Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

About Those 10 Books

By Leave a Comment

There was a thing last week, I think somewhere on Substack, about “10 books that changed my life.” I tried to find the specific article again, but Google produced an abundance of listings about 10 books, 37 books, 100 books, 20 books, 23 books, 77 books, 25 books, 40 books, well, you get the picture.

I asked myself the question. Could I identify 10 books that had changed my life?

My answer was no, I couldn’t, at least, not in the sense of some transformational change from what I was before reading the book and what I was after reading the book. But I could identify 10 that had influenced me, in some cases profoundly.

I first read four of the books in high school: Great Expectations and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and Don Quixote by Cervantes. The two by Dickens were both class assignments (9th and 12thgrades, respectively). I’d read Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 11th grade American literature, and I bought Four Quartets to read on my own (I even remember where I bought it — the long-gone Dolphin Book Shop at Lakeside Shopping Center in suburban New Orleans). 

Don Quixote was also a class assignment, but we had the option of reading the abridged or unabridged version. Two of 30 in our all-boy English class decided to bite the bullet and read the unabridged version – me and Jesse Stephenson. Our teacher said it was the kind of book you should read three times in your life – when you were young, middle-aged, and old. I read it was I was 17; I read it again when I was 35, and I discovered it was not the book I remembered it to be. I’ll have to wait a few years to read it when I get old. 

Version 1.0.0

I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings four times, and each time I’ve been blown away by the story. My first reading was in high school – the pirated Ballantine editions. After college, I read the official family-approved versions. Some 25 years later, I read the whole saga again, in anticipation of the Peter Jackson movies. And then, a few years ago, I reread the entire series.

The 1970s were the period that shaped my reading the rest of my life. I read the crime novels Dashiell Hammett, like The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest, and loved his writing style. A friend at work introduced me to Flannery O’Connor, and I read everything she wrote. In high school in the 1960s, I read the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, and Cancer Ward, and I was more than ready for the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974 (ordered from Cokesbury Bookstore, downtown Houston, Texas).  Reading John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was like going back to my roots; no one before or since captured the New Orleans accent as precisely as he did. October Light, a novel by John Gardner, remains one of my favorite works of fiction.

I’d previously read The Screwtape Letters and Surprised by Joy, but what really opened my mind to C.S. Lewis was They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, published in 1980 and edited by Water Hooper. The letters formed their own kind of biography, from the time the two were boyhood friends to near Lewis’s death in 1963.

In 1986, in the middle of my master’s program at Washington University, I took a seminar in the Latin American novel. The assigned readings for me were one wow moment after another. I was so blown away by Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World that I did my seminar project on his Conversation in the Cathedral, not the easiest work to read, and discovered the intricate underlying structure. A later course in the history of the early Christian church found me reading Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown, which is still one of the best, if not the best, biographies I’ve ever read.

Two recent influential books I’ve read fundamentally changed my understanding of the Civil War. I read them as research for a historical novel project (more on that later), but together they stripped away any notion of romance about the conflict. Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil Wars Final Campaign in North Carolina (2022) by Ernest Dollar describes the barbarism of the last spasm of the war, one in which neither side covered itself in glory. Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (2023) by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant estimates that about 10 percent of the soldiers on both sides were under the age of 15.

That’s my list of influential books. As important as they’ve been to me, there’s nothing like writing a book that will change your life. That’s a story for another day.

Save Your Editorial Cuts and Deleted Scenes

By Leave a Comment

I had several pieces of a novel-in-progress that I’d set aside from the manuscript. Two fell outside the overall timeline; I’d cut several others because, while they were interesting, detracted from the main flow of the story. One was most of an entire scene; one involved a character than I’d cut; and one simply had way too much detail for the short scene that it was.

But I’d kept them all, saved in a file on my computer as well as in my own head.

I was also working as a contributing editor for an online magazine, published several times a year and each issue centered on a theme. The editor was seeking articles, poems, and stories for the Christmas issue, and I remembered one of my cut pieces from the novel-in-progress.

It was a Christmas story, but it needed a bit of work. I pulled it from its Word file on my computer and began to read, edit, revise, and write. It needed work; reading it now, I’d still do more revising. But I submitted it, and it was accepted and duly published. 

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

Photograph by Alexander Grey via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Two Short Stories by Louisa May Alcott

By 5 Comments

I’ve been reading stories and novels by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) to understand what the popular culture of the 1860s,1870s, and 1880s was like. I could call it research for my historical work-in-progress, and it is that, but it’s also become something more.

Alcott first gained literary notice during the Civil War. In 1863, she published Hospital Sketches, a collection of stories about a volunteer’s experiences in a Washington, D.C., convalescent hospital for wounded Union soldiers. As serious as the subject was, Alcott also treated it with sympathetic humor, and she did it the right way by making herself the object of the jokes and comical situations. 

