Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Dancing Priest

The Grandson Loved It

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Authors sometimes get letters that completely warm their hearts.

A reader sent this to me via email, letting me know what his grandson thought of Dancing Priest, the first in the Dancing Priest novels. 

“My grandson is in 8th grade in a Catholic elementary school.  His class was given an assignment to read an adult level book (as opposed to a children’s book) during the current quarter.  He asked me for some ideas.

Dancing Priest reader response

“I looked over my home library of novels that I have accumulated over the years.  Unfortunately, many of them aren’t appropriate for his age due to excessive violence or offensive language.  So, I gathered three Grisham books and your Dancing Priest and gave them to him while encouraging him to read your book.  

“Early this morning at 12:50 am he sent me this text: ‘It’s 12:50 and I have just finished reading Dancing Priest.  That book was one of my favorite books that I have ever read.  Thank you for lending it to me.’  His comment made me smile and I responded that he’d really like the next book, A Light Shining, just as much.  He said he really wants to read it even though it wouldn’t be required at that point.  I plan to lend it to him once I get it back from our neighbor who’s reading it now.”

I can picture Michael Kent right now – with a big grin on his face.

Top photograph by Joel Overbeck via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Character of Michael in the Dancing Priest Novels

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After Dancing Priest was published in late 2011, I received an email from a reader in Seattle. He liked the book. He liked the book so much that he said it should be required reading for young men under the age of 20. 

He said this, he said, because the character of Michael was all about standing firm and true in the face of adversity. “There’s a nobility in the character of Michael Kent that we should all aspire to.” That character is demonstrated in large things, like an Olympic tragedy, and in smaller things, like taking in a motherless eight-year-old boy.

By the second Novel, A Light Shining, Michael Kent has become Michael Kent-Hughes, husband of Sarah. He wears his wealth lightly. Finding his family in Italy, instead of doing the legal thing, he does the right thing. And he faces the great personal adversity of any in the five novels, when he nearly dies. In fact, for a significant section of the book, Michael is unconscious, and the focus shifts to Sarah. 

In Dancing King, with Britain in physical shambles, Michael could have walked away from family responsibilities and the royal invitation that’s fallen to him. But he doesn’t take the easy way out. Months before the coronation, he learns that he’s facing serious opposition and a pile of dirty tricks. He and the staff he’s selected to work with him meet each one head one, turning potential adversity into advantage. 

Michael, as head of the Church of England, finds himself engulfed in a church mega-scandal in Dancing Prophet. The church scandal begins to erupt at the same time the Greater London Council reaches a political impasse, budgets expire, and the transport and sanitation workers go one strike. Michael is all of 30 years old in the story, but his sense of responsibility carries him forward. 

As the last of the series, Dancing Prince, begins, Michael is 35. He’s effectively the nation’s czar, parliamentary government having collapsed some years earlier. His sense of responsibility is still carrying him forward, but there are cracks, especially in his family life. He and Sarah have grown apart; trouble is brewing in their marriage. The flashpoint becomes their youngest child, Thomas, and one incident will haunt the family for the next 20 years. 

This is a somewhat different Michael than the theology student and cycling enthusiast in the first story. He knows that the pressures of his position are allowing his family to slip through his fingers. He’s physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. People are talking about Sarah avoiding evening activities at the palace. And one person, their youngest child, will bear the brunt of the estrangement.

Much of the younger man remains, but this is a man who’s been shaped, and sometimes mauled, by the job. In the previous stories, he was something of an idealized character. In the last one, he becomes more real. 

Top photograph by Benjamin Rascoe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Meet a Dancing Novels Reader

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He won’t remember, but I first met Randy Mayfield in the gymnasium of Central Christian School in the early 1990s, located across the street from Central Presbyterian Church, where Randy was on staff. I was a part of a non-denominational program called the Salt & Light Fellowship, and Randy was one of the movers behind it. With his guitar, he led us in songs, including one called “Lord, Don’t Send Me to Africa.” And I thought, who knew Presbyterians could be funny?

Ten years or so later, I was attending Central Presbyterian (still my church now), and Randy was still on staff, leading one of the church’s most successful outreaches – missions. The program involved a host of countries, an outreach to the St. Louis County Jail and a prison outside of St. Louis, schools and universities, a seminary, and more. 

