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As our collaborative Doxology’s final “Amen” rang out in North Wind Manor, I looked around and saw that my tears were shared by everyone else in the room. 185 voices from around the world: a harmony achieved miraculously in isolation, joining defiantly in that perpetual song from the dawn of all Creation (“praise God, from whom all blessings flow”) at the end of a long weekend, at the twilight of a very long year—I guess it just did us in. And in that “amen,” I swear that I heard God whisper, “Look at what we made together.” That is one of the most absolutely astonishing things about the Creator of the world. He involves us. Not condescendingly, just to make us feel special, and not co-dependently, as if it’s all up to us. But genuinely. He’s made us with voices because he delights in our voices, because of the over-abundance of his love, which would find no satisfaction until there was an earth, until there was sunlight, until there was language, until there was an electromagnetic spectrum, until there was. From the very beginning of Hutchmoot, we’ve never set out with an overarching theme in mind. It’s not something we want to impose on fifty speakers and hundreds of attendees. And yet, invariably, a uniting theme emerges of its own accord, clear as day and necessary as a cold drink of water. This year, this conference seemed to declare, loud and clear: “It takes all of us.” 2020 has been a year of profound loneliness and isolation. Gratitude—a rich soil that, when cared for properly, sustains abiding joy—has been threatened by despair’s erosion. The rain has kept falling. I don’t know about you, but at least for me, that was the backdrop as we headed into this Hutchmoot: Homebound weekend. I’ve lived much of this year in desperate need of something like a shot in the arm of sheer camaraderie—the sense of making something worthwhile and lasting together, something that could not be what it is without each person’s unique story. Something like…well, something like Inkmoot. Something like our collaborative Doxology. Something like eating the same storied meal as thousands of others around the world, even if not at the same table. This year, we conceded a physical table to the coronavirus. But in return, we got a figurative table with seats for more than 3,000 people. Friends, Hutchmoot: Homebound hosted ten times the amount of attendees as a normal Hutchmoot. Put another way, more guests attended Hutchmoot: Homebound than each of the eleven other Hutchmoots since 2010—combined. Let me say that again: this year’s Hutchmoot managed to make room at the table for the attendees of every other Hutchmoot ever and then some. Gathering physically is irreplaceable. We missed you dearly this year. We missed those physical tables, we missed those long discussions in the hallway, and we missed the embodied dimension of an event that is, at its heart, all about what Andrew so eloquently described Saturday night as “the thrill of incarnation.” That loss is incalculable. And—at Hutchmoot: Homebound, we were able to mourn that loss together, with you. Wendell Berry writes that “the impeded stream is the one that sings.” Well, broken as our song may be this year, it sure is beautiful and true. Which leads me back to that most astonishing invitation that we at the Rabbit Room believe God is always extending towards us—”Look at what we made together. It would have been impossible without you.” Isn’t it a joy to give sixpence back to our Father, though he’s “none the richer” for our offering? Isn’t it so crucial that we share that “chasm of need” that “binds us together in faith and vulnerability”? It is just such a binding as this which sets us homeward. And so we are deeply, unspeakably grateful that it takes all of us. We wouldn’t have it any other way. Pssst—Shigé’s poem, “Grateful,” begins at 14:45. I am grateful. Darkness pulls at the edge of my cloak, and I am grateful to stand in the smoke. I am able to laugh as I choke under scorched skies. Milky eyes leave streaks through dust tracks on my cheeks, ash rains down around me in the streets, Father, the world is on fire. I raise my hands higher in the flames, I am more than dust, and rust, and pain. I am grateful for the strain of music running through the veins of earth. For the birth of new joy in a hurricane of woes. For those who raise their horns to split the night asunder. For thorns shoved into willing brows and the thunder of hooves on battle plains. For those who bow under the weight and laugh beside me. For the dark that could not hide me, and the dawn that always rises in the east. For the feast to come, that’s starting here with table scraps of grace and the light of shattered gold on every face. Every trace of truth, it matters and it breaks into the battered body like a song. I am wrecked, and sore, and long to rest. But more, and more, and more, and best, I am grateful. —“Grateful,” Shigé Clark Every year, we invite you in the comments section to share about your experience of Hutchmoot: Homebound. What themes did you feel emerge throughout the weekend? What observations did you make as you attended sessions and Zoom discussions, sang songs and ate meals? We would love to hear from you.

Another great songwriter is setting her hands to a new project, and we have the honor of sharing one of the songs with you here, exclusively on the blog. Teressa Mahoney is making an album called Disillusions—she’s teaming up with Lori Chaffer (of Waterdeep) to do it, and what they’ve made so far is striking and true. Teressa uses songs to tell stories, and the overarching story of Disillusions is one of skin-shedding, major life change, and spiritual deconstruction: both the crisis that is often at the heart of these monumental turning points and the rebirth that emerges from the rubble. In her Kickstarter video, Teressa shares her hope that this album would take the hand of those walking through such painful moments and simply say, “You are not alone.” All the songs sound pristine, but one of them really stopped us in our tracks. It’s not a lead single of a song—it’s more of a heavy-hitting ballad. “Emma” tells the story of someone who has endured abuse in a religious environment and is left to sort through what is true and what isn’t. This song shows a depth of craft in both Teressa’s songwriting and in Lori’s production that is truly a gift, and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share it with you. Here are a few words from Teressa about its backstory: When I was a child, I had a friend who was abused. I knew something was wrong because the kids were all taken out of the home, but my parents shielded me from the specifics. Many years later, my friend wrote a memoir about her childhood. When I read it, I was struck by how very stuck she was. Her family was complicit in the abuse, and her father was a prominent member of their church, which made it nearly impossible for her to reach out to anyone there. I kept thinking about how when we grow up, we tend to think of our own experience as normal and how, within that context, sometimes wrong things can seem right. It can take a lot to wake us up and get us to question whether there might be a different way of existing. In the journey to health, the importance of questioning cannot be overstated. —Teressa Mahoney “Emma” She said, “He hurt me with his hands” And all her colors turned to gray She was too young to understand And she loved him anyway She said his guilt had never shown Singing hymns or saying grace She kept his secret like it was her own And he kept a smile on his face The smoke and the mirrors are blinding Yeah, it’s all part of the show Something inside her is fighting Is this not love? She said, “They wounded me with words” The glass was stained, the light was scattered They said, “Love forgives all hurts” As if the hurting never mattered The smoke and the mirrors are blinding Yeah, it’s all part of the show Something inside her is finding This is not love This is not, this is not not love She says, “I can’t stay here in decay Walk around mostly dead all day I see now that this was never okay And now I can see that their power Is waning by the hour I can’t stay this kind of crazy” The smoke and the mirrors are blinding But the cracks have started to show She says, “I don’t know what I do believe, But I know what I don’t”

Wherein Shigé Clark reads her poems “The Origin of Wind” and “Love Is This,” Andrew Peterson reads “The Integrated Imagination” from his book Adorning the Dark, Drew Miller shares this week’s Word of Befuddlement (“spudgeon”), and we receive a special visit from Drew of the Future. First published in Volume 1 of The Molehill, “The Integrated Imagination” follows Andrew’s journey from his self-conscious love of fantasy literature as a kid to the redemption of that love as a worthy site of engagement with the gospel. Words of Befuddlement Words of Befuddlement is a special Molehill Podcast segment inspired by games like Dictionary and Balderdash. In fact, it’s no different, except that the word in question doesn’t exist anywhere other than in the notorious mind of Pete Peterson (so don’t go looking for it in a dictionary). Each week, Drew Miller (host of The Molehill Podcast) will share a new Word of Befuddlement and ask you to send in your very own definition to drew@rabbitroom.com. The following week, he will read some of the definitions he received and reveal the “correct” definition as determined by Pete. The seventh Word of Befuddlement, shared in today’s episode, is the verb “spudgeon.” You can send in your very own definition of “spudgeon” to Drew, and he might just read it on next week’s show. And who knows? You may even guess correctly. Click here to listen to “S1 E7: The Integrated Imagination.” And click here to subscribe on Apple Podcasts and here to subscribe on Spotify. Transcripts are available for The Molehill Podcast. Click here to view them. Artwork by the inimitable Stephen Crotts Words of Befuddlement graphic by Mindy Cook Original Molehill Podcast theme music by Zach & Maggie Other music featured in this episode: “Donne’s Passage” by Ron Block

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with music industry legend Brown Bannister. Jonathan Rogers talks with music industry legend Brown Bannister about the difference between “Here I am” and “There you are” personalities, the similarities between producing a record and teaching students, and how Brown has stayed away from cynicism over his long career. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 41 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

We are so grateful for the opportunity to announce Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2: Death, Grief, and Hope by Doug McKelvey. Pre-orders are now open and shipments will begin in February 2021. Here’s what you can expect in this new volume. Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2: Death, Grief, and Hope is a book of liturgies for seasons of dying and grieving—liturgies such as “A Liturgy for the Scattering of Ashes,” “A Liturgy for the Loss of a Spouse,” or “A Liturgy for the Wake of a National Tragedy.” These are ways of reminding us that our lives are shot through with sacred purpose and eternal hopes even when—especially when—suffering and pain threaten to overwhelm us. With this new volume, you will find: A beautiful leather-bound hardcover with gilded edges Over 100 liturgies Illustrations by Ned Bustard A silk bookmark Examples of the kinds of liturgies inside include: For Caregivers in Need of Rest For the Living of Last Things For Releasing Ambitions & Embracing Christ Seeking Amendment & Reconciliation To Stir Courage in a Child Facing Death For Those Who Will Gather to Grieve For Me A Lesson We May Learn from Death For Moments When Dying Feels Unfair For the Forgiving of Unintended Wounds Click here to pre-order Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2 in the Rabbit Room Store. Below is a video from Hutchmoot: Homebound in which Joshua Luke Smith reads aloud “A Prayer of Intercession Against the Kingdom of Death” from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2.

There’s no way to make this more palatable: friction is essential to creativity. That doesn’t stop us, of course, from trying to find a hundred ways around or away from it, but in the end, if we desire to create then we must face and feel the friction. All of it. We must face our fears. We must take a vulnerable step. We must enter the unknown. Our latest episode of The Resistance features acclaimed singer-songwriter William Fitzsimmons, an artist who has learned the connective value from allowing friction to do its work. William is well known for his vulnerable, honest approach to the craft—sometimes painfully so—from his debut in 2006 to his latest album, Ready the Astronaut. William’s substantive songs are personal chronicles of heartbreak and hope, love and loss, doubt and despair. On the eve of Ready the Astronaut’s release, we sat down with William to discuss his relationship with Resistance, how it’s changed in his 20 years as a songwriter, and whether it ever gets easier to stand still. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

