Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

writing

Dancing Prince: The Exhibition at the Tate Modern

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An exhibition at the Tate Modern plays a critical role in the story of Dancing Prince. 

Readers first met Jason Kent-Hughes Dancing Priest as Jason Bannon. Then 16, he was one of the “warehouse children” living near St. Anselm’s Church in San Francisco. He’s drawn to Michael Kent’s outreach program, a coffeehouse with live music. In A Light Shining, Jason is taken in by Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes and eventually adopted. Almost accidentally, Michael and Sarah discover the boy has a gift for painting. 

By the time of Dancing Prince, Jason is in his early 30s, married and with two sons of his own. He’s an assistant curator at the Tate Modern. As Sarah recognizes in the story, their San Francisco street child has become an artist with a gift for art administration. As part of a regular staff activity, he gives a talk on the two paintings by Sarah owned by the museum. The interest is so great that the museum has to move the venue from a lecture room to Power Hall, the large interior space that helps define the Tate Modern’s architecture (see the top photograph). 

The interest is so intense, in fact, that the museum asks Jason to curate an exhibition of Sarah’s paintings for 18 months out. It’s an ambitious timetable; Jason not only has to find the paintings and their owners and negotiate contracts to borrow them, he also has to plan the exhibition itself, arrange for an exhibition catalog, and arrange for corporate sponsors. And then there the negotiations with three other museums which will host the exhibition after it closes at the Tate Modern. Eighteen months is an almost impossible timetable, but Jason somehow pulls it off.

I first visited the Tate Modern in 2012, during a vacation trip to England. Our hotel was on the South Bank, near Westminster Bridge, and I discovered I could walk to the museum by taking a more-or-less straight-line route through back streets. The alternative was to follow the south embankment along the Thames, past the London Eye, the Southbank Centre, the National Theatre, and eventually to the Tate, next door to the Globe Theatre. Because the of the curve of the river, the back-street route was much shorter, and took me through a neighborhood called The Cut, the Old Vic Theatre, the New Vic Theatre, various and sundry business areas, and then the rear of the museum property (you still have to enter from the front entrance on the river). 

The museum is something of an architectural wonder. A one-time power generation station, the structure has an interesting history. Closed as a power station, it was renovated and reopened as the Tate Modern in 2000. It is the major repository for the modern and contemporary art works in the Tate’s collection. 

In 2012, I visited three times; my wife likes to sleep in and I kept getting drawn back to the building and its collection. It also provided some great walking exercise. The exhibition that was on when I visited was “Edvard Munch and the Modern Eye,” and it was excellent. In 2015, I also viewed the Agnes Martin exhibition, which I liked, but it did inspire a comment about wallpaper by Jim Kent-Hughes in Dancing Prince. The museum expanded with a large, adjacent building, and I was able to see it in 2017. 

In the novel, dissatisfied with the rather perfunctory articles written by the experts, Jason eventually writes the catalog himself, an almost first-person account of his own knowledge of and experience with his adopted mother’s artwork. The exhibition also leads to the discovery of two unknown paintings by Sarah, a critical development in the relationship between Michael Kent-Hughes and his youngest child Thomas, and a fleeting first meeting between Michael and Mary Penniman, who assumes a large role later in the book.

Top photograph by Dil via Unsplash. Photograph of Tate Modern expansion by Jay Mullings also via Unsplash, Both used with permission.

Dancing Prince: The Heart of a Child

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The first four Dancing Priest novels were about Michael Kent-Hughes. In the fifth, Dancing Prince, the character who is stage center is Michael’s youngest child, Thomas, or Tommy, as he’s called by friends and family. He’s named for Michael childhood, college, and adult friend, Thomas MacFarland. 

As the novel begins, Tommy is four years old. His mother, Sarah Kent-Hughes, is painting in her studio when she discovers that the boy has slipped inside to watch. The unwritten rule of the family is that no one watches Sarah when she’s painting – not Michael, not the other children, not friends, no one. And yet there’s Tommy, quietly watching her and doing his own little drawings.

At first perturbed, Sarah looks at what Tommy’s been drawing, and she realizes that the boy might have artistic talent. She encourages him and continues to allow him in her studio while she paints. Until the day Michael comes home unexpectedly and finds them both painting in the studio. What happens next will frame the next two decades of Tommy’s life and the life of his father. It also frames the novel.