Randy believed in hands-on ministry, and he maintained a travel schedule that was exhausting just to read: Honduras, India, Philippines, Iraq, Ukraine, Russia, France, Italy, Hungary, Albania, Israel, Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, Kenya, Sweden, Albania, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, South Africa, Poland, Thailand, Tanzania, and a few places that can’t be mentioned because it would jeopardize people’s safety. He also led numerous vision trips for church members, for them to see first-hand what was happening. 

Randy Mayfield performing

At some point, Randy heard about Dancing Priest. He bought the Kindle version and read it while flying to some far-flung mission field (I think it was Iraq). He came a fan of the series, and the five novels about Michael Kent-Hughes have traveled all over the globe. He talked the series up with other church members, and others began to read it, creating still more fans.

Authors know what that does. Yes, it sells some books. But it also touches an author’s heart. 

Randy has now published his own book, One Life, and I’ve reviewed it on my Faith, Fiction, Friends blog. It’s part autobiography and part stories about some remarkable things that have happened with church missions. He’s also a husband to Sharon, a father to Amanda and Justin, and a grandfather to a little girl named Afton who owns him and soon to be a grandfather again to Afton’s brother. 

Randy does concerts; he can sing rock, country, and just about anything else, including Nessun Dorma. He’s had a band, called the All-Star Band, that’s performed in St. Louis and all over the world (my tenuous claim to fame with it is that my next-door neighbor is the band’s saxophonist). He’s performed at the Grand Ole Opry, and he’s opened concerts for Stephen Curtis Chapman, Jaci Valesquez, and the Imperials. 

He’s been a chaplain to the St. Louis Cardinals. He’s come under military gunfire while on mission trips. He’s met with presidents and paupers, and if you know Randy, you know he treats them exactly the same – with a handshake, a smile, a laugh, a hug, and a song.

Randy’s retiring as Missions & Outreach pastor at Central Presbyterian; he gave an official farewell sermon this past Sunday (it won’t be his last sermon; Randy doesn’t retire from ministry). But it’s gratifying and encouraging to know him, and it’s been encouraging to know how much he’s liked the stories of Michael Kent-Hughes. 

Top photograph by Paola Chaaya via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Tale of Two Paintings

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I’ve talked about how an exhibition at the Tate Modern plays a critical role in Dancing Prince. In turn, two paintings in the exhibition play a critical role in the narrative of the novel. 

Jason Kent-Hughes, the adopted son of Michael and Sarah, is working as an assistant curator at the Tate Modern. Sarah describes him as their “San Francisco street child with a gift for painting and art administration.” After graduating from school in London, he did a year of military and then enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of University College London. After receiving his degree, he joined the Tate Modern.

As he explains to Michael, he gave a talk at the museum about the paintings done by Sarah that are in the Tate’s collection. It’s part of a regular weekly feature, he says, in which a staff member speaks about their choice of topic – something they’re working on, something in the collection, an upcoming exhibition, a research project, and so on. 

The lectures are open to the public and generally draw anywhere from 30 to 300 people, apart from the staff attending. Jason’s talk on Sarah’s paintings brings 2,000, forcing the museum to move the event to Power Hall (the Tate Modern’s huge interior space). It’s also videotaped and posted for sale on the museum’s web site, resulting in 30,000 orders during the first day. The museum suspects there’s a huge financial and artistic potential here, and it asks Jason to curate a major exhibition of Sarah’s work. Assembling the exhibition becomes his full-time job for the next 18 months.

Jason uses a journal of works kept by Sarah, starting with the paintings she did for her senior university project (described in Dancing Priest). Through some fairly intense work, he’s able to track 99 of her 101 listed paintings. The two that he can’t locate are the last ones, and they’re described in the journal with rather puzzling letters. What he knows is that these two paintings are likely important, because Sarah had been evolving her style and clearly reaching for something more.

Jim Kent-Hughes, the other adopted son of Michael and Sarah, accidentally comes across painting #100. It is their youngest child, Tommy, who holds the key to painting #101. All of Sarah’s paintings, and even her studio, become flashpoints in the relationship between Michael and Tommy. But those two paintings will be the most serious tension points. 

