. degree in ministry service at Spurgeon College. He’s currently enrolled in the D.Min. degree program at Midwestern. 

The Storied Life is written for Christian writers. Others can read it and benefit, but it is aimed squarely at those of us among the Christian community who are called to write. Wilson offers his own experience, encouragement, and deep insights into the writing process. Christian writers need a book precisely like this one.

Top photograph by Etienne Girardet via Unsplash. Used with permission.