Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

short stories

The Value of Writing Short Stories

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In the seven months since my last novel Brookhaven was published, I’ve been focused on talking about it, writing about it, publicizing it, sending out copies, and all the usual things you do to promote your book. I haven’t done much writing of anything else or anything new. An idea for a new novel has been percolating in my mind, but nothing has seen the light of day.

Yet the desire to write is there; it seems like it’s always there. I’ve had to stifle it a bit to keep focused on marketing Brookhaven. 

I was able to scratch the writing itch by what resulted from a coincidence.

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

“Spare Us Yet: And Other Stories” by Lucas Smith

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Faith meets reality. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out as you expect it to, or as you think it should.

Growing up in a culture that’s saturated Catholic (like New Orleans was), even we non-Catholics were aware of the impact and reach of the church. Ash Wednesday felt weird when you were one of the few in public school with a clean forehead. You lined up for your polio vaccine (sugar cube style) at the local Catholic school. Most of the weddings and funerals you attended were Catholic, and you typically found more food at funerals than wedding receptions. Almost all your neighborhood friends were Catholic. You took you SAT tests at the Catholic high school. Catholic was familiar; Catholic was normal.

Perhaps this is why I felt completely at home with Spare Us Yet, the collection of short stories by Lucas Smith. To call them Catholic stories would be an act of misdirection. Certainly, they all have the sense of faith, and a few even concerns priests, religious holidays, and observances. But they are not stories of faith as taught in seminary or theology textbooks as they are stories of faith lived out in day-to-day life.

A young priest prepares for Shrove Tuesday. An American tries to give away an Eisenhower dollar in Mexico, discovering that even friends may not be what they seem. People wrestle with getting the COVID vaccine. An expert marksman volunteers to be part of a firing squad chosen by the condemned felon as his method of execution. An omen of death in the form of a washerwoman appears in three visions. In a dystopian future, a man gets in trouble with villagers for teaching children about Jesus, repeating stories as he remembers them (this may be my favorite in the collection, although several are vying for that). A young boy prepares for a swim meet by having the “heat numbers” written on his arm. Priests try to manager worship during lockdown. A mother and her son take a trip to the Outback. A grandson visits his ailing grandparents, who are trying to cover for each other’s memory loss. A letter to the editor serves as an obituary. And more.

Lucas Smith

Every story in Spare Us Yet is moving; each is worth reading at least twice. The characters are people struggling to make sense of life, struggling to understand what it means to live one’s faith. You know them, you’ve met people like them, and you recognize yourself in them.

Smith is a writer and poet who is from Orange County, California and Australia, where he currently lives. His writing has been published in such literary journals as Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Quadrant, Island, Southerly, and The Rialto. He’s the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bonfire Books in Melbourne, and in 2023 served as writer-in-residence at Wiseblood Books, which led to the writing and publication of Shape Us Yet. He writes The Sprawl of Quality at Substack.

A word about Wiseblood Books. Likely named for Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, it publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I’m most familiar with the poetry, having read some 18 of their collections over the past several years. I’ve also read several of their fiction works. Their authors include Sally Thomas, Kary Carl, Dana Gioia, James Matthew Wilson, Glenn Arbery, Marly Youmans, and many authors. The novel Hold Fast, by Spencer K.M. Brown, was one of my favorite books in all of 2024. They work with literary fiction, serious literary fiction, but it’s also readable literary fiction. I can’t recommend them enough.

Related:

Lucas Smith reads from his story “Compline.”

An Australian to English Glossary for Spare Us Yet – Luch Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

“The Collected Breece D’J Pancake”

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Up to a point, the similarities between John Kennedy Toole and Breece D’J Pancake are uncanny.

Toole (1937-1969) wrote two novels. The first was The Neon Bible, which was published a decade after the second novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Both received repeated rejections from publishers. Toole would eventually commit suicide in 1969. His mother, Thelma, was determined to see A Confederacy of Dunces published, and she pestered publishers and writers for years, finally wearing down Walker Percy who read it and was blown away. It took Percy three years to find a publisher, and it was LSU Press. A Confederacy of Dunces was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

Pancake (an unusual but real last name) wrote 12 short stories and a few fragments of others. Born in 1952 in West Virginia, he managed to graduate from Marshall University. and taught at two military academies. He enrolled in the creative program at the University of Virginia, where he sensed a “class” consciousness between those who held only a B.A. degree and those who had more advanced degrees. But Pancake was the one selling stories to The Atlantic, which made a typographic error when they printed his stories, changing his middle initials “D.J.” to D’J; he kept it. 