I’d like to say I understood exactly what I was doing when I developed the story of the two paintings. Perhaps I did, subconsciously. But it was only after the book was published, and I had reread it (twice), that I realized the story of the two paintings are the bookends for the entire series of five novels. Sarah’s paintings and art play an important role in the first book, Dancing Priest. And they play a critical role in the final book, Dancing Prince.

The story of the two paintings also speaks to something else – the meaning of art in our lives. We can look at a painting say “I like it” or “I don’t like it” or “They call that art? I could have painted that.” Or we can be so struck by a painting that words fail us. The first time that happened to me was in London, and (surprise) it was at the Tate Modern. It was a portrait of Marguerite Kelsey by Meredith Frampton. That one painting brought me back three times to the museum during a 2012 visit, and I still don’t know if I can adequately describe the impression it made on me. Another annual exhibition in London that we’ve seen all five times we’ve visited is the BP Portrait Awards, which has a similar effect on me. 

In Dancing Prince, those last two paintings will affect virtually every character who sees them in a very similar way that those paintings in London affected me. For Michael and Tommy, the impact will be far greater. 

Top photograph by Abbie Bernet, and middle photograph by Zalfa Imani, via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Dancing Priest: What You Learn at a Group Book Discussion

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In February, a woman at church asked me if I would be interested in talking with her book discussion club about Dancing Priest. She had read it, and the three published after it, and said she had recommended it to the club. The question became, how fast could I say yes?

Then came coronavirus, and everything went into hibernation. But Dancing Priest hadn’t been forgotten, and once our county emerged from lockdown (or sort of emerged), the discussion was back on. Last week, I sat for two hours with the club’s members, about eight or nine people in all, and talked about Dancing Priest, its successor novels in the series, and the new and final novel in the series, Dancing Prince. 

Virus note: Yes, we wore masks and sat in a socially-distanced-approved manner.

The members are people who love to read. They’ve been meeting for several years and have become good friends. They take their books seriously, and they read a broad range of fiction and non-fiction. (Their next book is Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.) Two of the people in the group had read all five of the Dancing Priest novels. Two had read the first two, Dancing Priest and In A Light Shining. The rest had read only the first one.

Any author loves to talk about his or her books. The best part of a discussion like this one is to hear directly from readers, particularly readers who love books. They ask questions, they make observations, and they offer deep insights and comments. They take what you’ve written very seriously. 

Here are a few of the questions and comments.

Where did the idea of Michael Kent come from? A song, “Luna Rossa” by Mario Frangoulis. I heard it on an airplane flight to San Francisco, and the song evoked the image in my mind of a priest dancing on a beach (it’s an older song, popular in the 1950s, sung in Italian; I have no idea what it’s actually about). Music infuses all five of the books. The first two were written while I listened rather incessantly to two Frangoulis CDs, “Sometimes I Dream” and “Follow Your Heart.” The last three owe a debt to two instrumental albums by Michael W. Smith, “Freedom,” and “Glory.”

How many times have you been to Edinburgh? Since a good part of Dancing Priest and the others have a significant Edinburgh component, it’s a good question. The answer is – I have never been to Scotland or its capital city. But I have spent so much time on the internet doing research, and especially visual research, and I feel live a virtual resident. The home where Michael is raised outside Edinburgh is based on a real house, An Calla, just transported from an island on the western side of Scotland to the eastern side of the country. I used real buildings at the University of Edinburgh, real coffeeshops, and real theater venues. 

In the last three novels, the scenes in London were all based on first-person visits – my own. During trips in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017 to London and England, I took a ton of photographs. I stood at the front of Southwark Cathedral and imagined what it would be like to preach a sermon there. I’ve done the tour at Buckingham Palace twice. I’ve stayed at a hotel on Buckingham Gate. I know the bus lines and the tube lines, and how to get from Hyde Park to Kings Cross Station. We had considered going to Edinburgh in 2020, but the virus disposed of that idea. Perhaps next year.

Who was your intended reading audience for Dancing Priest? My original idea was to write a romance that men could read. Yes, men. And, for the first two books, readers were about evenly divided between men and women. The reality is, though, that it’s mostly women who read fiction, including both Christian and general fiction. Interestingly, most of the emails and social media messages about the books have come from men. 