The only thing better than reading C. S. Lewis’s novels would be listening to Lewis himself read from his novels. It is now possible to hear Lewis reading from both Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). Additionally, Lewis fans can listen to him reading the famous opening section of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in resonant Middle English. The Marion E. Wade Center, in partnership with the Rabbit Room, is releasing all three segments of “The Lost Lewis Tapes” to the public. Excerpts of the tapes, along with in-depth analysis of the Ransom trilogy, are available for free on the Wade Center Podcast. All three segments (45 minutes in total) are now available in the Rabbit Room Store. C. S. Lewis at his desk in the Kilns. Photo taken by Bill Gresham in August 1960, during the same visit in which Bill recorded these tapes! These tracks were first recorded at Lewis’s home, the Kilns, in August 1960. After Joy Davidman Lewis passed away in July 1960, her former husband, Bill Gresham, traveled to Oxford to see his two sons, David, 16, and Douglas, 14, as well as to meet Lewis face to face. Gresham brought a portable tape recorder with him and apparently asked Lewis if he would do some readings. Lewis chose to read nearly all of Chapter 3 in Perelandra for 27 minutes, narrating in detail the scene in which Ransom first arrives on the sea-swaddled world of Venus. The next reading is nearly 9 minutes long and comes from Chapter 13, section 1, in That Hideous Strength. This is the scene in which the newly-awakened Merlin interrogates Ransom about his credentials, ultimately kneeling before the man he recognizes as the Pendragon, the one person who has the authority to carry the secrets of Logres (the spiritual dimension of Britain) into the modern world. Photo of the 5 inch, EMI reel-to-reel tape containing the recordings of Lewis’s voice by Bill Gresham. Photo taken by Wade Archivist, Laura Schmidt. The third segment features Lewis declaiming the General Prologue to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in impeccable Middle English for over 8 minutes. He may be reading the text, but then again he may be reciting. (Both Lewis and Tolkien had near-photographic memories, and Tolkien is known, on at least one occasion, to dress up in Chaucerian garb and recite “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” again in Middle English, from memory.) The original source for these audio files is a 5-inch reel-to-reel tape stored in the in the archives of the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. This tape came to the Wade Center in 1982, purchased from Bill Gresham’s widow, Renee. Dr. Lyle Dorsett, a professor of history at the University of Colorado, interviewed Renee when he was writing his concise biography of Joy Davidman Lewis, And God Came In (1983). Dr. Dorsett arranged for the Wade Center to purchase some of Bill Gresham’s papers, including this vintage audiotape. (Dr. Dorsett served as Director of the Wade Center from 1983-1990.) The files on old-school magnetic tape are a delight to listen to, though clearly homemade. Lewis has a mesmerizing voice, reading in a confident, steady tempo with just enough dramatic flair to fit each sentence of his prose. The Perelandra segment begins “This is from chapter three of Perelandra, Ransom’s arrival on the planet Venus.” Lewis reads the chapter from his classic fantasy novel with a spell-binding bass voice in what Americans think of as “the Oxford accent,” but with a few hints of an Irish brogue. The audio segments seem to have been recorded with little or no editing. Lewis occasionally coughs or clears his throat during the reading, and at one point we can hear a fly buzzing around the room. At another point, we hear heavy steps ascending creaky stairs, which Douglas Gresham guesses was Warren Lewis heading upstairs to bed. How vividly these small background noises evoke the whole world of the Kilns in Lewis’s later years. What more can we ask than to hear Lewis’s inimitable prose read in his own inimitable voice? David Downing One can’t help but wonder how Lewis chose the sections of the Ransom trilogy he decided to read on tape. In the first segment, Ransom plunges through the radiant atmosphere of Venus, feels his coffin-like spacecraft melt around him, and encounters a world of golden skies, massive waves, sweet-water seas, and floating islands. Though these early scenes contain many hints that Ransom has landed in an unspoiled planet, he himself—from a violent, fallen world—is full of doubts and anxieties. Only at the end of the chapter does Ransom begin to wonder if he has indeed found a mythical paradise that has been drawing him with cords of longing since his childhood. Lewis’s immediate audience for this impromptu reading seems to have been his 14-year-old stepson, Douglas Gresham, and Douglas’s father, Bill. Lewis may have wanted to choose a sample that was a lively, stand-alone chapter, needing little exposition. He may have also wanted to enthrall both of his listeners in the room with an imaginative immersion into Joy, the yearning for some lost paradise that is also a pleasure to feel. In the second excerpt, the conversation between Merlin and Ransom in That Hideous Strength, Lewis seems to have found another good stand-alone scene. This is the moment when the newly awakened Merlin questions the injured Ransom about his credentials for carrying on spiritual warfare on planet Earth. Eventually, the haughty and skeptical magician from King Arthur’s day humbly kneels before the seated Ransom, acknowledging him as the Lord’s anointed in the upcoming battle with the forces of evil. Of course, one can never know why Lewis chose these passages to read or how they were received by his immediate listeners. Whatever their immediate effects, these recordings are likely to become an ongoing source of edification and delight for listeners more than a half a century later. What more can we ask than to hear Lewis’s inimitable prose read in his own inimitable voice? Click here to download the Lost Lewis Tapes from the Rabbit Room Store. And click here to listen to the Lost Lewis Tapes on Apple Podcasts and here to listen on Spotify.

Several years ago, Arthur Alligood set his dreams aside. After a decade of trying to provide for a family as a touring singer-songwriter, Alligood came off the road for good and decided to pursue a new career—one that allowed for a consistent paycheck and presence at home. It was the necessary choice, but with it came a sort of death—a personal loss that required grief and time and reorientation. When Arthur recently launched his Kickstarter campaign for a new album, Better Late Than Never, it represented more than just an emerging set of songs. It marked the beginning of something new, a season in which Arthur felt the freedom to pursue making music on the other side of great personal change. I asked Arthur to tell me more about his journey back to recording and the emotions that accompany a willingness to dream once again. It’s wonderful to see you back here, but at one point I know you set music aside. Can you take us into that decision first? In 2012, I put out One Silver Needle, an album made possible by winning the 2011 Mountain Stage NewSong songwriting contest. I put that album out and there was a bit of touring behind it, but very quickly out of that, I knew I was moving into a new realm of life, based on what I was going through personally with a divorce and all. I guess “timid” is the word. I went from being on the road to going back to school and got a job teaching. It was a totally different way of living. Carrying that to today, I got my Masters and have continued to teach. Music has always been a thing that, during this time, was always there as a way to process life. But it was nothing I was looking to do vocationally. I’m still not there, but the music’s not done with me. I still have things to say. I feel like incrementally, over these last 10 years, I’ve realized how important music is to me. It’s not just me in a bedroom recording my songs, but I feel like I have, for lack of a better term, something bigger to say and I want the records to reflect that. What was your first impulse that music was coming back around again? I just realized that I’ve never been able to shake songwriting. I’ve never been able to stop writing songs. I’ve always written songs and they pile up on my phone in voice memos. At some point you ask, “Why is this impulse always with me to do this?” There are a million things I’ve started in my life that, after six months, have faded away. [Laughs] Why is songwriting a thing that’s always been there? I can’t let go of it. The logical conclusion for me is that I’m supposed to write songs. I’m supposed to do that. It wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t supposed to be a part of my life. So I’ve had a lot of little moments where I’ve realized it’s core to who I am, so of course I should be writing songs. I've never been able to shake songwriting. I've never been able to stop writing songs. Arthur Alligood Did that feel like the responsible thing to do, to try to set that aside? I had to come to grips that I could not provide for my family by being on the road as a singer-songwriter at that time. I just could not do it. It felt like giving up on a dream for sure, but it also felt like the pivot that maybe I should have made all along instead of trying to put all my eggs in that basket. It made me realize that music was a part of my life, but it doesn’t have to be like everyone else, like how I provide for my family. It can still be important. I can still make thoughtful music and put it out into the world, but unless the stars align and opportunities come, I can do it in a way that fits with my life and the core things that are also important to me. Could you share about that shift from realizing music was still important to actually making a new record? During quarantine, just as a writing exercise, I thought if I made a rock record, what would it sound like? What were the songs I’d bring to the table if I lost some of those Americana tones and went for the general pop/rock thing? It was just for fun during the pandemic, and that’s where the idea for the album came. Then Mikal [Blue] reached out on Instagram about possibly working together one day. That gave me enough strength to dream about music. I realized that I’d not dreamed up any projects or albums. I used to dream about making records, but I hadn’t done so in a long time. So that writing exercise was how all of this started. You brought up Mikal and I know you also have a great team of players. Can you introduce them to us? Mikal Blue is going to produce and he’s known for his work with Colbie Caillat. His career was kind of made on her success. He did her first record for free years ago and really developed her as an artist. Dean Dinning is the bassist for Toad the Wet Sprocket and Josh Daubin is the drummer for Toad. They both work with Mikal closely on other projects and they’re working together on the new Toad album. They’ve been brought in. Then we’ve got Michael Ward, who has played with John Hiatt and The Wallflowers. He played on One Silver Needle in 2012, so I know him and he’s a great electric guitarist. Then there’s a handful of others who will come in. What are your emotions as you step back into all of this? It’s real exciting and it’s scary for sure. But the scary part is more about the Kickstarter and putting yourself out there in that way. The last time I did a Kickstarter was 2010, so I haven’t done a bunch of crowdfunding before. This is my first official big one. It’s scary to put yourself out there and all the work put into it. But with the music, that’s where I’m comfortable. I’m the most excited to get out there and start working because I love how Mikal works. We get along really well. He lets me be me. There’s no dumb idea, and we’re able to chase down the songs and have fun in the process. So I’m over the moon about recording. Thematically, what weaves together the songs you chose for the new album? It’s me reaching out for hope in this time. They’re all pulled straight from my life. I’ve been writing for 20 years, but I finally wrote my first legit love song. My wife got sick during this time, and it just came out. Generally, it’s looking for light in all the darkness, but it’s also way more lighthearted than I’ve ever been. I gave myself challenges to do things I’d never done. There’s a couple guy-girl duets on the record. The songs are very accessible but definitely still my writing and who I am. They came from my heart. I’m just really excited and I hope that comes through in all I’m saying.

The world is darker now than Melanie Penn could have ever predicted. When Melanie decided to once again partner with producer Ben Shive to put together another set of pop songs, there was no sheltering-in-place or such social upheaval. Sure, decency was draining and tribes were fracturing, but the bottoming-out of 2020 had yet to arrive. So while Melanie undoubtedly held out hopes that her unabashedly optimistic new album would wrap an arm around the listener, she’d no idea just how many of us would appreciate the sentiments within. More Alive, Vol. 1 stays true to its name as a buoyant release in every way. Musically, these are radio-ready, synth-lite pop songs that conjure comparisons to Katie Herzig‘s lighter work or even Ellie Holcomb. Thematically, Melanie has pulled back the curtains to allow in as much sunlight as possible. These are heartening songs intended to meet the listener grappling with death and despair in any form in order to comfort and strengthen. “You’re Not Absent” reaches out to the desolate listener longing for a meaningful connection. “Avenue of the Americas” pays tribute to the electricity of a city like New York, but it’s also a lifeline for the weary listener whose grip is slipping on a long-held dream. The album’s title track speaks life to the aging listener who has lost a vision for the days ahead. “One Word” clears some room for the confused listener to hear anew the promises of God’s faithfulness. If those encouragements fail to land, “He Will Redeem It All” provides an inclusive banner for all situations in which we find ourselves. “Every sigh of sorrow will be turned into a song … Every tear will disappear in the light of that dawn,” Melanie sings. In short, there’s no corner where the darkness will ultimately remain. It’s all fleeting. It all disappears. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Though we find ourselves immersed in the former, especially so in a year like this, Melanie Penn’s More Alive, Vol. 1 is a reassuring companion of these true words even in the face of circumstances that say otherwise. Click here to listen to More Alive, Vol. 1 on Spotify and here to listen on Apple Music. #MelaniePenn

Wherein Jen Rose Yokel reads her poem “When I See It” and her piece “Beneath the Flood,” Rebecca Reynolds reads her poems “Dear Students” and “The Farmer,” Jonathan Rogers reads his short story “When the Angel Stirred the Waters,” and Drew Miller thanks you for listening to Season 1 of The Molehill Podcast. First published in Volume 2 of The Molehill, “When the Angel Stirred the Waters” is something of a riot. The story unfolds in the backwaters of Florida and directly downstream from Flannery O’Connor. It involves a mermaid, a fistfight at a beloved whirlhole, and for those of you who are curious, yes—an alligator. Click here to listen to “S1 E8: When the Angel Stirred the Waters.” And click here to subscribe on Apple Podcasts and here to subscribe on Spotify. Transcripts are available for The Molehill Podcast. Click here to view them. Artwork by the inimitable Stephen Crotts Words of Befuddlement graphic by Mindy Cook Original Molehill Podcast theme music by Zach & Maggie Other music featured in this episode: “Ruminate” & “Wish for Bridges” by Brooke Waggoner “We Will” by Chris Coleman “A Light So Fair” by Ron Block