He killed himself in 1974 at age 26. His 12 stories represented his entire literary output, but his mother Helen was determined to see them published in book form, which they were in 1983. In 2020, the Library of America republished the 12 stories, along with fragments of other stories and his letters as The Collected Breece D’J Pancake. The introduction is by novelist and short story writer Jayne Anne Phillips, who would go on to win the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Night Watch. The collection also includes the 1983 introduction by James Alan McPherson, who was a director of the creative writing program at Virginia. 

The stories are absolute gems, and even the fragments are excellent. For all of the stories, Pancake drew upon his knowledge of and upbringing in West Virginia. These are the stories of the people left behind America’s growth and prosperity. A farmer trying to keep a dying farm alive. A coal miner who somehow still has work, drinks, and shoots pool. A man who encounters an underage girl working as a prostitute. The death of two teenagers that’s meant to look accidental. A snowplow driver who gives a lift to a hitchhiker. Men who fight for money while onlookers bet. A man on parole out for revenge. And more.

Breece D’J Pancake

The stories aren’t minimalist, which was a quite popular writing movement in the 1970s and early 1980s), but they are written sparingly, with no word superfluous or wasted. Pancake had an ear for authentic conversation; you know you are reading words that sounded exactly like people of the time and place spoke. 

Both Toole and Pancake died way too young. Both left an impressive if limited literary estate. Both were so good one has to wonder what else they might have written had they lived. But both left us with something important and valuable. And both are well worth reading.

Related:

“Time and Again” – short story by Breece D’J Pancake at The Short Story Project.

Top photograph: New River Gorge National Park, West Virginia, by Ryan Arnst via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Blackbird & Other Stories” by Sally Thomas 

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A little girl tries to lead a normal life – dance revues, school – while the shadow of her mother’s illness seems everywhere. If she focuses on dancing “The Blackbird,” she’ll be fine.

A couple try to make sense of their grown son’s suicide, even if you can never really make sense of that kind of tragedy. Or you’re traveling with your grandparents, trying to escape, or deal with, a family breakup. Or a spouse dies, that “little cough” having turned into something fatal. Or your youngest child is born with a skin condition that essentially makes him allergic to sunlight, and you have to re-orient everything you know and do. Or you take refuge from your spouse’s beach house, the one in your family for three generations, the one containing memories of every childhood vacation. 

These are a few of the stories in The Blackbird & Other Stories, the new collection by Sally Thomas. Comprised of eight stories and one novella, Thomas explores life in contemporary America, where marriages flounder and fail, children die, someone you know and love is going to be on the autism spectrum, and dementia and its annihilation of memory always threatens. Underlying all the stories is the subject of faith, or lack of it, never overtly there but only a subtle presence, almost a reminder of something lost. 

But being lost doesn’t mean unimportant. In one of the stories, “Not Less Than Everything,” faith has an important part to play.

Three of the stories and the novella (“The Happy Place”) are about members of the same family, especially the mother Caroline and the daughter Amelia. You read how their lives unfold, and you ache, all the while sensing that there is something here to hold on to while life throws everything at you. These are people you know; they may even be your own family.

Sally Thomas

Thomas is a poet and fiction writer. She serves as the thesis advisor for the M.F. A. program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. She’s published two poetry chapbooks and collection Motherland, with a second collection being published this year. Thomas served as co-editor (with Micah Mattix) of the anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. Her writing and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Plough Quarterly, North American Anglican, Dappled Things, First Things, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Public Discourse, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. With Joseph Bottum, Thomas is the co-editor of Poems Ancient and Modern, a poetry newsletter on Substack.

The Blackbird & Other Stories is a collection that asks, how do we make our way in a broken, fallen world? Or conversely, how can we make our way without faith?

Related:

Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas.

Top photograph by Nick Fewings via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Save Your Editorial Cuts and Deleted Scenes

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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.