She continued to write and publish short stories (the family needed her income). And then, in 1868 and 1869, came the two-part publication of Little Women, and international fame for Miss Alcott. (I’ve told the story here of how I came to read Little Women, not exactly voluntarily.) When she did a European tour in 1870, she was surprised to discover that she was famous in England as she was in America. Little Women was a sensation.

It’s also set during the Civil War, and the wounding of the March patriarch in battle becomes one of the significant scenes of the novel. Several of her short stories also referred to the war, set either during or shortly afterward.

A Country Christmas is one of those stories. A young woman visiting relatives gets the idea to invite two city friends to spend “a real country Christmas” with them. It’s not exactly a “city mouse and country mouse” story, but the two rather blasé city friends experience the values of family, community, hard work, and true friendship. It’s a charming story, definitely of its period, and it shows the author using a light touch to extol country values.

Kate’s Choice was published sometime later and most likely after Alcott’s European tour. A teenaged English heiress is sent to America after the deaths of her parents. Her mother had been the only daughter among several brothers in a farm family. All of the children had done well financially, but their lives had taken them away from their mother. 

According to the terms of her father’s trust, Kate is to visit each of her uncles’ families and decide which one to live with. All of them are interested in the girl – she’s charming, pretty, and extremely wealthy. But it’s only when she visits her grandmother that she makes her choice, and the lives of everyone in the family will change. It’s a sweet story and again very much of its time. 

What do these stories tell you about Alcott? She was a woman and author of her time, but she was also something more. Her female characters are strong ones; no damsels in distress are found here. Her stories are straightforward accounts and (fortunately) lack the element of “breathless prose.” G.K. Chesterton would say that she anticipated the School of Realism by about 30 years. 

Alcott also knew her audience – girls and young women. She tapped into an awareness that was growing that would eventually lead to women’s suffrage and equal rights. Her stories may be about well-to-do and middle-class girls at home, but her heroines are independent, with dreams and aspirations of their own. Likely much like Alcott herself.

Related:

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott.

Photograph: Louisa May Alcott about 1870.

Sometimes Fiction Imitates Life

By 2 Comments

You read a book like A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child.

My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law. 

My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.

Each summer, from the time I was 8 to about 13, I would fly to Shreveport to spend a week with my grandmother. My grandfather had died when I was nine months old, so I never knew him. My grandmother lived across the street from my father’s oldest sister (and the family’s firstborn) and her husband. Aunt Rubye and Uncle Revis were responsible for some of my most vivid memories of Shreveport.

Both were “characters,” Aunt Rubye only slightly more staid than Uncle Revis. She was famous for her looks of disapproval and her biscuits. He wore a cowboy hat and drove a gigantic Dodge that was a faded pink and only slightly smaller than an ocean liner. My grandmother usually ate her lunch and dinner with them, which meant I did, too, when I visited. My visits usually coincided with harvesting the acre of vegetable gardens they had behind their small frame house. I learned to dig up potatoes, pick corn (and when to know it was ready), pick green peans (and help shell them; no body ate for free). 

The Lennon Sisters

Saturday evenings were devoted to watching the Lawrence Welk Show on television. I wasn’t a particular fan, but the best part was the running commentary on the individual acts from Uncle Revis. My favorite part was when the Lennon Sisters performed. You would hear my uncle begin to mutter until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He’s shout “Ignorant!” at the television set. “They’re ignorant1” My grandmother would smile, my Aunt Rubye would roll her eyes, and I’d go off into gales of laughter. I suspect that his commentary was for my benefit and amusement.

He’d let me tag along with him when he ran errands. He always seemed to have a pipe in his mouth, even when he wasn’t smoking it. We’d go tooling all over Shreveport in that big Dodge. I’d go with my grandmother when she had errands to run as well. She drove a black 1940 Ford that always, always was breaking down, usually in a part of town you didn’t want to break down in. I met the most interesting people because of that car’s problems.

Uncle Revis hated one thing even more than the Lennon Sisters. 

Cats. 

When I was about 10, I was sitting with him on the back steps after dinner. For whatever reason, we had no garden duties that might. It was one of those beautiful Southern summer evenings, still light. He was smoking his pipe, and he was talking about his favorite writers, of which James Michener was No. 1 on the list. Suddenly, he grabbed a rifle from behind us (which I didn’t know he had at hand) and fired off a shot at the fence between his yard and the neighbor’s house next door. A cat went flying in the air. 

The next-door neighbor loved cats, with at least a dozen and often more roaming around. If they stayed at the neighbor’s house, Uncle Revis would have been fine. But, as all of them were outdoor cats, they roamed the outdoors. And they seemed to know that Uncle Revis didn’t like them. All the more reason to visit.

Aunt Rubye came flying on to the back porch, shouting at my uncle. This might have been Shreveport in the 1960s, but firing a firearm inside the city limits was something only the police could do. But that wasn’t Aunt Rubye’s issue. 

What she was upset about was the reaction from the neighbors. As it turned out, they were their son’s in-laws. And they might, she said, breathing fire, think it was an insult aimed at them.