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment Magazine. Jonathan Rogers and Anne Snyder discuss our culture’s antipathy towards institutions, the role of theological reflection during a time of crisis, and her work with Comment Magazine to serve both readers and writers in uniting thought and action. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 42 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

In this final installment, I want to say a few words about Lucy Maud’s personal challenges as a writer. Even a casual perusal of her journals reveals the fact that Maud was a creature of intense, sometimes crippling moods. I don’t think anyone could be capable of communicating the full scope of human joys and sorrows like she did without being intimately acquainted with both the heights and the depths. And it’s a dangerous business. Many an artist has run aground on the shoals of their own passionate natures. Although Anne Shirley was a gentler version of her own extremes, Maud well-knew the both wings of anticipation and the depths of despair. And like Emily Starr, Maud had to come to terms with what she really believed to be the creative force acting in the universe. At the beginning of Emily of New Moon, young Emily learns from the brusque and rather brutal housekeeper, Ellen Greene, that her father is going to die. Ellen has told Emily that “finding fault with God” is the absolute wickedest thing anyone could ever do. But Emily has no one else to blame, and she just tells God just what she thinks about it. Unable to keep such a terrible thing to herself, however, she confesses to her father that she doesn’t like God anymore. Douglas Starr laughed—the laugh Emily liked best.“Yes you do, honey. You can’t help liking God. He is Love itself, you know. You mustn’t mix him up with Ellen Green’s God, of course.Emily didn’t know exactly what Father meant. But all at once she found she wasn’t afraid any longer…She felt as if love was all about her and around her, breathed out from some great, invisible, hovering Tenderness. One couldn’t be afraid or bitter where love was—and love was everywhere…    Emily of New Moon When the news came out in 2008 that Maud suffered from massive depression, which may have led to, or at least hastened, her death, a lot of people were shocked. I remember coming across online comments expressing disappointment that Lucy Maud wasn’t all she appeared to be from her books, as if her struggles somehow discredited her ideals. Academics made something of a sensation out of it, only too glad, perhaps, to add her to the canon of tortured female geniuses. But people just could not seem to account for the light she brought into the world, in the midst of such personal darkness. But let me tell you what this news did for me: I was absolutely bowled over with admiration and respect. Writing for her was not so much an escape, as an antidote. It was not an act of denial, but an act of defiance. Lanier Ivester As early as the 1890s her journals start bearing witness to bouts of devastating depression, usually brought on by some event that underscored her vulnerability. The death of one her dearest friends in 1897 nearly crippled her, and at the end of 1910 she suffered what we would call a nervous breakdown as a result of a prolonged and unnamed worry in her life. Unfortunately for her, and for so many sufferers from what was known as “neaurasthenia” in that day, there were few options beyond bromides and silence. Bromides were a commonly prescribed remedy for depression in the nineteenth century; a practice which persisted into the mid-twentieth century, when researchers began to realize (and doctors began to admit) that many of the patients in psych hospitals were not suffering so much from mental illness, but bromide poisoning. As in all too many cases, the cure was worse than the disease. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan, a Presbyterian minister consumed morbidly—and heartbreakingly—with the fear that he was not one of the ‘elect,’ had been treated for depression himself as early as 1919. He was later to develop the classic symptoms of bromide poisoning—the tragic upshot of which was that he was prescribed more bromide. It’s very likely that this medication which was supposed to help him destroyed his life. And there is evidence to suggest that bromides had a similarly, though not as outwardly dramatic, impact on Montgomery’s later life, as well. In a painful passage from her journal, written after her recovery from the 1910 attack, Maud confides: I have heard hell described as “a world from which hope was excluded.” Then I was in hell for those three weeks. I had NO hope. I could not realize any possible escape from suffering. You might wonder what is a pregnancy pillow and if a pregnancy pillow is necessary. A pregnancy pillow is a pillow that is meant to support your growing body throughout pregnancy. They are often called maternity pillows and they help to relieve pressure that your back and hips, along with other parts of your body, might feel. When you decide to pick the best pregnancy pillow for you, take a serious look at the considerations. Determine what type of pillow works best for your needs, and take a look at the features that matter the most. Those will help you make the right pick for you! #pregily #maternity. It seemed to me that I must exist in that anguish forever…      The Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 1 As I’ve already mentioned, 1937 was a year of almost unbearable sadness for her. Strikingly (for all her habitual “writing out”), it is a year of which she leaves no account in her journal; all we have was written after the fact. Nevertheless, 1937 was the year that Maud struck up a cheerful and encouraging correspondence with the aspiring young writer, Violet May King. In one of her letters, Maud tells Violet that the ability to see beauty in the world is “a birthright a princess might envy.” In another place, referring to the “happy ending” debate raging in the disenchanted 1930s literary circles, Maud said in defense of her happy endings that “the world must have something to keep it alive.” In writing to Violet, Maud doesn’t deny the fact of her personal struggles, but the undeniable focus of these letters is to keep this young woman from giving up on her literary dreams. I’m not trying to paint Maud as a faultless paragon. She was a very human, very wounded woman who made beautiful things in the face of often horrifying inner odds. But looking back over Maud’s books, and examining her life, I keep asking myself, “What was her greatest gift? What was her real legacy?” And what it boils down to—for me, at least—is hope. Montgomery’s stories give us hope—hope as readers; hope as artists. Lanier Ivester Hope that, in the face of war, and mass destruction, and illness and suffering, that the delights and vagaries and foibles of human nature still matter. That second chances actually do happen and that redemption is an active force at work in a broken world. That the pinewoods are just as real as the pigsties. That “Douglas Starr’s” God, not “Ellen Green’s” god, is running the universe. Montgomery’s stories give us hope—hope as readers; hope as artists. And this is absolutely mind-blowing, considering the fact that she struggled so mightily to keep hope alive in herself. This woman was so brave. She didn’t give herself up to the darkness and refuse to write at all. And she didn’t give into it and write what the darkness was dictating to her. That takes tremendous—I would say, superhuman—courage. Writing for her was not so much an escape, as an antidote. It was not an act of denial, but an act of defiance. When WWI shattered the world that she knew and loved, she kept writing of that world in order to keep reminding the world of what on earth they were fighting for. Two of her most optimistic books, Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams, were written while WWI was raging. And in WWII, Polish troops were issued copies of Anne of the Island to take to the front with them. WWII effectively broke her heart, I think, after all the optimism that WWI really would be the war to end all wars. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the wars raging in her personal life. But she never stopped incarnating her ideals in irresistibly human heroines. She never stopped articulating Beauty, Truth and Goodness, over and over and over again. She fought her stories into the world. But she never got so caught up in the battle that she forgot what she was fighting for. I think this passage from The Story Girl beautifully expresses Lucy Maud’s own heritage: Well, The Story Girl was right—There is such a place as fairyland—but … only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland. In Parts One, Two and Three of this series, I looked at some of the ways Lucy Maud Montgomery continues to enchant her readers over a hundred years after the publication of Anne of Green Gables, and examined a few of the practical means by which she accomplished that enduring magic.

I’m going to tell you a secret. This is one of those details of the writing process that feels so intimate I’m almost embarrassed to share it. When I did not yet know my heroine’s name would be Persimmony Smudge, for much of the first draft of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic I called her “Joy.” I knew that would not be her name in the book; it was a bit of shorthand, a placeholder. My early notebooks are filled with it. I named her that while she was still lost, grumpy, prone to temper tantrums and pouting—in fact, rather (in the first draft) a little brat—anything but joyful. She certainly did not Embody an Idea. I called her that, in part, because even though I didn’t know exactly how the story was going to go, I had already glimpsed the ending—one moment in particular, one scene, in which something profoundly true and good would burst out of her in messy ecstasy. And so, underneath and deeper than the name of Persimmony, there was Joy, and in giving her that word to wear at the beginning of our journey together, I gave her an arc and a climax. To be named is to be set upon the path of an adventure. “No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.” “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” “There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” For it is naming that marks you as part of creation. You are not nothing. You are unique in all the cosmos. You are loved. You are. Jennifer Trafton My favorite story about naming is Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. Evil forces of hatred, dissension, and annihilation are ripping holes in the universe, and Meg Murry learns that she, along with her new cherubim partner Proginoskes (a singular cherubim; he is most certainly not a cherub), is a Namer. Proginoskes has learned the names of all the stars in all the galaxies “to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be,” and Meg must similarly reach out with love, seeing in even the most despised of characters the seed of what they are meant to become, telling them their true names, their true selves. For it is naming that marks you as part of creation. You are not nothing. You are unique in all the cosmos. You are loved. You are. To be named is to be known. This is why, as an author, it’s so vitally important to me to get the names of my characters right. Persimmony, when I eventually settled on it, was meaningful to me—like persimmon, the bitter fruit that ripens to sweetness. Smudge—unheroic, unimportant, ironic. And even though Persimmony Smudge exists only in my imagination and the imaginations of those who read the story, she will always exist—she can’t un-exist now, can’t undo her own story. Though she is not matter, she matters (to use L’Engle’s pun) because she is named and known. I created her. I named her (twice!) She is. I have a friend who, more than anyone else I’ve known, is a Namer. She has named me Beautiful, Playful, Fierce, Bold, or my favorite, recorded in my “encouragement” file, Giant Walking Womb of Creation. That is her special gift: to find the broken people and remind them of their names, or give them new ones. “This is the word that defines you,” she seems to be saying, “not the false words you’ve been calling yourself or others less loving have called you.” And because she is a poet, she is uniquely able to craft words that make people seem like the most epic versions of themselves. I imagine her like Adam sitting on a stone in Eden as the creatures pass by, laying a hand on each and saying gently, “You are…” There’s a beautiful audacity to this kind of naming. It’s one thing to say to a frightened person, “Hey, I know you’re scared, but try to be braver. You can do it.” It’s quite another to say, “Your name is Brave. I love you for it. Go and be who you are.” There are a number of people in my life who love me far better than I love myself and who remind me, daily, of the names I am too afraid to accept. I want to say, “Don’t name me Artist when I’m not. Don’t name me Gentle when I’m not. Don’t name me Lovely when I’m not.” I know how far removed my real nature is from these words. It was precisely this discomfort that made me think recently of Persimmony squirming in the audacious, misfitting first draft I stuck her into. I imagine her stomping her foot and saying, “Don’t name me Joy when that is nothing like me.” I have a feeling that if God bent down today and whispered my true name, the name written on a white stone, the name he gave me before the world began, it would not be an immediate comfort to me. There would be no warm fuzzies. I would not say, “Of course! I always knew it would be that!” I expect I wouldn’t recognize it at all or understand what it had to do with the person I see inside myself. There would be a baffling sense of disconnect. Perhaps it is best that we not know our name too early in the story. It might terrify us. Imagine going to a timid little girl who gets spooked by her own shadow and telling her, “Actually, your real name is Deadly-Dragon-Piercer.” The implication of the plot to come, no matter what the resolution, might be too much for her. The poor girl would never come out of her bedroom. If I must someday be known as Excruciating-Torture-Chamber-Survivor, I’d rather not know it ahead of time, thank you anyway. It is enough for me to know that the name is there, underneath and deeper than the name Jennifer—that the Author gave it to me even before he wrote life into my bones, that it will shine out of me in the climactic scene when I finally grow into its meaning, and it will be the name that defines me as a character in the Great Story. Someday I’ll be told, gently, just as if I were to put my arm around Persimmony at the end of her story and say to her, “In the beginning, before you were born on paper, when I dreamed you into being and set your feet upon a journey, I named you Joy. And now, finally, you know why.”