Have you thought about turning Dancing Priest into a movie script? Yes, actually, I have, but I have zero experience in scriptwriting. In fact, it was the publisher who first brought the subject up, back in 2011. He even sent the book to a film production friend in California, who read it and said, “It’s a novel. I thought you were sending me a script.” The question comes from how visual the book seems to be. Even when I reread it, it seems like I’m watching a movie. But that’s how the book was born – in my imagination. I wrote the manuscript in my head for four years before the first landed on the computer screen, and in that sense, it was a visual story. This has been noted by some of the very first readers almost a decade ago. 

How Sarah Hughes comes to faith is exactly how it happens for a lot of people. In Dancing Priest, Sarah and Michael have a major conflict over faith; it’s the central conflict of the story. When she returns to Los Angeles, her experience at UCLA is lifted almost exactly from my own experience at LSU. For the book club members, this deeply resonated; some have had similar experiences or have family members with similar experiences. One called it “completely realistic.” 

Photograph by You X Ventures via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Story of the Novella ‘Island’

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“Did you write this?”

My publisher asked me that question after reading the manuscript for the novella Island. The reasons he asked was straightforward. It is completely unlike the writing style for the five novels that constitute the Dancing Priest series. 

The novella is closely connected to but not dependent upon Dancing Prince, the fifth and final novel in the series just published last week. The choices were to publish it as a separate work or include it as a bonus with the novel. Ultimately, we included it as a bonus with the novel. (The photograph above is the one that would have been used for the cover if we’d decided to make it a separate work.)

Early readers of Dancing Prince have discovered that the novel itself is about the same length as its four predecessors. But the novella adds another 20,000 words.

Island is story that a character in Dancing Prince, Erica Larsson, begins to write to explain – at least in fiction – how a tomb on the island of Broughby in the Orkneys might have come to be. The story doesn’t play a critical role in the main narrative, but it does stand as something of an extension of it.

The novella tells the story of Aoife and Ulf, two people living at the end of the 9th century. Aoife was born on the island, the daughter of a Celtic fisherman and the Dane woman he marries. Ulf is the third son of the king of Trondelag, a city and region in what is now Norway. Island is even given an introduction by Farley MacNeill, a character in the book who is the professor and academic mentor for Thomas Kent-Hughes. Thomas, or Tommy, is the fourth natural child and second son of Michal and Sarah Kent-Hughes and leads the archaeological dig that finds the tomb on the island of Broughby. 

MacNeill writes that he finds the story compelling historically, and he notes as almost an aside that he finds that the author has told something of her own story. 

The idea for the novella predates Dancing Prince itself. In 2014, I was fascinated by an article in Discover Britain magazine entitled “All roads lead Norse: Mysteries of the Orkney Islands.” It described the Neolithic and Norse relics and sites that are common in these islands off the northern coast of Scotland. The story is available online but is behind the magazine’s paywall. A similar story, “Discover the ancient island history of Orkney,” is available on the magazine’s web site and includes a photo of St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, which has a brief mention in Dancing Prince. 

In 2015, when my wife and I visited Britain, I made a point of visiting the Lewis Chessmen exhibition at the British Museum. These game pieces are among a hoard of similar pieces found buried on the Isle of Lewis in the Orkneys in the 19th century. I even picked up a few replicas, and this crowd sits on the shelf above my computer screen. They watched me write the manuscripts for Dancing King, Dancing Prophet, and Dancing Prince. The original chessmen are a couple of hundred years older than the period for Island, but they have been a good reminder of where the story came from.

The names and events of Island are based on a lot of online research into Viking / Norse and Celtic names and customs, as well as a lot of reading of Viking and Scottish history. I won’t claim that I got everything right; in fact, the story in the novella and the main novel turns on a Viking expedition about a century earlier than what history tells us. 

As the publisher discovered, the writing style is very different from the five novels. For one thing, it’s written entirely in the present tense; most novels, including mine, are usually written in the past tense. It’s also what’s called historical fiction; the five novels are closer to something I might call contemporary alternative history. Plain fiction works, too.

But that’s where the novella came from.