The novel shows Tommy at 4, 6, 13, 15, 19, and his early 20s. In his relationship with Michael, there is a recurring pattern, leading to the estrangement between the two. David Hughes, Sarah’s twin brother, becomes the significant male influence in Tommy’s life. Because Tommy so strongly resembles his uncle; people often think he looks more like David’s child than Michael’s. David also becomes the chief counsel to Michael on the subject of Tommy, for it is to David that Michael turns at times of crisis. 

What the story required was a boy and eventually a young man who somehow retain s the heart of a child. Tommy is known as the most devout of Michael and Sarah’s children. He’s also the most perceptive and intuitive. As his older brother Hank points out, from a young age Tommy always seems to know what is going to happen next, and he always seems to understand what is happening better than his older siblings.

Tommy was not the easiest character to develop. The section when he is 13 was actually the first part of the Tommy sections of the novel that was written. The scene of Michael accompanying Tommy and a friend to the Imperial War Museum is actually the oldest written part of the novel, having been originally drafted in 2006 and 2007 as part of a very different story about Michael and his family.

Tommy wasn’t supposed to be the main character of this novel. As the drafting got underway, Tommy kept poking his head into the story. It was almost as if I couldn’t keep him out or under control. It was a year ago that I finally threw up my hands and surrendered, completely revising the draft into something that is closer to what was finally published. Tommy turned out to be very content with being the center of attention.

Top photograph by Japheth Mast via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Do Your Characters Talk to You?

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The news report made quite a splash. Researchers at Durham University in the U.K. teamed up with The Guardiannewspaper and the Edinburgh Book Festival to do a study of authors. And the study reported that two-thirds of authors hear their characters speak while they’re writing. 

My first thought was, this is news?

The study was more of a survey. Some 181 authors who participated in the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2014 and 2018 were asked an array of questions. The biggest surprise, at least to the researchers, was that 63 percent of the authors hear their characters speak, and 61 percent say their characters can act independently. 

I’ve been listening to my characters speak since I’ve been writing. I’ve experienced characters getting a mind of their own and doing both the expected and the unexpected. Other writers I’ve talked with say they’ve experienced the same thing. Of course, characters speak. Of course, authors hear them speak. Of course, characters get themselves totally out of character and screw things up, at least temporarily. This is part of what makes them real to the author and the reader.

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

Fiction and Faith: The Importance of Stories

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(This is the text of my remarks at the Artists of Central Concert, Central Presbyterian Church, St. Louis, Mo., on Feb. 29, 2020.)

I’m one of those fortunate people who can tell you exactly when and where I became a Christian. It was Jan. 26, 1973, about 8:30 p.m. I was standing in a hallway of the basement of the main lecture building at Louisiana State University, when I prayed to receive Christ. 

Many Christians don’t have those specifics. My wife, for example, was raised in a Christian home, and she can’t remember when she wasn’t a believer. She remembers her baptism in a local river, not the least because she saw a snake swim by. 

Many writers of faith can tell you exactly when they felt called by God to write. Others can’t. I was a writer before I was a Christian. I wrote my first story, a mystery, when I was 10. I wrote James Bond satires at 14. At 15, I was rewriting fairy tales into contemporary settings. At 17, I was writing poetry – really bad poetry. In college, I wrote a one-act play for an exam in Chinese history. I majored in journalism, spending a lot of time writing for the campus newspaper. After college, I made my living by writing, especially corporate speechwriting. Writing has always been a part of my life and career.

The school in Erfurt where the shooting occurred

In 2002, I was part of a short-term mission team to Eastern Europe, a three-person communications crew – a trip manager, a video guy, and me, the writer. Our job: interview and film missionaries to help publicize the overall mission effort in the area and create videos and articles that the missionaries could use with support-raising. It was a packed schedule, and it was immediately upended by an event in Erfurt, Germany – a school shooting where 13 people were killed.

We were diverted to Erfurt to help support a young pastor, who’d been ministering non-stop to the grieving for four days. What happened during the interview with him is a long story – but I can summarize it by saying that he, the video guy, and I were overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit. Even now it’s hard to describe the experience.

Five months later, I was flying to San Francisco for a conference. Reading while listening to one of the music programs, I heard a Greek tenor who sang in five languages. He sang one song in Italian, called “Red Moon.” I was clueless as to what he was singing about, but an image formed in my mind, of a priest dancing barefoot on a beach. When I reached downtown San Francisco, I found a bookstore and bought the CD.