Silence is a masterpiece that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen an adaptation that so well translates the nuance of its source material. But after seeing the film, my wife made a critical observation of the story that I think is worth pointing out. As I believe everyone knows, the story deals with persecution and suffering and the nature of apostasy. It’s gut-wrenching, and doesn’t give easy answers, doesn’t let anyone off the hook. It’s a swamp of impossible moral choices and subtleties that ought to unsettle anyone who watches (or reads) it. But in the midst of its portrayal of suffering and persecution, what’s missing is a discussion of resurrection. The Christian perspective on suffering and death fundamentally changes in the light of bodily resurrection, and it’s notable that none of the priests in the story make any mention of it. Why? One possible reason is that it’s difficult to discuss resurrection in the context of a story about suffering without seeming like you’re explaining away the unpleasantness or offering a trite answer to a painful reality. It’s kind of like telling a friend at a funeral to cheer up because “heaven’s got a new angel”—an unhelpful or even hurtful sentiment in a moment of grief. Or maybe Endo, and by extension Scorsese, was primarily concerned with the subject of suffering and apostasy and limited his authorial lens in order to keep the focus on those issues, choosing not to engage the wider implications of resurrection. None of this lessens my love for the book or the film, but the question looms large and makes me wonder about the omission. Would my feelings about Rodrigues’s choices be different if he’d demonstrated a more robust Christian theology? What differences are there between what we see of Endo’s portrayal of martyrs and apostates in Japan versus what history tells us of other martyrs, specifically those of the early church? How does a concrete belief in the resurrection of the body explain those differences? Does Silence embody a meaningful view of the resurrection? If so, how? If not, why? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on the matter, or on the film/book in general. What do you think?

Good music has a way of fostering community, and sometimes that community begets more good music. A collaborative album between Ron Block and Jeff Taylor has seemed like a natural for years now, and the occasions the two gifted players have shared the stage have built steady anticipation. The result is Trouble Go Down, an album of sweet hymns and songs that warm the spirit. The collaboration was made richer when the pair turned to Rebecca Reynolds for lyrics to several of the melodies. I spoke with Ron and Rebecca at Hutchmoot 2017 and learned about their approach to songcraft, the subtle distinctions between poetry and lyrics, and the difference between a fine port wine and a beer-can helmet. Tell me about your songwriting process. Does it stay fairly regimented as to who writes the music and who writes the lyrics? Rebecca Reynolds: Generally, I’m lyrics and they’re music. Ron Block: There might be a little adjustment. She’ll say, “The melody goes down here but I’d like it to go up.” Or I’ll say, “This word reads well and sounds good but it doesn’t sing well. Can we change it?” We’ll modify little things here and there. The process is fascinating to someone who is not a songwriter. To read words and then hear a melody in your head, or to hear notes and imagine words to match, is a bit mystical to me. RB: Art is evocative. When she sends lyrics, I read them and I think, how does that make me feel? Then I get out a guitar, and I don’t have a left-brain analytical thing going on. It’s very right-brained for me. RR: A lot of times the words are already in there. For a couple of songs, I listen two or three times and think, There’s something that melody is trying to sing. Oh, it sounds like that. Then you send it back and ask if that’s what they intended the song to mean. What’s an example of a tune that was trying to sing words? RR: The words were definitely in “Trouble Go Down.” RB: I remember she said it feels like a mixture of King James English and Kentucky back woods. RR: It reminded me of these Kentucky Music Weekend fesitvals I’d go to growing up. I thought, there’s one of those songs that I used to hear growing up. So it was easy to find that feeling in it. What are some of the differences in writing poetry—even rhyming poetry—versus song lyrics? RR: A lot of the principles transfer. The main thing is, especially when I was first writing songs (and I’m still making this mistake), that there’s a density to written poetry, but in song poetry or lryics, Ron reminds me, if it’s too dense, people will have trouble unpacking it. It needs to be simpler when it’s musical. So, in terms of the meter, even if you’re looking at enjambment or the line breaks or the movement, and little quirky things like where you’re going to ask a question and answer the question, or—you know how a sonnet works, where you have 14 lines but then on line 9 you’re going to have the volta, or like a haiku when you’re trying to create tension and then answer it—a lot of those elemental things you can have in a song, but you can’t have those super-dense, academic images or words or people get lost. RB: Poetry is like when you sip port. You don’t chug port. You sip it, and it explodes, and it gives a burst of revelation. And then after that you sip again. That’s what poetry’s like. If you go to the other end of the spectrum, some brands of popular music are like the helmet with the two beer cans and the straws, and you flip a switch and it all goes down your gullet. That’s all you’re going to get out of that song—that one little shot of high, and you’re never going to get anything else out of that song. There’s nothing there. There’s a spectrum between port and this immediate experience. And somewhere in between are guys like Paul Simon. You get something out of it on the first listen but as you listen more and more it deepens. In poetry, sometimes you don’t get anything on the first reading, but then slowly you start to see something. In music you can’t do that to too great a degree because the listener generally is not going to be as patient as a literary reader of poetry. The listener is just going to skip to the next song, and then they’re never going to listen to it again. That’s what we’ve had to do. She can write very dense poetry, and less dense poetry. Instead of a series of images in each line, I’ve got to have a central image to the whole song, and then speak to that image in each verse. “Gather Ye” is that, it’s a nature image, and it shows who God is in all these aspects of nature. RR: One of the things I’ve started doing—it won’t show up much on this record but if we get to do another one it will—I’ve been listening to opera (because my literary agent really likes opera). One of the things that’s different is the pace. It’s good for me to see that musical poetry works differently than written poetry. You have to let people have time. I was talking here at Hutchmoot with a friend about how I write album reviews, how I let it play in the background for a while before my first dedicated listen. I mentioned that the really great song reaches out of the background and grabs me. I think that’s the middle you’re talking about—a song commands attention but is not bewildering or overwhelming. RB: There’s a wide middle ground. I really do think that some forms of popular music try to push to be almost too simplistic. Sometimes that happens. To me the best ground for lyrics is the wide middle ground. Even on one record. Here’s a little bit more dense one for people to chew on, and here’s one that’s simple for everybody. And then you sequence them carefully. RB: Yes, then you choose what goes where on the record. RR: And we dropped one that I loved but it was too dense. “Hail Thou.” The meaning was beautiful. RB: The poetry was beautiful. And I’ll probably put it out eventually as a demo or something, ’cause it’s a cool track. RR: You could pick it apart and see what matches with what and unpack it… RB: …but most listeners aren’t going to do that. Regarding density, I think there’s a place in bluegrass that is different on that scale than maybe other genres. RB: Yes, again in pop-influenced music—and this is not a slam, it’s just the way things are—in pop-influenced music there’s an instrumental hook, some theme that happens. In bluegrass there might be that theme, but it tends to be more varied. Popular forms of music tend to be more static. In my musical sense, which is foundationally the bluegrass kind of sense, I tend toward that. I think Jeff does too. But, for instance, “Gather Ye” has that theme that he plays—it’s the same theme. We access some of that, but it’s a little more complex—kind of Irishy-classical. I’m going to speak out of my league in music theory here, but you have a few parts both lyrically and musically in a couple of the songs that are almost like a fugue, with repetition of phrase, either musical or lyrical, and that’s not trivial. You don’t hear that a lot in. Does that come from a random set of ideas that are working at the time, or some deeper influences? RB: I think it’s both. Speaking instrumentally, when we’re sitting there arranging something, it has to ring true inside me or inside Jeff. Sometimes there’s something missing, and I can’t identify it. The only way to remedy it is experimentation. Let me try this—can you try this? Then you kinda find it. Sometimes it’s experimentation that helps you find those things that are repetitive but not mindlessly so. Even in that repetition there is variation. It maintains an interest. One of the things you have to do as a musician, whether you’re taking a solo or writing a song, you are juggling the listener’s expectation. They expect the melody, so I can throw them a curveball a little bit. If I’m playing a hymn, I’m playing the melody and playing the lines, but then I’ll go, I feel like doing this thing that twists the phrasing just a little bit so they don’t fall asleep. You’re playing with their expectation. They say, “Oh, I didn’t expect that, that’s cool,” and then, “Ah… I did expect that, that’s nice.” I think you can abuse that, too, and frustrate the listener. RB: Yes, you can go too far in either direction. It can be boring, or it can be an abstract thing that never repeats and has no melody. Ron, your vocal range seemed really big on this album. Was that you continuing to grow and stretch yourself? You write the notes; you’re in control of the range. RB: Remember “Inside the Actor’s Studio”? Both Richard Dreyfuss and Sally Field were asked, “What made you take that script?” They both said something along the lines of, “Because it scared me to death.” That place of, Am I going to be able to do this?, that’s the place of growth. When we were doing these melodies and choosing these keys, sometimes I’d think, that’s pretty wide. But I went to my vocal coach, and we figured it out. You have to grow. It forces you to grow. This record has helped me move into new places. This might sound terribly contrived, but I wanted to get each of you to talk about the other’s contribution to one song. RR: Can I pick an instrumental? I listen to “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” over and over again. It makes me do what the song says—to lean. Whatever I’m thinking and wrestling with, when that comes on, I’m not listening to a record. It puts me in that place where I’m leaning on the arms of God. It’s like prayer almost. The way he plays that takes me out of the temporal realm and puts me in the eternal realm. Actively. RB: The purpose of the record was to have the guy who’s driving to work thinking, I fought with my boss yesterday and I don’t want to face him, or the mom that’s struggling with her teenage son. They can put this record on and go, I remember. I can do it. RB: I want to talk about “Everything Broken and Everything Beautiful.” I love what she did with that. “The fog angels bathe in a choir of praise, yield to the sun as it rises.” I remember many times overlooking a river and in the morning you see those wisps of fog and as the sun comes up it begins to burn them off and they yield. So that image of us yielding to God, yielding to the sun as it rises. Remember what I was saying about writing reviews? That line grabbed me by the ears out of the background and said, “I’m going to blow you away right now.” RR: I was at a state park, really early in the morning, and it has these beautiful bodies of water. I turned around a corner and there was this strange fog—there were hundreds of these little tendrils and it looked like at the top they were opening, almost gasping, and I thought, I just saw something amazing. I was reading something at the time that made me think about unity and submission. RB: That’s how a poet views the world. Last question. “His Love Will Bear You On” has half the Rabbit Room on the vocal! How did that come about? RR: We were talking about wanting it to be like the end of Hutchmoot, when everybody sings the Doxology. We wanted to catch some of that spirit. RB: I love that when you listen, you can go, oh, there’s Ellie, and that voice sounds familiar, who’s on the right? It captures that sense of community. RR: We wanted it to be an invitation. [Trouble Go Down is available in the Rabbit Room Store.]

