When I first launched the website for The Fiddler’s Gun one of the things I wanted to do was to find a way to flesh out the world and the story for people even though they hadn’t read the book yet. What I came up with is a feature I call “Letters to Peter“. The idea springs from a portion of the book in which the heroine, Fin Button, is away from home and has the opportunity to write letters to her childhood friend, Peter LaMee.
So for the past couple of months I’ve been imagining what those letters might have said. It’s been a ton of fun for me to be able to write about my characters in a new voice and in a new format. In addition to letters written to Peter I’ve been keeping it all fresh by creating letters and documents from other people and places that illuminate other aspects of the story. A mystery of sorts has slowly been revealed and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.
If you haven’t yet stumbled onto any of Fin’s letters to Peter, go check them out at The Fiddler’s Gun. I hope you enjoy reading them half as much as I enjoy writing them.
Update: Due to overwhelming demand we’ve officially sold out! If you missed your chance at owning one, never fear, we plan to have more in the future. Thanks for supporting Katie Coston and thanks for being a reader.
Sorry for not announcing the winner to last week’s “Find the Moral” contest any sooner, but the awards committee has been engaged in a spirited debate (not all of it civil, I’m sorry to report). It’s been tough to choose a winner from so many outstanding entries. 
Carolyn Arends is one of my favorite writers (not to mention one of my favorite people). Here’s a snippet of a great piece she wrote for Christianity Today this month:
We’ve already built an 
I’ve been working on a story for my “Education of a Grade-School Pharisee” series but it has me stumped. I’m quite sure it means something: I just can’t figure out what. I thought this might be a good chance to put the collective wisdom of the Rabbit Room to good use. Dear reader, I invite you to write a last paragraph for the story below—the paragraph in which the narrator steps outside the narrative and tells what it all means. Please enter your entry as a comment to this post. I haven’t yet decided what prize the winner will receive, but I’m quite sure it will be small and inexpensive (or perhaps an 8×10 glossy of Russ Ramsey, if I can convince him to part with one). The real prize will be the glory of winning a Rabbit Room contest. Now for the story:
We are so used to running from temptation because we are so often unbelieving. We don’t believe in the power of Christ in us, so we cut, run, and hide.
Ah, the joy of a nice new cotton t-shirt. The thrill of a fashionable grey color, the perfect complement to jeans, shorts, slacks, dungarees, britches, khakis, cargos, jams, capris, and knickers. The deep-in-your-gut satisfaction that you’re not just wearing a shirt, or supporting a musician you like (love, even?), but that you’re declaring solidarity in the battle against crime and rascality. You’re locking arms with fellow sojourners. You’re girding up your loins. You’re saying to the forces of evil, “I like Andrew Peterson and the Captains Courageous. What of it?”
When I was a boy, an old man told me a story that I’ve always loved in spite of the fact that it was almost certainly a lie. He said he was walking across a long railroad trestle one dark, dark night when he heard a train coming. He had come far enough that he knew he couldn’t turn around and outrun the train to the far end of the trestle. He considered running toward the train in hopes of beating it to the near end, but without knowing how far he was from solid ground, that was awfully risky. He decided his best bet was to crawl over the edge of the trestle and hang there until the train passed by. 
God’s opportunities are always coming our way. Weekly, daily, hourly, we are being handed situations by which God wants to manifest Himself through us.
Once again, I’m a little late with a birthday post. Maurice Sendak turned 81 on June 10. Most popular for the book Where the Wild Things Are, he once explained why he put scary monsters in kids’ lit:
I was digging through my backpack a few weeks ago when I found a letter someone had evidently handed me after a concert (this happens sometimes, my apologies to previous post-concert letter givers). It was addressed to “The Proprietor”. I was intrigued. Here was someone familiar with the workings of the Rabbit Room. It was written by Janna Barber, and she mentioned her interest in writing the occasional piece for the Rabbit Room. I took her up on the offer and here it is, her first post, about an encounter with the legendary Bill Mallonee of Vigilantes of Love. I hope you enjoy it. 
I’ve sometimes wondered if many of the books I read are not just piling up more perceptions in my dusty mind cluttered by too many options. Parenting books are a good example. I’ve got a shelf full, and I’ve learned a lot from them - I think. But in applying those principles I’ve often fallen short. There are certain scenarios with my children that too often have tripped me up, and occasionally my will seems frozen in place as some old reel-to-reel tape appears on my tongue and spits out its ratta-tat-tat song and dance. A revelation I had awhile back about deep seated fear for my children, and its subsequent healing, went a lot further and deeper into me than any parenting book ever could. 
Kicking off their 2009 concert series earlier this year, the Nashville Symphony performed Gustav Mahler’s Sixth symphony (and being the Mahler freak that I am, I attended all three performances). Mahler wrote nine symphonies in all - and started a tenth before he died - and after hearing them, it becomes difficult to try to put his genius into words. Of course, one could say that one reason art exists at all, the reason we have symphonies and paintings and jazz and dance, is to express that which we cannot put into words. So maybe it is better to say the same thing about the creators - the sub-creators, as C.S. Lewis called them - and not try to reduce their work to the written word. Still, at times, we search for ways to describe to others the effect art has on us, to explain, to ourselves as much as to our friends, why we were so moved, why we found tears in our eyes or felt our deepest secrets were laid out in the open or saw laid out before us the way we should go. 