The CD I bought in San Francisco

That night in my head, I began imagining a story about that priest. Over time, he changed from Catholic to Anglican and then to a theology student. Italy changed to a university in Edinburgh. He was English but raised by a middle-class Scot veterinarian. He was a cyclist. And he fell in love with an American exchange student. His name was Michael Kent. His story would occupy my head for the next 18 years. Only this past week, while putting these thoughts together, did I realize that the inspiration for Michael came from that young pastor in Erfurt.

For three years, the story existed only in my head, getting longer and more elaborate. No one knew, including my wife. What finally moved it to the computer screen was something out of left field – Hurricane Katrina, and what it took to extricate my mother from New Orleans. I came out on the other side of that intense experience knowing I had to write the story down or I’d lose it.

I started writing, and I didn’t stop until more than 250,000 words later, something akin to the length of War and Peace. I split the manuscript into three pieces, and focused on the first part, writing and rewriting. I went to a writer’s conference, where an editor and an agent called my story “good.” The agent also said I needed to include werewolves, because they were hot at the moment with publishers. I assembled and mailed book proposals, minus the werewolves. The manuscript was rejected, many times, although a few rejections were encouraging.

In early 2010, a small specialty publisher said he’d heard about my manuscript and he’d like to read it. I said no; it wasn’t ready. He gently persisted for six months. I finally relented. Within days, he said he wanted to publish it. And I said no. Another six months passed before I agreed. We might call this “The Case of the Reluctant Author.”

Dancing Priest was born in December of 2011. This story of Michael Kent is about a young man who believes he understands his future as a priest, because it’s what he’s been called to do. Then he’s thrust, or shoved, into the center of dramatic, life-changing events, not unlike that pastor in Erfurt. That’s how I understood the story.

Then I heard from readers. 

A pastor of a megachurch in Kentucky sent an email, telling me he’d ordered copies of Dancing Priest for his staff and his Elder Board. He called it “the best description of lifestyle evangelism” he’d ever seen. My first thought was, “What on earth is he talking about?” Until I’d read the book again and found it.

An executive with Microsoft sent a letter, saying that the book should be required reading for teenaged boys, because it described the nobility of behaving like men and fighting for good.

Two readers, both men who said they didn’t read fiction, told me they had to stop reading the book several times to control their tears. 

A woman wrote that the book was so well-rendered that it could qualify as alternate history. 

A sequel, A Light Shining, followed in December of 2012. A non-fiction book, Poetry at Work, came in 2013. Exhaustion from three books in three years, while holding down a full-time job, plus the final illness and death of my mother, meant that five years would pass before the third novel, Dancing King, was published. Dancing Prophet was published in 2018. The fifth and final story in the series, Dancing Prince, will be published in about three months.

The reactions speak to more than my Michael Kent stories. The reading of fiction has been declining for the past 30 to 40 years. There are reasons for that, but it’s a trend that impoverishes all of us. Speechwriting taught me that stories connect people to each other. I could spend weeks writing logical arguments and marshaling reams of evidence for a speech, and what the audience invariably remembered was the stories. And the jokes.  If nothing else, that kept me humble.

But we’re constructed for stories. We’re built to be part of something bigger than ourselves, because God made us precisely to be a part of a bigger story. And when we read or hear a good story, something speaks to our hearts, and tells us that God is in control, He knows what He’s doing, and we’re a part of that.

Top photograph by Štefan Štefančík via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Five Things You Can Do After the Writing Storm

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The manuscript sits with the publisher. A fifth novel, it’s the last of a series. The story arc that began with listening to an airplane music program in 2002 is coming to an end some 18 years later.

You’ve lived with the characters for almost two decades. Sometimes it feels like you know the characters better than your family and friends. You know their history, their quirks, and their strengths and weaknesses. You know their pasts. You know their stories because you’ve written their stories, and you’ve written the ongoing story they’re part of. You know how an agnostic, what today might be called a “none,” became a believer. You know when the hero was ridiculed and disparaged. You know when characters had nothing but faith and courage to go on. 

Now the story is ending. The story you had to tell, that dominated your waking hours and many of your sleeping hours, that story that often drove you crazy, is now finished. The characters who seemed so real to you and your readers are now turning out their lights.

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

Photograph by Radu Florin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Research a Contemporary Novel?

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The four, soon to be five, novels in the Dancing Priest series are set in the near future, at least far enough away from the actual present to avoid any notion that the characters are based on real people. But they’re essentially contemporary fiction, falling into the space between general fiction and Christian fiction.