This post is adapted from a talk given at Hutchmoot 2016. T. S. Eliot is one of the most iconic poets of modern times. In fact some would probably label him one of the most original poets of the 20th century. And yet, when we study his own philosophy and poetry, Eliot does not seem all that interested in being “original” in the sense that we understand it. He is rather, as Thomas Rees puts it, a “master of eclectic synthesis.” Eliot is famously known for saying something along the lines of “bad poets imitate; good poets steal.” What he really said is a little more involved. In discussing how 17th century English dramatist Philip Massinger borrowed from Shakespeare, Eliot wrote: “One of the surest of tests [of greatness] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion” (The Sacred Wood). Eliot believed that the poet must be a student of poetic tradition and his contemporary environment, and through such study would arrive at a poetic distillation of the two. He thought a poet must embody “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer.” At the same time, he also believed that any new poem shifted how one would view past art. For him, tradition and the present existed in a dynamic relationship, in which the former was carefully studied and respected and incorporated into the latter, and the peculiar distillation of the latter served to shed new light on the former. A perfect example of this is Eliot’s famous poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” On the one hand, it has a highly individualistic feeling, presenting the inner monologue of a man disenchanted and weary of modern life. But Eliot achieves this expression by “remixing” and “stealing” from a variety of sources, including Dante, Shakespeare (Hamlet and Twelfth Night), Rudyard Kipling (from whom he got the idea of the title), and the Bible (John the Baptist and the parable of Lazarus and the rich man)—at least. Eliot distilled them all with his own unique style, but understanding the allusions enriches our understanding of the poem. Modern poet Billy Collins presents Eliot’s idea in a slightly different way when talking about the oft used expression “finding your voice”: “What I don’t like about the expression ‘finding your voice’ is that it’s very mystifying in the minds of young people. It makes you feel — made me feel when I first heard it — that your voice is tied up with your authenticity, that your voice lies deep within you, at some root bottom of your soul, and that to find your voice you need to fall into deep introspection… you have to gaze deeply into yourself. The frustration and the anxiety is that maybe you won’t find anything there. That you’re on this terrible quest to nowhere. Let me reassure you that it’s not that mysterious. Your voice has an external source. It is not lying within you. It is lying in other people’s poetry. It is lying on the shelves of the library. To find your voice, you need to read deeply. You need to look inside yourself, of course, for material, because poetry is something that honors subjectivity. It honors your interiority. It honors what’s inside. But to find a way to express that, you have to look outside yourself. Read widely, read all the poetry you can get your hands on. And in your reading, you’re searching for something. Not so much your voice. You’re searching for poets that make you jealous. Professors of writing call this “literary influence.” It’s jealousy. And it’s with every art, whether you play the saxophone, or do charcoal drawings. You’re looking to get influenced by people who make you furiously jealous. Read widely. Find poets that make you envious. And then copy them. Try to get like them.You know, you read a great poem in a magazine somewhere, and you just can’t stand the fact that you didn’t write it. What do you do? Well, you can’t get whiteout, and blank out the poet’s name and write yours in — that’s not fair. But you can say, “Okay, I didn’t write that poem, let me write a poem like that, that’s sort of my version of that.” And that’s basically the way you grow….After you find your voice, you realize there’s really only one person to imitate, and that’s yourself. You do it by combining different influences. I think the first part of it is you do slavish imitations, which are almost like travesties, you know. But gradually you come under the right influences, picking and choosing, and being selective, and then maybe your voice is the combination of 6 or 8 other voices that you have managed to blend in such a way that no one can recognize the sources. You can take intimacy from Whitman, you can learn the dash from Emily Dickinson…you can pick a little bit from every writer and you combine them. This allows you to be authentic. That’s one of the paradoxes of the writing life: that the way to originality is through imitation.” What Eliot and Collins are both talking about here is something Austin Kleon refers to as the Artist’s Family Tree. In his book Steal Like An Artist he writes: “Marcel Duchamp said, ‘I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.’ This is actually a pretty good method for studying—if you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you’ll choke. Instead, chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start you own branch. Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff…. The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.” For those of us who create, achieving something unique in our art will likely be both easier and harder than we thought. Easier in that it might not involve incessant navel gazing and endless soul-searching for our “authentic voice,” but harder in that it will involve the hard work of time spent at the feet of those who have gone before us, and time spent distilling all of those influences through practice until we arrive at something that feels like our own. As Karen Burke Lefevre puts it in Invention As a Social Act: “There will always be great need for individual initiative, but no matter how inventive an individual wants to be, he will be influenced for better or for worse by the intellectual company he keeps. On top of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont, there are thirty-year-old trees that are only three feet tall. If a tree begins to grow taller, extending beyond the protection of the others, it dies. The moral for inventors [and artists]: Plant yourself in a tall forest if you hope to have ideas of stature.”

The Founder is a good film. From the story of Ray Kroc’s invention of fast food, to the acting (Michael Keaton, Laura Dern, and Nick Offerman), The Founder is an enjoyable ride that reveals Kroc’s rise to the top of the most American of empires. But hours after the credits rolled, I realized why I felt so empty after watching it. The Founder is soulless. The story of Ray Kroc’s fast food empire isn’t rooted so much in good ole hard work as it is acting at all times somewhere between “duplicitous” and “wicked.” Originally, McDonalds was a single San Bernadino hamburger joint with lines around the block, run by two brothers who perfected the art of fast food. An efficient work station (30 seconds from grill to customer!), simple menu (burgers, fries and cokes!) and convenient packaging (you can throw it away!) brought families by the carload and eventually drew Kroc’s attention. From there, Kroc’s natural salesmanship and relentless drive for more (in any area of life) broke through the McDonald brothers’ defenses, allowing Kroc to legally oversee and take over franchising for the brand. A few legal loopholes later, the McDonald brothers found themselves outsiders looking in to their own company. And they weren’t the only characters with such perspective, since Kroc also steals the wife of a fellow businessman in Minneapolis who buys into the company. The bottom line: If you have something Ray Kroc wants, he will find a way to take it. This story is nothing new in Hollywood. Wolf of Wall Street tells the same tale. So does every movie made about the recent financial crisis (Margin Call, The Big Short). The problem is that the villains in those movies are treated as villainous. They are horrible people doing horrible things and the distance is felt between audience and protagonist, a necessary gap I was unable to understand until watching The Founder. Watching Michael Keaton deceive anyone and everyone was a thrill, and I was cheering him on the entire way. During those two hours, I was excited to see Keaton swindle the McDonald brothers out of their rightful share of the (crazy) profits. “They had no vision for what McDonalds could be.” I was agreeing with Keaton, who’d also outwitted me. “Her husband doesn’t appreciate her,” was my initial response to why Joan Smith (Linda Cardellini) should be with Kroc instead. Maybe that’s why I have issues with The Founder even so long after watching it in the first place — that I stand among those who were duped by Ray Kroc. For 115 minutes, I also gave Kroc whatever he desired — my attention, my approval — even as he completely disregarded any needs of my own. He bridged the gap that typically exists in these kinds of films, allowing me to empathize with a man who deserves only scorn. Maybe that makes The Founder a better film than I realized.

“When we avoid…the suffering of others…what we’re really avoiding is the cross. Embracing refugees, welcoming them, is welcoming Jesus, and we’re missing out on the opportunity to do that when we hold them at arm’s length.”

Some walls are built to keep something out. Others are built to keep something in. But there’s another kind of wall, a wall that defines the boundaries of a place in order to make that place more beautiful, and to demonstrate a kind of affection. (I wrote about it a few years ago in a post called “You Shall Be My Pumpkins.”) I started building a dry stack stone wall about three weeks ago on a chilly day in January. As is usually the case, I had no idea what I was doing. When I started keeping bees, I got my dad’s bee supplies leftover from his short stint as a beekeeper, ordered a queen, and asked questions later. This is, I realize, in flagrant opposition to Jesus’s parable about counting the cost, but it’s a weakness I can’t seem to shake. Planning bores the tar out of me. When the mood strikes to build something or write something or draw something, I dive right in because who has time to do homework when there’s something cool to be done? This kind of behavior drives some people crazy (my long-suffering and wonderful manager, Christie, for example), but even though I get myself into pickles sometimes I happen to think the pickle is part of the fun. Back to the wall. I love stone walls. I love them in Tennessee, I love them in the British Isles, and I love them in New England when ex-convicts played by Morgan Freeman discover secret notes from Andy Dufresne hidden in them. We have an old wall here at the Warren that was built before the Civil War, and every time I walk beside it my imagination is dancing with images of the people who made it. I wonder why it was put there in the first place. You have to mean to build a stone wall, you know? Someone on Facebook, on seeing a photo of my progress, said that they had a revelation about the existence of God when they spotted a dry stack wall while driving through the countryside. The wall couldn’t have happened on accident; it was put there with a great deal of work and consideration. When I researched the cost of building one I was deflated by the fact that a four-foot wall costs, on average, about $100 a foot, so I never got around to starting one. But then. Then, the Peterson family was given a mighty gift. Julie Witmer, who has a bona fide English Gardener’s certificate, emailed one day from her home in Pennsylvania and offered to come to the Warren with her family for a weekend and help us map out a master plan for our property. We live on five acres, about half of which is wooded. The other half is pasture, more or less, and while it’s pretty to look at, that much space makes landscaping difficult. Eric Peters, on the other hand, lives with his family in East Nashville in a lovely little house with a fenced backyard and a front porch and a sidewalk. His flowerbeds are gorgeous and diligently weeded. His backyard has little nooks and crannies that are lovingly landscaped. Whenever we visit the Peters house I’m always a little envious because he has a defined space to work with—a frame for the picture, so to speak. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining—just saying that a few acres of pasture makes landscaping tricky. There was no getting around it. It was time to build that wall. I went out one day with my boys, a few shovels, and some string, took a deep breath, and started digging. That was a few weeks ago. Andrew Peterson All that to say, when the Witmers offered their kind assistance, we jumped at the chance. A few months after their visit, during which Julie took lots of pictures and measurements and sketches, she sent us what she called the Thirty Year Plan. It’s beautiful. You can see our house from a bird’s eye view, and all around it are splashes of color where amsonia and hydrangea and yarrow are placed among walking paths and raised vegetable garden beds and raspberry arbors. In a column on the right is a list of all the plants she recommends and how many of each we’ll need. We framed her plan and hung it on the wall, a practical piece of art. When I study the plan, I can almost smell the flowers as I move around inside her dream. Then I tear my eyes away and look out the window at a bare yard, and I’m struck by the tension between the hope and the reality, the future and the present, as if the expectation of the thing haunts the property. To my delight, the plan included a stone wall that borders an English garden in our front yard. Like I said, it’s the Thirty Year Plan. There’s no way on earth we could find the money or the time to do it all at once, but we can do a little each year, so I decided on a whim to start on the front yard. But how to begin? I ordered a few of the plants this winter, to be shipped at planting time in early spring. I knew I’d need to mulch the yard to kill the grass, but it wouldn’t make sense to do that unless there was some definition to the area. There was no getting around it. It was time to build that wall. I went out one day with my boys, a few shovels, and some string, took a deep breath, and started digging. That was a few weeks ago. I had no idea how many thousands of pounds of rock I’d need to lift, how many pairs of work gloves I would wear through (two so far, and I’m about to need a third), or how much I would obsess every waking minute over rocks, rocks, rocks. On every drive I’m scanning the sides of the roads for the right kinds of stone, every time I walk our property I come back to the front yard hefting a stone from the woods, every morning when I wake up the first order of business is opening the blinds to evaluate yesterday’s work. It’s been a deeply satisfying process—a few hours each day of either driving to get more rocks from the roadside, dumping them in the yard, sifting through them for the right rock, tapping little shims into the spaces with a hammer to make sure they fit tightly, running out of stones and in exasperation driving out to find more. Slowly but surely the wall came to be. I’d get mentally fatigued and head in to the house for a drink of water, wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into, and then I’d see the Witmer garden plan on the wall. After a few minutes of studying the Thirty Year Plan I’d nod resolutely and walk out into a physical version of it—under construction to be sure, but the manifestation of Julie’s imagination no less—and I’d find a fresh wind to carry me through the next layer of stone. Saturday I built the falsework for a stone archway. The archway wasn’t in her plan, but our family agreed that there just had to be one. We’d seen so many of them still standing in the ruins of abbeys and castles in Britain and Ireland that the thought of having one in our front yard was too good to pass up. Yes, I’m following the Witmer plan, but just like writing a book, it’s good to leave room for surprises. When I told my brother Pete I was going to build an old school arch he scoffed (that’s what big brothers do). “How are you going to do that?” he scoffed. I counter-scoffed with a shrug and told him, “The glory of the interweb.” It turns out I’m not the only oddball out there interested in stone arches. People have been doing this for thousands of years, I figured, so it wasn’t a question of “Is it possible?” but a question of “Am I crazy enough to try it?” First I built up the wall on the sides of the gap to reinforce the outward pressure of the arch. Then I built what’s called “falsework,” a wooden support in the shape of the arch. The falsework is held up by  four 2×6 legs, screwed in so that once the arch is complete I can just unscrew them (verrrrry carefully) and let gravity do the rest. I stood the frame in the gap and right about then Pete came over to scoff some more. “That thing’s gonna fall, you know.” “You’re probably right. But I’m going to try.” “Well, call me when you’re ready. I’ll have the car warmed up to take you to the hospital.” I know my big brother well enough to know that his scoffery is meant as encouragement, because he knows that if there’s one thing that can motivate a little brother it’s the desire to gloat over his big brother’s unjust scoffing. I placed the rocks on the falsework slowly, heaving them up from my pickup bed one at a time and then shimming them into place. The keystone went on last, followed by several more shims, just to make sure the whole thing was tight as a drum. I called Pete and shouted for my family to come watch. To make a long story short, it worked. Pete was congratulatory. I wasn’t too gloaty, I don’t think. The gravity of the earth tugs constantly, unwaveringly down, and that half-circle of ancient stones wedged against one another just hang in the air as if they were always meant to do that very thing. (Pete, by the way, gloated on Facebook that he was the first to walk under it.) Here’s the deal. I’ve had plenty of time, as you can imagine, to think while I’m out there laying stone. In the mornings I’ve even prayed quite a bit that this wall-building process would be a kind of worship, and that God would show me something. And he did. For weeks now, working with stones lifted from their graves in the Old Earth to give them new and beautiful purpose, I haven’t stopped thinking about the New Earth. The New Creation. That map on the wall was born of someone else’s imagination and expertise. From a far country Julie cast a vision for our lives. We hung that vision on our wall as a picture not of what is, but of what will be. When we look at it, our minds can’t help but wander to the day when, thirty years hence, we’ll move around inside the real thing. When I get tired, discouraged, forgetful of what on earth I’m doing out there in the yard, I look at the map and remember: there’s a world that is coming—a world I could never have imagined on my own, a world born out of a gardener’s mind. I have been invited into the building of that world. It’s not just theory. It’s not just pie-in-the-sky. It’s stone and sweat and work and wonder, all to make our little corner of Tennessee look a bit more like the Kingdom of God. This archway is not meant to keep anyone or anything out or in. When we’re standing in our garden, the gate will beckon us out into the wild pasture. When we’re in the pasture, the archway will beckon us into the order and fragrance of the garden. The wall is the frame of the picture, which makes not just the painting more beautiful, but also the very room it inhabits. And the arch? The arch is neither a way in or out, but a way through, a passage that honors the going and the coming, just as the mouth is for breath and for song, both of which are necessary for survival.

