Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

short story

The Mud Queen

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When I agreed to co-teach a Sunday School class of second graders, I had no idea of what I was going to experience. And it wasn’t the kids.

It was my co-teacher, Carl.

He recruited me. We both had our youngest children – boys – in second grade. The Sunday School class needed a teacher. We’d met in an adult Sunday School class, but we weren’t particularly close friends. 

“Look,” Carl said, “they need a teacher for the second grade. I can entertain the kids, but you’re the teacher. We have to make this fun. We can show the kids that Sunday School is fun. And so is learning about God.”

To continue reading, please see my story at Cultivating Oaks Press. This is the summer edition, and the theme is merriment.

Photograph by Matt Seymour via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Echoes of Hemingway: An Anthology”

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In early May, I was reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Coincidentally, a writer named Harvey Stanbrough announced a writing contest for short stories inspired by any work of Hemingway’s. 

This must be a sign, I thought; I’m right in the thick of what’s known as the great love story of World War I. 

I wrote a story and submitted it. It wasn’t one of the stories chosen as top 3 (with a little prize money) but it was chosen to be in the e-book anthology, “Echoes of Hemingway.” 

The title of my story is “Sonnets to Psalms,” and it’s about what happens to the main character Frederick Henry after the war ends. The title comes from a sonnet written in 1590 by George Peal, which some literary critics believe inspired Hemingway to write his World War I story. The sonnet’s title: “A Farewell to Arms.”

Then it became a matter of fitting pieces together – the town of Montreux, Switzerland, where Frederick and Catherine lived; an abbey not too far away; and some basic research.

The anthology contains 20 stories by 13 writers (a few overachievers wrote more than one story), and it has some very fine short stories covering a surprising number of genres. My own story would be categorized as general or historical fiction.

You can find more information about the anthology at https://payhip.com/b/3ibI5, and it will be available on the various book sites July 12. It can be pre-ordered at Amazon or at Books2Read. And it’s available right now at Harvey’s web site.

I’d never done this with a short story before, and it was actually a lot of fun.

The Stamp of Generosity

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The spring issue of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and I have a short story, entitled “The Stamp of Generosity,” included with all the other articles that explore the topic of generosity. My story is based on an event from my own experience, when I was about 12 or 13 years old. A stamp store really did exist in that location, but it was known under another name. 

You can read my story here.

You can access the entire issue here.

Photograph by Krista Bennett via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Ushers” by Joe Hill

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Martin Lorensen is a young man who’s been extremely lucky, or he’s extremely guilty. Twice he’s narrowly escaped death – a train wreck and a school shooting. Both times, his escape was a last-minute thing – a panic attack kept him from boarding the train and an upset stomach stopped him from entering school and returning home. In the train wreck case, he warned a mother and daughter not to board.

The FBI is interested. Very interested. To the two agents interviewing Martin, it seems like there’s a strong possibility that Martin knows what’s going to happen before it does. And perhaps he’s not the lucky bystander. Perhaps he’s the cause.

Joe Hill

Ushers is a short story by best-selling writer Joe Hill, and it’s one creepy story. You’re sucked into what may or may not be a tale of a serial killer. The story is structured in two parts – an “informal” interview of Lorensen by the agents and then a meeting in a bar between the suspect and one of the agents, where all is made clear.

Hill is the author of The Fireman, Heart-Shaped Box, and Strange Weather, among many others. Several of his stories have been adapted for movies; his Locke & Key stories became a popular series on Netflix. He’s also written several graphic novels, and he has a not terribly active blog at Hill’s House (the title possibly being a nod to Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House).

Ushers begins as a police procedural type of story and ends as something entirely different. And Hill nicely builds the tension right to the breaking point.

A Language Lesson

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I have a short story in the fall edition of Cultivating Oaks Press. The edition focuses on the theme of “fortitude,” and my story is entitled “A Language Lesson.” This is how it begins:

As the train arrived at Heidelberg Station, Sam McClure smiled to remember the first time he’d arrived here. In 1906, he’d just turned 16 and was preparing to spend his high school junior year with a family in Germany. He’d traveled by himself across the Atlantic on the H.M.S. Heimat for Hamburg, sent a telegram to Heidelberg to alert them of his arrival, and taken the train to his sponsoring family. His textbook-fluent German had been more than useful from the time he boarded the German liner in New York Harbor.

The Mittelstein family had been waiting: Dr. Aaron Mittelstein, chemistry professor at the university; his wife Ada; and their three children, Wolfgang, 18, Paul, 16, and Annaliese, 13. Wolfie was preparing to leave for university in Berlin. Paul, known as Mitti for being the middle child, was almost exactly Sam’s age and would share the same classes in Gymnasium, the German school he would attend. Annaliese would be attending Gymnasium with them.

Sam hadn’t known then what the Mittelsteins thought, but for him it had been love at first sight. That love, and what would become his deep friendship with Mitti, sustained him through a huge bout of homesickness and a steep cultural learning curve. He’d come to love this family so deeply that he returned four years later and stayed with them for a year abroad at the university.

To continue reading, please see my post at Cultivating Oaks Press. You can read all of the contributions here.

Two Short Stories by Louisa May Alcott

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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.