“Well,” Uncle Revis said, “they’d have to be pretty smart to figure that out. That won’t be a problem.”

Uncle Jack and Burley Coulter up in Port William, Kentucky would be proud. Yes, sometimes fiction does indeed imitate life.

Top photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth in Jena, Louisiana, about 1923.

It’s Take Your Poet to Work Day

By Leave a Comment

Today is Take Your Poet to Work Day at Tweetspeak Poetry, and the site has a raft of resources to help you do that. The celebration of poetry and work has been going strong for more than a decade, and I’ve been an enthusiastic participant from the get-go. I even wrote a small book, Poetry at Work, on finding poetry in all aspects of work.

When I still had an office (or a cubicle), I’d pick a poet and bring him or her to work on the designated day in July. Typically, I’d bring my longstanding favorite poet, T.S. Eliot.

Ten years ago, I was preparing to give notice of my intended retirement from work, which I did in September of 2014. I officially retired in May of 2015. It was early, but it was time. Enough said.

I did some freelance work for a time and was even called back to the company for a three-month assignment in 2018. But “work,” if you define it as something like an eight-hour-a-day job, was over in 2015. 

But I still work, mostly with my own writing. And I still bring my poet to work.

For the last three to four years, that poet has been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (see lower right-hand corner of photo). Longfellow has accompanied me on a writing project, serving as guide, resource, break from the pace, and sometimes even reality check. I read his works in three different editions – an 1898 “complete poems” edition by Houghton Mifflin, a 1944 edition published by Illustrated Modern Library, and a 2000 edition of his poems published by Library of America. I also used Nicholas Basbanes biography, Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2020) as a resource.

As I read, researched, and wrote, Longfellow was along for the ride, so much so that, while he didn’t become a character in my story, he did become a presence and an influence on one of the principal characters. If the character recited The Courtship of Miles Standish or Poems on Slavery, I’d stand and read them aloud as well.

I was not only taking Longfellow to work, I was also putting Longfellow to work and working alongside him. I’ll have some news about the final result in some weeks, but Mr. Longfellow may be getting his due.

You don’t have to write a novel to take your poet to work. You can read a poem aloud to yourself or others. You can stick a poem on your bulletin board. You can memorize poem or recite one while you’re doing garden work. Over the years, some have gotten rather elaborate in their efforts, including doing poetry readings at work.

What I discovered was that, even simply reading a poem in the office to myself, my understanding changed because the place provided a different context. 

For resources, tips, and background on poets (including ones you can color like Longfellow), head on over to Tweetspeak Poetry and take your poet to work.

Top photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in old age.

Remembering the Journey

By Leave a Comment

A Brookhaven Short Story

When he looked back on that time, he could see the first days were the easiest, if also the most frightening. And more dangerous days were to follow.

Like hundreds and thousands of others, he walked home from the war, home from defeat and surrender. Glory was long gone, erased in places with names like The Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Petersburg, and Appomattox.

The road he took began in Virginia. It ended more than 900 miles later in Mississippi, and home. The camaraderie he’d experienced with others walking home disappeared three days into the journey, when he discovered he’d been left behind. Alone, he walked the often-deserted roads, asking the occasional fellow traveler the direction and the next town.

The woods he passed through were often thick, untouched since forever, he thought, dense forests of pine, oak, and elm. When he could, he traveled through trails in the woods that followed the roads. He liked the silence of the trees and undergrowth; he also liked the safety they afforded, unlike the open road.

He also liked the shift from woods to farmers’ fields, most of which were untouched because the men were gone to war. Or gone from the war.

He’d gone about a hundred miles, he reckoned, based on what other travelers told him, when the walk changed to a ride. He’d gotten a feisty stallion and a wagon drawn by two draught horses. But there had been a tradeoff. With the wagon and the horses came a freed slave woman and her two children and a dead planter’s teenaged daughter and her young cousin. He’d probably never understand why he agreed to see them southward, but he had no regrets.

By necessity, homeward progress simultaneously quickened and slowed. The horses made for faster travel; the women and children did not. He’d quickly learned that their needs were always more complicated than his own and required frequent stops. Progress had been further slowed by rain, bandits, and measles.

He’d just turned 15, a war veteran with two years’ experience. His traveling companions made for conversation, but the responsibility for the five lives terrified him. When he felt most afraid, he’d focus on the road. The woman and the girl had no inkling of his fear; they thought him moody and melancholic.

He led them through rain and flood. He protected them from the evil roaming the roads, evil that was all too common, sometimes predators preying on people just like themselves and sometimes desperate people doing desperate things. They had all seen death and destruction, often so bad that even the children stopped talking. 

But he’d seen them all safely home.

He thought he knew the reasons for their success, the reasons they’d survived. He’d trusted the good Lord to watch over them all. And he trusted his determination to do this thing, to see the journey through.

Related:

“Christmas Oranges,” a short story at Cultivating Oaks Press.

“Encounter in the Woods,” a short story.

Top photograph by Lukasz Szmigiel via Unsplash. Used with permission.