If you’re in the Nashville area, we want to invite you to join our friends at Covenant Seminary on March 3rd and 4th for this special seminar led by Denis Haack of the Ransom Fellowship. Professor Haack was mentored by Francis and Edith Schaeffer and he brings a love for music, film, and visual art that engages the Church both in how to appreciate these mediums as good art as well as how to engage with them as communication about the truth of God’s world. Denis is the author of The Rest of Success: What the World Didn’t Tell You About Having It All. We’re delighted to be a sponsor of the event and we’re offering a huge discount to Rabbit Room readers. The seminar costs $48 to attend, but if you use the code “rabbitroom” during registration you’ll get a $33 discount, bringing the registration down to just $15. That’s a great deal for a two-day seminar! Here’s a description of what’s in store: Human culture began at creation, receiving God’s blessing as part of what was “very good.” Then the fall fractured human creativity from God’s glory, so that now culture is both for blessing and for curse. As God’s redeemed people we can learn to be discerning rather than defensive or reactionary, making and responding to culture under Christ’s Lordship and so anticipate the restoration of all things. In an age of disbelief when Christian faith is seen as unattractive and unnecessary, when hostility to faith is increasing, every believer can demonstrate that the God they serve is the God of truth, goodness and beauty beyond our wildest imagining. In this class we will begin a conversation about seeing culture and human creativity biblically, developing skill in cultural discernment, and being faithful in ordinary life as a witness to the gospel in our increasingly diverse world. We hope to see you there. Click here to register. TIME & DATE Friday March 3: 7–9pm Saturday March 4: 8am–5pm LOCATION West End Community Church Nashville, TN SPEAKER Professor Denis Haack is the Director of Ransom Fellowship, a ministry devoted to teaching Christians the art of discernment amid popular culture. Denis is the author of The Rest of Success: What the World Didn’t Tell You About Having It All and has written articles for such journals as: Reformation & Revival Journal; Eternity; Covenant; and, World. You can find his ministry at www.ransomfellowship.org.

In the middle of January, I took two weeks off from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It’s a tricky experiment when one of your jobs is managing social media, but setting all my apps to work accounts and actively avoiding Facebook’s Home button when I dropped in to schedule updates was enough to hold me back from unintentional journeys down the Internet rabbit hole. Though I missed the voices of my wise and funny friends, there were plenty of things I was grateful to leave behind — illogical bickering among strangers, comment thread rage, dramatic clickbait “news,” and incessant ads, to name a few. If I had to describe those two almost-unplugged weeks, I’d say it felt like a fog lifting, like the voices screaming about everything wrong with the world quieted until I could hear something true again. Sometimes, I wish I could make the break permanent. Hey, I can’t fix the world, so why should I let arguing and opinions drag me down? Today, I present two ideas I’ve held in tension since returning to the social media machine, two ideas I’m not sure how to reconcile. Perhaps you’ve struggled here too, or have some insights on surviving this constantly connected culture. Idea One: I don’t want to be totally uninformed or let compassion fatigue set in. On one of my first days back, as I scrolled through my Facebook feed wishing everything wasn’t deadly serious, Matt Conner posted something that shifted my perspective: “It’s one thing to need an escapist moment in the middle of a bad day — to go see a movie or binge watch a few episodes of The Office after a long week at your own place of work. It’s another entirely to wish away something deemed negative or divisive because you’re uncomfortable. Those with the most rights are the ones who are tired talking about them.” Or in other words, to say “I can’t take any more negativity” is a luxury statement. My “negativity” is another’s everyday struggle. How can I turn away from the real hurting human behind the scared or angry tweet? “We’re living in a society in which facts are thrown away, yet somehow we’re already growing “tired” of being informed?” Idea Two: How much information is too much? When do the voices grow so loud I can barely form a thought for myself? Some, like writer Alan Jacobs, suggest massively scaling back on the quick bursts of information and hot takes to take a long view: “On social media today everyone is in a state of high alarm all the time. Which leads me to something I didn’t mention explicitly in my year in technology post: my efforts to get onto a longer news frequency… I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion.” All this leaves me wondering if our breakdown in honest dialogue and simple civility might be born in that constant “high alarm,” this stream of panicked noise all around us. It’s one thing to be informed, but now it seems we have to be informed AND have an opinion five minutes after anything happens—be first to speak, make some noise, amplify. And before you know it, it’s hard to tell which voice is yours and which is the sum of the rumblings all around. I am grateful for the space and community we’ve cultivated here, for slow takes and careful thought, for Civil Language and the via media. And now I’m wondering, how can we successfully live in this tension?  How can we keep informed about the harm done to our neighbors, stay humble and alert, but take in the flood of information without drowning? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

