Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

In Praise of Reading Poetry

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Like most of us, I read poetry – a lot of poetry – in high school and college English classes primarily because it was assigned. I was much more interested in fiction (Dickens!) and noir mysteries (Dashiell Hammett!) than I was in Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Elizabethans. 

My attitude changed with T.S. Eliot and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was first published in 1915, and Poetry Magazine published it only as a favor to Ezra Pound. The editors were so uncomfortable with it that they placed it at the back of the issue. But it was our first great modernist poem, and it changed poetry forever. A high school senior, I read that poem, and I was mesmerized. I went to the local bookstore and bought a small paperback edition of Four Quartets (I still have it; it’s now more than 50 years old).

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph by Thought Catalog via Unsplash. Used with permission.

An Incredible Review of “Dancing Prophet”

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Dancing Prophet

Writing a novel is a hard, lonely work. You often struggle through a story, writing and rewriting and editing and deleting whole sections because, well, they’re just bad and aren’t going the way they need to go. And when you finish writing a novel, if there ever be such a thing, you have all the worry and anxiety and disappointment of how people will respond. 

And then you read a review, like “A Prophet Raised Up for Such a Time as This” by Luke Herron Davis.  And you tell yourself this is why you write. 

Poetry at Work, Chapter 5: Poetry of the Boss

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Poetry at Work

More than 40 years, I was handed my college diploma and, two days later, showed up for work at my first official job. I didn’t realize it until much later, but I walked into the doors of my employer that day carrying an assumption. I believed that people in positions of authority – bosses – always knew what they were doing. Why else would they be bosses?

Slightly more than a decade later, my assumption continuing to take body blow after body blow, I was presented incontrovertible evidence that my assumption had been flat-out wrong.

A group of us were sitting in a conference room, waiting for the news to go public that one of the company’s top products had a problem. The first indication would be the stock market. We all knew the news was imminent, and we had prepared for it as if a tsunami was about to strike, which, metaphorically, turned out to be true. The call came, confirming that the news was public, and for a very brief moment we experienced a silence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

My Interview with Megan Willome on “Dancing Prophet”

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Dancing Prophet

Where does a story come from?

The idea for my novel Dancing Prophetcame from the my regular route for riding my bike, and the nondescript apartment complex I passed. I recently talked with writer and author Megan Willome about where the story came from, the major issue that affected it, and how it began to seem that my fictional story was writing the news. She captured exactly what I was trying to do in telling the story.

You can read the interview here. 

Poetry at Work, Chapter 1: How to Recognize a Poet

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Poetry at Work

If there is such a thing as a poetic movie, the 2016 film Paterson is perhaps the archetype. The actor Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson, who listens to the conversations of his passengers, colleagues, and friends, and to his own interior conversations, and writes poetry. He works in Paterson, New Jersey, and the man Paterson and the town Paterson eventually come to be seen as of the same essence. Person becomes place becomes person. Poetry constitutes a sizeable portion of the dialogue.

Not coincidentally, Paterson also happens to be the hometown of the modernist poet William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine there. Over a period of decades, he wrote a five-book collection entitled – what else? – Paterson (among a lot of other works). Williams was a physician, and he was a poet. Like the bus driver in the movie, Williams recognized and recorded the poetry of his daily work.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Poetry at Work Series at Literary Life

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When it came, it came as a BFO – a blinding flash of the obvious.

I was working in communications for a Fortune 500 company. A large portion of the day-to-day work was meetings. We had a team-based culture, and to our work, our teams had to meet. 

The teams, and the meetings, proliferated. We had departmental meetings. We had cross-functional meetings. We had committee and subcommittee meetings. We had telephone meetings, video meetings, and online chat session meetings. We had one-on-one meetings. We had staff meetings. We had briefing sessions, strategy discussions, and crisis planning meetings. We often had meetings to plan meeting agendas.

I often wondered if the curse placed upon Adam and his work for eating of the Tree of Knowledge possibly included meetings.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.