Why would contemporary novels require extensive research? Lots of reasons.

You’re writing about a country or culture not your own. You’re writing about people who do things you’ve never experienced. You write about a painter when you’re not one. You’re writing about an institution you’ve never been part of. You’ve put your characters into a geography, even if ever so briefly, you’ve never visited. 

Many people – historians and novelists alike – write about the American Civil War, or World Wars I and II, but were never part of it. Some write mysteries set a generation before they were born. Some write about peoples and cultures that aren’t their own (an often-dangerous thing to do these days).

When Dancing Priest first started in my head, I didn’t know a lot of things about what I was writing about. But other people did, and other people had written about them, published books about them, even created online courses about them. All these sources were readily available.

Here’s a partial list of the reading I did, the web sites I visited, and the courses I took to create the Dancing Priestseries. It does not include an untold number British novels, play scripts, and poetry collections, but they, too, were part of the research effort.

History and Biography

Crown, Orb & Sceptre: True Stories of English Coronations – David Hillam

King John – Marc Morris.

Queen Victoria’s Buckingham Palace – Amanda Foreman and Lucy Peter.

The King’s Speech – Mark Logan and Peter Conradi.

Victoria & Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour.

A Brief History of the Bodleian Library – Mary Clapinson.

Behind the Throne: A Domestic History of the British Royal Household – Adrian Tinniswood.

The History of England series: Foundation, Tudors, Rebellion, Revolution, and Dominion – Peter Ackroyd.

London: The Biography – Peter Ackroyd.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World – Arthur Herman.

London: The Illustrated History – Cathy Ross and John Clark.

Windsor Castle – John Martin Robinson.

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 – Andrew Roberts.

God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible – Adam Nicholson.

Tyndale – David Teems.

The Life and Prayers of St. Patrick.

St. Martin-in-the-Fields – Malcolm Johnson.

Current Affairs

Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope – Justin Welby.

Reinventing the Idea of a Christian Society – R.R. Reno.

This is London – Ben Judah.

Painting

J.M.W. Turner – Michael Bockemuhl.

J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free – David Brown.

Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and His Circle – Rachel Dickson.

Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I.

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life – T.J. Clark and Anne Wagner.

Anselm Kiefer – Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Travel Books

Various London, England, and Britain guidebooks by Rick Steeves, Eyewitness Travel, Knopf Map Guides, National Geographic Traveler, and American Express.

On Glasgow and Edinburgh – Robert Crawford.

London Walks, London Stories – David Tucker.

London – A View from the Streets – Anna Maude.

Anglotopia’s Dictionary of British English.

Night Walks – Charles Dickens.

A Guide to Dickens’ London – Daniel Tyler.

Walking Dickens’ London – Lee Jackson.

Souvenir Guides

Buckingham Palace.

The Royal Line of Succession.

Imperial War Museum Guidebook

Wallace Collection. 

The British Library.

Christ Church, Oxford – A Brief History.

Discover Kensington Palace.

Westminster Cathedral Guidebook.

Canterbury Cathedral Guidebook.

Charles Dickens Museum.

Tate Modern and Tate Britain guidebooks.

A Guide to the National Gallery.

National Portrait Gallery Guidebook.

Online Courses

Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life – University of Nottingham.

England in the Time of Richard III – University of Leicester.

Robert Burns: Poems, Songs, and Legacy – University of Glasgow.

A History of Royal Fashion – University of Glasgow.

Introduction to the U.K. Parliament: People, Processes, and Public Participation – Houses of Parliament.

Wordsworth: Poetry, People, and Place – Lancaster University.

World War I Heroism: Through Art and Film – University of Leeds.

The Tudors – University of Roehamption / London.

Blogs

Spitalfields Life.

A London Inheritance.

London Wlogger. 

English Historical Fiction Authors.

Books and research specifically related to Dancing Prince, last in the series

Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms – Claire Breay and Joanna Story.

Mercia – Annie Whitehead.

Ivory Vikings – Nancy Marie Brown.

The Lewis Chessmen – British Museum.

The Lewis Chessmen – Caldwell, Hall, & Wilkinson.

The World of the Vikings.

Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England – Eleanor Parker.

Online course: Hadrian’s Wall – Life on the Roman Frontier – Newcastle University.

Archaeology: From Dig to Lab and Beyond – University of Reading.

Top photo by Clay Banks via Unsplash. Used with permission.