I think we all have memories of finishing a favorite childhood book—of turning the final page and feeling as if we’ve lived a lifetime in the space between those two covers. We will never forget where we were the day Aslan came alive again, just as people never forget where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot or a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I still remember vividly that family car trip when everyone filed into Wendy’s for a lunch and bathroom break except me—I was still sitting in our minivan, unable to tear myself away from the last pages of Jane Eyre. Here is another such memory: 12 years old, propped up on my pillows with a reading light on, long past my bedtime. My mother walked in to find me sobbing and asked what was wrong. “It’s just so sad … and so good,” I cried. I was reading the final chapters of the final book in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne series, Rilla of Ingleside (about Anne’s youngest daughter). That book looms large for me when I think of those tipping point years between childhood and adolescence. It was, I think, one of my first experiences, in literature, of good grief, a grief that contains the world’s suffering in its heart and yet reaches past the darkness to find something beautiful on the other side. It was a feeling I was later to encounter on a much larger scale in books like The Lord of the Rings. But Rilla was important to me at that stage of my life because it was a depiction of real grown-up suffering in the real world—in this case a world in the throes of the Great War. All things great are wound up with all things little. L. M. Montgomery Like many of Montgomery’s novels, Rilla of Ingleside has been cursed with modern covers that make it look like the most saccharine of teenage romance novels—a travesty, as well as a false advertising. Teen romances are not typically filled with acerbic commentaries on Kaiser Wilhelm II by matronly Canadian housekeepers. And in this romance, between the first dance and the final kiss, a girl’s soul must pass through the fires of hell as she learns womanhood through self-sacrifice, heart-numbing grief, and quietly heroic perseverance. Not to mention orphaned babies in soup tureens. Only a few years after I finished that book, I would be sobbing in my bedroom again because my own world had just been plunged into war—Operation Desert Storm—and like Rilla I felt the foundations of my childhood security crumble away beneath me. Could anything be beautiful again? Would I have to endure what Rilla and Walter and Anne and Gilbert had to endure? When Lanier Ivester approached me about leading a session on L. M. Montgomery at Hutchmoot with her, my first thought was, “What do I have to say that anyone in the audience who grew up with Anne Shirley couldn’t say from their own overflowing heart? She was the kindred spirit who led me by the hand through my girlhood. The end.” And my second thought was, “Lanier Ivester is the living embodiment of L. M. Montgomery. I could simply point to her and sit down again. Enough said.” I’m actually serious, and I’m not trying to embarrass Lanier with praise. As I was re-reading some of my favorite Montgomery books—and a few new ones like The Blue Castle which I had missed out on thirty years ago—I felt deeply convicted. Here I am saying that this author has been one of the most influential authors in my life, but what does that really mean, for me? Have I put into practice the lessons I learned from her? If so, why does nearly every poetic sentence, every rapturous phrase, remind me not of myself but of my dear friend—who doesn’t simply pay lip service to her muse’s vision, she lives and breathes it, and everyone around her sees the fruits of it. And so that was my challenge to myself as I thought about what to say to the Hutchmoot audience. Why have Montgomery’s books been so important to me, and what am I going to do about it? Case in point: All my life I’ve longed to live in a place that deserved a name. In Montgomery’s books every good and beautiful spot of earth was christened with fairy tale fervor: Green Gables, Windy Poplars, Rainbow Valley, New Moon, Silver Bush, Lantern Hill, the Lake of Shining Waters. People rarely name their houses anymore, perhaps because they are so often temporary abodes in our migratory culture, perhaps because modern homes lack individual personalities that make them seem as alive as the people who live inside them. And it’s not so easy to believe in the poetry of place while surrounded by the prosaic world of suburban America. I don’t think anyone has ever impersonated the Lady of Shalott while floating down Mill Creek under the concrete overhang of Old Hickory Boulevard with its ungraceful blooms of air-brushed graffiti. But why not? Why is there so little “scope for the imagination” in our ugly modern cities? Would Pan ever coming piping through our manicured hedges? When we moved into North Wind Manor, we knew of course that we would give the house a name, just like the Warren next door. But I didn’t just fall in love with a house; I love the whole hill on which our few little houses stand, surrounded by a slender halo of woods that shield us from the sight of the neighborhoods beyond. I let some of the neighborhood kids in one of my writing tutorials reimagine our hill as their own fantasy domain, and they came up with “The Woods of the Moon,” which is an Anne-Shirley-ish name if ever I heard one, and I think it will always be the Woods of the Moon for me from now on. But there are other spots I want to give names to as well . . . The wide green clearing in those woods where the old piano once stood—now weather-beaten down to a pile of splinters and keys—with the stones of a dried-up waterfall rising like the grand stairway of a fairy ballroom. The little dimple in the line of trees in our backyard where a writing cottage may someday stand. The old rickety bridge over the nearby creek, with the “No Trespassing” sign universally ignored by the Peterson clan. That one particular shady bend in the greenway where a canopy of trees hides the houses from view and the Black-eyed Susans come out to play. But I haven’t named them yet. I have utterly failed Anne. However, I hereby vow that I will, in Lucy Maud’s honor, listen carefully to these beloved places as they tell me what they want to be called. Because I don’t want to go through my life surrounded by beauty and treating it simply as the background for my busy story. I want to invite it into my heart as a friend, speak its name, and let it remind me of my own. Yes, Montgomery’s books make me want to go see Prince Edward Island, but even more than that, they make me want to find Prince Edward Island here, in my own surroundings. I recently came across someone praising L. M. Montgomery’s “eloquent descriptions of nature” and it struck as an odd thing to say because in all of my years of reading her books I never would have thought of her writing in that way. The woods, the ponds, the flowers, the seas, the stars—these aren’t “nature,” these are characters for Montgomery. They are as much a part of the story as Anne and Emily and Pat and Jane. They are a large part of the reason why Anne and Emily and Pat and Jane are who they are. Here is her description of the sea in Anne’s House of Dreams: The woods are never solitary—they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unsharable sorrow which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce it’s infinite mystery– we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only—a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. Did you just find some random bugs in your bed? Perhaps something has been eating the food in your pantry? Or maybe you’ve noticed a colony of fire ants have taken refuge in your backyard. Well, you’re in luck, because PestHit – Best Pest Control Product Reviews is here to help you get rid of your bug and rodent problems. From bed bugs, ants, mosquitoes, chipmunks, and more, PestHit can help guide you along your pest killing journey. Just select the type of bug you’re dealing with below to get started. #pesthit #pest control #kill pests #best pest control product reviews #pesthit reviews #pests. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels. This isn’t just a beautiful world to Montgomery; it’s an enchanted world. There is a glimmer of holiness in every sunrise. This is one of the most important things Montgomery does for me. I spend so much of my life looking down—at my laptop, at my phone, at my lesson plans, at my book. But when I read one of her novels, she makes me look up. She makes me not want to miss anything. And not just look up at the sea or the woods. Look up at people. Montgomery, more than any other writer I know, falls so much in love with her minor characters that she sometimes forgets who her protagonists are. It almost at times seems like a bait-and-switch. “Ha! You thought this book was about newlywed Anne and Gilbert, did you? Well, let me just introduce you to Captain Jim . . .” But I love this quirk in her. As a storyteller she finds people in all their flaws and eccentricities endlessly fascinating, for she knows that behind every human face, no matter how ordinary, is an untold epic. Town gossips and reprobate drunkards, lonely teachers and absentminded preachers, motherly old maids and rascally schoolboys—the more obscure or overlooked or misunderstood they are, the more you may sure that they have a tale to spin that will make you laugh or break your heart—if you will only make a cup of tea, pull up a chair by the fire, and listen. But the ones we all love most are her heroines, and what has always impressed me is that Montgomery could write about the growing pains of imaginative young girls without a hint of condescension. This is precisely what made her books feel like friends to those of us who saw ourselves in Anne Shirley or Emily Bird Starr. Montgomery knelt down gently like a comrade; she knew the tragedy of not owning a dress with puffed sleeves; she understood that “It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable”; she felt the explosive grief of a girl sobbing on her pillow because of a botched hair-dyeing experiment. She climbed down into the depths of despair with her heroines—but she didn’t leave them there. Her female characters remind us that girls have emotions and imaginations that are epic in scope. Some might say melodramatic and sentimental, to be sure. But I tend to think that the 13-girl-old girl, sobbing her heart out over some hurt that seems small to adults, sees a truth in that detail of life that we jaded grown-ups miss. “All things great,” Montgomery says, “are wound up with all things little.” A sonnet is beautiful and brilliant because it is so constrained; yet within its strict little fourteen-line form it contains worlds of truth and emotion. Women’s lives, throughout much of history, have been sonnets. Constrained by conventions, by the demands of home and children, by strict limitations on roles within society, and sometimes by choice. Montgomery’s heroines don’t wander far; their worlds are tiny, focused, and therefore intensely rich. And I think what Montgomery has done so well is to show us the deeply lovely, complex sonnet that is a young girl’s life—or an elderly girl, for she loves the silver-haired child-at-heart as much as the red-haired woman-to-be. Men can spin their cowboy sagas and war stories all they want, but sometimes it takes a female author—a Jane Austen, a Charlotte Bronte, an L. M. Montgomery—to unpack the drama of the human heart danced out in the tightly courteous battlefield of the parlor, the brave self-respect of an unloved governess, the smothered grief of the wife or mother forced to stay at home while her beloved soldier goes off to war. Little boys (and grown-up boys) with swords and guns do not have a monopoly on heroism, as the heroic women in Rilla of Ingleside prove. An adventure of the soul can be as thrilling as a knight’s quest. And the small, commonplace beauties and goodnesses and truths that Montgomery’s girls love so much are precisely the things that wars are fought to protect. Which is another way of saying that Lucy Maud Montgomery was actually a hobbit. From my conversations with the parents of tween and teen girls—and with the girls themselves—I have begun to fear that my generation will be the last to have grown up with a shared love for Anne. I am told that even the book-loving, imaginative daughters of my friends are no longer drawn to Prince Edward Island in their dreams the way we were. I don’t know why this is; it’s not as if these books were contemporary when I was growing up. They were always old-fashioned. That was precisely their appeal to me. But I wonder: what has taken their place? Will the girls of this generation, and the next, be given the things I was given by Anne Shirley, through other stories? Or is something being irretrievably lost if authors like L.M. Montgomery and Elizabeth Goudge and others like them fall out of fashion? The thought makes me want to keep writing, to keep pointing to beauty, to corral all of the young girls I see into a room and plead with them like Aunt Josephine, “Make a little room in your life for romance, Anne-girl!” I don’t mean anything so prosaic as dating. I don’t mean chick flicks or Instagram selfies or fashion magazines or bridesmaid dresses that scream pink. I mean the romance of the moonlit wood where fairies might dwell, the thrill of maple leaves in October, plum pudding and currant wine, lacy hand-me-down tablecloths that are good because they are beautiful and nothing more, burly sea captains and curmudgeonly gossips gathered around a fire together spinning yarns, and the humble affection of a tousle-headed chum who treats you with the courtesy of a gentleman. Home is the place of unlikely heroes, and the companionship of a kindred spirit is a majestic thing. “There is so much in the world for us all,” Anne learns through a college professor, “if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves—so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful.” And here is why I am convicted most deeply by Montgomery’s books. More than any other author I can think of, she understood that a sensitive, imaginative nature lives in the extremes of heights and depths—with an immense capacity for suffering and grief, and a correspondingly immense capacity for joy and longing. I am so good at the depths; not so good at the heights. I have not exercised and enlarged my capacity for rapture, and in that, more than in anything else, I have failed Anne. I will do better. Tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it yet. And even as the news rains down fresh horrors on our ears each day, and even though in the face of mass shootings and ISIS terror, Green Gables can seem like a sentimental dream, I will dig out these books again and again for the rest of my life, to remind myself that even though beauty may be eclipsed by tragedy for a time, it is not any less real. “I love to smell flowers in the dark,” Anne says. “You get hold of their soul then.” Smelling flowers in the dark: that to me epitomizes what Montgomery accomplished, in her own life of striving and heartbreak, in her writing, and in her lasting impact on millions of readers who, in the midst of their own darkness, desperately need to catch the scent of beauty’s soul. Though life may sometimes feel like “a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” it is worth living, Montgomery reminds us, “as long as there’s a laugh in it.” Laughter is Rilla Blythe’s calling in the wake of a hellish and hideous Great War—healing laughter and warm friendship and faith in a new world being birthed out of the terrible pangs of the old. For wars will pass away. But tea parties are eternal. [Adapted from a session at Hutchmoot 2015.]

Vincent and Theo: that was the example I was to present. How did Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo exemplify “the artist in the heart of community”? I struggled at first to determine what to call the role Theo Van Gogh played in his brother Vincent’s life. I remember talking about it with a friend, describing what I’d learned about all the things Theo had and been for Vincent—patron, caregiver, brother, friend, champion. My friend said he was the person that a book dedication is made out to. Exactly—except that’s still a really long title for a role. The one part of speech that’s the most important thing in the language is the name. Names are the very basic, life-giving term in language. Eugene Peterson, Godspeed In Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a biographical novel about Vincent Van Gogh based on the letters he sent his brother Theo, there is a scene between the brothers that seems to be the essence of what their relationship was in light of Vincent’s art. Vincent had been serving as an evangelist among the coal-miners of Belgium and threw himself entirely to the service—to the detriment of his own health. He lost his appointment as a missionary but remained in the area beginning to pursue drawing, and continuing to serve the poverty-stricken miners. Theo comes to visit after having stayed away for over a year, to find Vincent sick, fevered, and nearly starving. He gets him food, buys him a bed, and puts him in it to sleep for the first time in days. When Vincent awakes, he watches Theo going through his sketches for a few minutes before speaking. Vincent asks what Theo thinks, but Theo forces him to shave, clean, and eat before he will answer. Vincent begins to defend his lack of direction in a career and his pursuit of art—that he is seeking to be of some purpose in the world. And finally, Theo answers. “I’ve believed in you, and had implicit faith in you since the earliest days…and I haven’t any less faith now. I need only to be near you to believe that anything you do will eventually come right.” He goes on, “I have a suspicion that behind all of these abstractions you’ve been dealing in, there is something you want to do. Something you feel is ultimately right for you and will finally bring you to happiness and success.” The words open a door for Vincent. Stone describes his response: Vincent looked over at the pile of sketches Theo had been studying under the window. A grin of amazement, incredulity, and at last awareness spread across his face. His eyes opened wide. His mouth opened. His whole personality seemed to burst open wide like the tornasol [sunflower] in the sun. “Why, I’ll be blessed!’ he murmured. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say all along and I didn’t know it.” Theo’s eyes followed his to the sketches. “I thought so,” he said. Vincent was quivering with excitement and joy. He seemed to have suddenly awakened from some profound sleep. “Theo! You knew it before I did! I wouldn’t let myself think about it. I was afraid. Of course there’s something I must do. It’s the thing I’ve pointed towards all my life and I never suspected it….Something has been trying to push itself out of me all these years and I wouldn’t let it.” It was Theo who woke Vincent to the truth: he was an artist. I will never forget the first time I heard someone tell me I was a storyteller. I may have been told it before that, and I certainly told stories all along, but I had not heard it before. I was a senior in college, sitting in the back of a van with the alumni director, Louise Riley, after we’d been representing the university at a conference together. In the thread of conversation she said, almost off-hand, “Well, of course. You’re a storyteller.” It was a revelation. And it was one of the pieces God used to change my path and move me toward storytelling and creativity as a vocation. I believe artists need the kind of community that Theo was for Vincent—the person who can look in, with unwavering eyes, and see what is true. And also the person who has the guts to speak it. Reading through Stone’s book, there were many times I felt that Theo should have just given up on Vincent. Vincent bullied him, harangued him, and wouldn’t listen to him. But Theo kept faithful, introducing Vincent to the impressionists, telling him when it was time to leave Paris and become his own artist, and reminding him of truth over and over again. It was this role I tried to find a term for. Yes, Theo supported Vincent financially, he introduced him to other artists, he served as a dealer for Vincent’s work. But he was more than a patron, more than a networker, more than an agent. Finally, reading Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wind in the Door, I found it: Theo was a Namer. L’Engle’s book is steeped in the concept of Naming. Her protagonist Meg is partnered with a cherubim named Proginoskes, and they are faced with fighting the Echthroi, beings that X. Progo takes Meg to look at a sky full of stars and they watch as a line of black appears with violence. The Echthroi have Xed, says the cherubim, “Annihilated. Negated. Extinguished. Xed.” Trying to explain the Echthroi and how they work, Progo says, I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming—making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate. That’s why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished. As Meg fights against the Echthroi she learns that to Name people she must love them. That is her weapon against the darkness—and it’s not an easy one to wield. To do so, she must see clearly who she is, and move past her own hatred and anger to see clearly the one she is Naming. [Spoilers ahead] Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga recognizes the value of Naming. Gnag the Nameless is the great terror to the Wingfeathers. Abandoned, crippled, unloved, never named. The lack is what shapes him. He grows into Gnag the Nameless, hungry for power, for destruction. But the heroes realize in the end that [spoiler]all along, Gnag has always been hungry for one thing only: a name. And, reading the First Book, they discover that his mother loved him, and she named him. And that is the undoing of his evil and the satisfaction of his soul. In Naming him, the Wingfeathers fight the darkness.[/spoiler] Artists must have Namers. Namers who love you and love your work. They’re not sycophants, but truth-tellers. It may be just one person—that person who delights in your work and tells you the truth about it: needs improvement; love this character; your perspective’s off; ooh, good line; I see the passion in that painting. But we are a forgetful people. Naming is not something that happens once and is done. I was asked recently what the Rabbit Room meant to me and the first image that came to my mind was that of a cairn—a pile of stones that serves as a memorial or a trail marker. In the Old Testament, the Israelites set up cairns to remember God’s faithfulness, his provision, his rescue of them. In the Law, God instituted feasts, regular reminders of who he was, who they were, and their covenant relationship with one another. I encountered the Rabbit Room at a time when I had lost sight of my name: storyteller. I needed this community to remind me. Namers remind us who we are and that our endeavors are worth doing. I once drove an eight-hour car trip with my friend Seth and we spent a good portion of the time figuring out the geography of my fictional kingdom so that I could get the climactic battle to take place in the right area. Seth was a Namer in those hours. He said: it’s worth doing, and it’s worth doing right—let’s figure it out. Diana Glyer uses the term “resonator” to describe “anyone who acts as a friendly, interested, supportive audience” (Bandersnatch). She says that resonators give feedback, praise, encouragement, and offer help and promote an artist’s work. I would call Namers a subset of this category, with the specific role of telling—and reminding—the artist who he is. During her keynote at Hutchmoot 2016, Glyer told a story of a time she was ready to throw in the towel. She’d been trying to get her first book published for years, and had seen no movement. She told her writing group that she was finished, and a friend there told her he saw her walking in to their meeting with a box full of copies of her book. When she told him she couldn’t see that, he replied, “I will see it for you until you see it for yourself.” He named her: author. There are people in the world who do not consider themselves creative. And while I agree with the argument that creativity is a much broader thing than just making art, perhaps some of these people are called to be Namers, rather than artists. Naming is a creative act. The Namers in my life are just as important to the stories I tell as I am. I have one manuscript that will be dedicated to Christine and Saritha, for they were the Namers in a period of darkness when I couldn’t write. They are the ones who reminded me that the story was worth telling. To steal ideas from L’Engle’s book, I would say we are fighting the un-Naming of the universe as we create art. If feasting is an act of war, art is its counterpart. Art is an act of love—to paraphrase Jonathan Rogers: the artist loves his audience and loves his content and wants to introduce the two to one another. But while the artist may be the front line of the battalion, the Namers are the gun loaders, the message runners, the water carriers. The front line would falter and fail without them. [This post was adapted and expanded from a portion of Makers and Thieves: Subcreation and Inspiration, a session at Hutchmoot 2016.]