Adam, in his original state, was not a sword but just an untempered hunk of metal. He had to be hammered out in the fire and on the anvil of his wrong choices, like Moses, like Abraham, like Paul.
I’m currently making my way through Frederick Buechner’s masterwork Telling the Truth. The subheading is “The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale.” Upon a friend’s recommendation, I found the book online for cheap and set a course once received.
Heaven knows why it has taken me so long to write a little something about this album, the newest EP from friend and soul sister, Julie Lee. Julie and I met several years ago at a friend’s house and found immediate ease in conversation and a unique connection; sparks of light and magic hung lightly in the air around our collision. It was one of those instances where you know for sure that the God of the Universe meant for you to meet this one particular human being out of the millions that He created. I know that sounds a little dramatic, but I like drama (the good kind only, please) and am grateful when I find it happening in my little life.
Browsing the shelves of wicked-cool used bookstore here in Nashville, McKay Books, I happened upon Kathleen Norris’s (The Cloister Walk, Dakota, Amazing Grace) latest, Acedia & Me. Though I had no idea she had a new book out, the cheap sticker price for a primo first edition (Note: you will recall from a previous post that I have a more than slight affinity for used bookstores and, especially, first editions) was an easy decision. The title itself was mildly intriguing since I was vaguely familiar with the word, “acedia”, but of which I knew very little. The subtitle, “A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life”, though hardly an enticing, round-em-up, gather-em-in slogan, is true to Ms. Norris’ midwestern style, neither flamboyant nor melodramatic.
I’ve been hearing about this children’s Bible called The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones for a year or so now, first from Ben Shive, then from a smattering of others whose opinions I respect on such matters. One night last week Jamie and I were putting our sweet Skye to bed (she’s 6 now), and we were talking to her about Christmas. I’d been gearing up to leave for tour and with the first Sunday of Advent fast approaching we wanted to find out what she thought. Jamie asked her who was born on Christmas morning, and Skye answered, “Um…Noah?”
Russ Bremeier at Christianity Today:
Is there a qualitative difference between learning a song from your Grandfather and downloading a song from iTunes, from getting a recipe online and pulling out the yellowing paper of an old, family recipe? Ken Myers answers in the affirmative, channeling C.S. Lewis when he discusses the need for thoughtful Christians to consider not only content in what we appreciate in art, but also how we receive it.
The other night my wife and I had the opportunity to see Charlie Peacock in concert. The Art*Music*Justice tour, featuring Sarah Groves, Derek Webb, Sandra McCracken, Brandon Heath and Charlie, had an off day in Kansas City. So Charlie set up a house show with just him and his piano in the upstairs art gallery of the world’s most perfect Christian bookstore, Signs of Life, in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. (No kidding. Not a Scripture mint to be found, but huge sections on art, history, classics and local writers. There’s one wall devoted to the puritans, and another to Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor and the like. Dangerous.)
Mystery. Intrigue. Drugs, dark secrets, the decay of the will, and the transforming power of God’s love sown by a single man to a harvest of redemption.
My favorite book I’ve read this year was initially only a curiosity piece I perused while killing time in a Barnes & Noble. I had recently bought Unchristian – a book that offers an insightful look at how outsiders of the faith view the church – by David Kinnaman & Gabe Lyons, but decided I needed a mental break and started looking for something a little lighter. I’m not inclined to reach for humor books, but the cover of a book featuring a man dressed in Old Testament garb and looking earnestly heavenward with the ten commandments in one hand and a Starbucks cup in the other proved irresistible. I picked it up, thumbed through the pages and found myself laughing out loud in the aisle at Barnes & Noble – another uncharacteristic behavior for me.
The Yellow Leaves: A Miscellany, the new book from my favorite author, Frederick Buechner, was released on June 16th. I added it to my Amazon shopping cart when I first heard about it from the Proprietor and Eric Peters, after they heard Buechner read a couple excerpts during the grand opening of the Frederick Buechner Institute back in January (which also featured a concert by Michael Card, with AP opening for him).
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
The musical bumper sticker on my car during the ol’ college years would have definitely read “I’d Rather Be Listening To Acoustic Music.” Therein was my initial foray into the early careers of Square Peg artists like our own Proprietor. I found great enjoyment in the Texan college worship scene (early Crowder, Robbie Seay, Justin Barnard, anyone?). And the great unknown (acoustic) rock over which I stumbled came in the form of Jill Phillips.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Andy Gullahorn is funny, but he’s also one of the more serious lyricists I’ve come to enjoy in a while. Listening to Reinventing the Wheel, you come to understand that he is more than a good songwriter. He is a craftsman. He knows what he’s doing, where he’s going, and where he’s taking his hearers.But as I said, people say Andy Gullahorn is funny. They say that, I think, because he makes them laugh. But as for me, I’m calling it nervous laughter.