I started writing songs when I was in High School. In recent years, life, calling, and family have redirected my creative bandwidth to other endeavors—good work I love and happily give myself to. But in recent years a desire to write songs has returned. So I’ve been knocking off the rust a little. Songs from Struck is a short EP inspired by the events described in my book Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death. In the spring of 2013, I developed a blood-borne bacterial infection that destroyed my mitral valve and required urgent open-heart surgery. Struck (the book) chronicles that experience, from the onset of affliction through diagnosis, surgery, recovery, and re-entry. My story is the setting for the book, but it is not the subject. Struck is a book about what happens when affliction and faith collide. I wanted to explore the common experiences afflicted people share—the onset of a sense of frailty, the fear, the grief, the humor, the routines, the new ways of relating to people who love us and are afraid for us and for themselves. I committed myself to the work of paying as much attention as I could to the medical, spiritual, relational, emotional, pharmaceutical, and physical experiences of this journey my failing heart had set me on. I asked a lot of questions and took a lot of notes and used them to write the chapters that make up the book. Along the way, some of those same themes became Songs from Struck. Dance with Me (Track 1) is the song mentioned in Chapter 6: The Letters. My good friend Andy Osenga (who plays all the instruments you hear on the EP except drums, which were played by the amazing Paul Eckberg, and violin, played by the brilliant Daniel Fisher) offered to help me record this song for my wife to mark this season of our marriage. Due to the dangers involved in my surgery, we knew we needed to record my vocals before I went under. I’ll never forget when Andy said, “Let’s get your vocals now, and I’ll take care of the rest.” That was the same day I gave him the letters I had written to my wife and children, and asked him to hold them for me. It was a holy moment, and a bold responsibility for him to assume on my behalf. I sang this vocal while I was still hooked up to an IV antibiotic pump. The shaker in the chorus is actually one of my many pill bottles.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/01-Dance-with-Me.mp3 The Ballad of Andy Catlett (Track 2) is inspired by Wendell Berry’s short novel Remembering, which explores themes of anger and forgiveness discussed in Chapter 11: Tornado in a Trailer Park. Berry’s novel powerfully unpacks what it is like to suffer an affliction that takes away a person’s ability or strength. In Remembering, Andy Catlett loses his right hand in a farming accident. Being right handed, Andy felt he lost his hold on the world. He couldn’t dress himself. He couldn’t even write his own name. He took out his frustrations on those who were trying to love him. Eventually, his wife sat him down and told him that if he wanted to get better, one thing he would have to do would be to ask her to forgive him for how he was treating her. All the anger and indignation of being a victim rose up inside of him and he thought about leaving her and starting over. But he came to realize that her love for him was an anchor that held him in the one place he belonged—broken as he was. Anger in affliction can be profoundly disorienting. Love is a true north.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/02-The-Ballad-of-Andy-Catlett.mp3 Both Alive (Track 3 – co-written with Andrew Osenga) tells a story based on themes discussed in Chapter 5: The Distance. When someone goes through some kind of suffering, affliction, or loss, those who are close to them go through it too, each in their own way. But even though they’re both struggling through the same thing, they experience it differently—which can create a strange and hard to understand feeling of distance. Often it is the things we share in common that make us feel most distant from one another. This song doesn’t attempt to solve this phenomenon (I don’t know if that’s possible). But it does try to recognize it, describe it, and shine some light on it because there is great power in naming.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/03-Both-Alive.mp3 [Songs from Struck is available on iTunes, Spotify, and here in the Rabbit Room. Use the discount code “Struck” in the Rabbit Room Store to get it for free. You can also pre-order Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death.]

Lately, I have been thinking about the theology of art. Almost certainly this is a bad use of my mind, as I am neither a theologian nor an artist. But I cannot help myself. And I feel compelled to think out loud, as it were, here on the Rabbit Room. At first, I considered writing a bunch of paragraphs making some points about theology and art. Is there a Christian way to do art? One paragraph would say this. Another paragraph would say that. A conclusion would end with such and such. Inevitably I would sound like a pseudo-intellectual frump, though. While I am not a practiced storyteller, it seemed better to me to attempt to work through my thoughts on a theology of art in narrative form. That is how the “Sojourner’s Dilemma” came to be. Perhaps there will be other stories on this theme. Interpretations and discussion are welcome. The Sojourner’s Dilemma Let us call the territory in question Houven. The borders of Houven were established in the Southern Hemisphere sometime in the twelfth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, Houven had disappeared from maps. Throughout its four-hundred-year existence, Houven prospered. In one way more than all others, however, did the territory flourish—its people were creative geniuses. Houvenians were prolific artists, more so than the people of Florence or modern-day Portlandia. Houvenian artists pursued many media. Oil on canvas. Tapestry. They were sculptors and architects and musicians and poets. Yet they were most known for their perfection of pottery. They threw, glazed, and fired plates and bowls and goblets unmatched by any pottery before or any since. It was said that the plates were so gorgeous and of such fine quality that no person eating a meal off of Houvenian dinnerware could become fat. (This seems suspicious to me, because I would think a person enthralled by the dinnerware would lose track of his caloric intake and overeat. But, I am just telling you what was said.) Likewise, Houvenian goblets lacked imperfection. It was said drinking from a Houvenian goblet was the smoothest moment of one’s life. (Whatever that means.) The point is, the Houvenians were master potters. There is a way to create perfect pottery. For four hundred years, Houvenian potters did it. Once a traveling artist from another territory, likely in the Northern Hemisphere, came and sojourned in Houven. Knowing something of the potter’s craft, the sojourner marveled at the Houvenian creations. The proportions were exact. The glaze even. The designs were Platonic. She even pretended one time to be tipsy and dropped a plate, which broke into several pieces. Really the sojourner had had nothing to drink and was in her right mind. But she pretended to stagger when she picked up the pieces and then gaped with amazement at the perfection of the clay exposed by the fracture. She played the scene well, and the Houvenians, thinking she stared at the shard like a drunkard, insisted she go to bed early to sleep off her liquor. The sojourner lay in bed awake that night thinking. Pottery was not her artistic gifting. The sojourner had a lazy right eye that made depth perception impossible and her pottery lopsided. But she was a genius when it came to mixing colors, unmatched by any artist on earth. (The lazy eye meant she kept to abstraction when she painted.) The sojourner lay in bed thinking, and then she determined what she would do. Waiting three days, so the Houvenians would not relegate her ideas to the ignorance produced by a hangover, the sojourner approached the chief potter of the Houvenian potter’s guild. She said, “Chief potter, you are aware, I believe, that it is as an artist from another land that I have come to sojourn with you here in Houven. I have these many days been on the watch, observing the Houvenian artists at work. The painters are expert. The weavers are expert. The sculptors are expert.” The chief potter knew where this was headed, for he had heard praise like this before. He let the sojourner continue. She continued, “The musicians are expert. The taxidermists are expert. The architects are expert. The poets are expert.” She drew in a contemplative breath, “And you, sir, must surely know there is no art in all the world as lovely as the pottery of Houven.” He replied, “Yes.” The sojourner reached into the satchel she had over her shoulder and took out many pieces of canvas. She laid them on the floor in front of the chief potter. He looked down and straightaway began to weep. He had never seen such colors. It overwhelmed him. He said, “I believe my eyes have now seen the perfection of light.” This is going well, thought the sojourner. So she spoke to the chief potter, saying, “Thank you for your praise! If I may appeal to your kindness and to the great keenness of your affections, then can I speak freely? I have seen no pottery more perfect than yours. And you say you have seen no mixture of color as perfect as,” she toed the ground, “mine. Could we not join what happenstance has kept apart? Would not the combination of perfected pottery and perfected color make a work of art more perfect still?” Solemnity was no longer on the chief potter’s face. In fact, he now appeared logical. “Woman,” he inquired. “You are not from Houven?” She shook her head. “Well, then those colors were mixed up somewhere other than Houven. Thus, those colors are not from Houven, are they?” She shook her head again and also made a puzzled brow. “Well, then if I were to allow you to wet Houvenian pottery – which you yourself call perfect – with non-Houvenian color, it could not possibly remain Houvenian or, as I prefer to say, exactly as it should be.” The chief potter then called a guard, which immediately took the sojourner to the Houvenian border and shoved her across. Those armed men stood with menacing looks, waiting for the sojourner to walk away and out of sight. Something like this encounter with the sojourner happened only a handful of times throughout Houvenian history. Each time, the Houvenians banished the intruder and by doing so, for four hundred years, preserved the distinctly Houvenian way of creating art, especially pottery.