What are you looking for?

[Editor’s note: Our theme for today at North Wind Manor’s Opening Week is story, and this evening the Manor will host a Storytellers’ Night with Helena Sorensen, Andrew Peterson, Jennifer Trafton, Doug McKelvey, A. S. Peterson, and Jonathan Rogers. So here’s a piece from Helena about her journey from a flash of inspiration to a completed story in the writing process for her latest novel, The Door on Half-Bald Hill.] I’d forgotten how chaotic it feels in the midst of the research process. I look back at the path that brought me from an initial idea to a completed, printed copy of The Door on Half-Bald Hill and everything falls into sequence. The journey has a beautiful logic to it, as though I always knew where it would end and what it would become. But as I work through the process of building a new world for a new story, I’m reminded that what will later seem purposeful feels in the moment like groping around, wasting time. In these early stages, you don’t know what’s significant and what isn’t, so you gather everything that sparks your interest. At some point, I think, the writer begins to vibrate to a kind of frequency—the frequency of the story—and then things come more quickly. They jump out because they resonate. As the story becomes clearer and purer, everything that doesn’t match the frequency falls away. I don’t know how many times I passed a certain hill on I-24, remarking at the distinct line down the center, before I began to think of it as Half-Bald Hill. It must have been dozens. That’s all it was for some years—a hill beside the interstate. Then one day as I passed, I saw a girl forging an iron chain at the edge of the woods. I saw her in my mind, of course, but that was the beginning of the story. It wasn’t exactly right, but the image resonated. It had a certain energy to it that caused it to stick around. On another unremarkable day, I found a copy of James Stephens’ Irish Fairy Tales at McKay’s Used Books. I’d never heard of Stephens, but the collection was illustrated by Arthur Rackham, and his name I knew. Thinking it might be connected to the girl on the hill, I bought the book, took it home, and read it. It was utterly captivating. I’d never encountered anyone who used language the way Stephens did. His tales were so full of passion and vigor that I thought the characters might crawl out of the book and take over the house. The stories were absurdly violent, full of exaggeration, yet beneath them lay a deep current of joy. These people loved to be alive. And here was the first place I heard of an ancient salmon who ate the hazelnuts that fell into the river and grew as wise as the world. I wondered what sort of people sought knowledge from fish and nuts. What did they value? What did they fear? What had they lost? That’s when the serious note-taking began. I made lists of insults and compliments. How can you not love a people who insult a man by calling him a “lean-hearted, muddle-headed, little-winded, lazy-boned clump”? How can you fail to fall in love with someone who calls you the “pulse of his heart”? This one sentence from James Stephens was enough to send me into raptures: “She thought that crowned only with his curls Crimthann mac Ae was more nobly diademed than are the masters of the world, and she told him so.” (Those last five words!) I read Carmel McCaffrey and Leo Eaton’s In Search of Ancient Ireland and Jean Markale’s The Epics of Celtic Ireland. I started jotting down words like “ogham” and “Fir Bolg” and “Tir na n-Og”. I learned about the Shí and the Many-Colored Land, which are a real part of Irish/Celtic mythology. I read about men who, while harvesting peat in 1984, found a body as well preserved as a mummy. I learned about creeping bogs (they’re real, too) and golden torques and drinking horns and honey mead and the migrations of people groups. I read up on hill forts and ring forts and the Celtic warriors who fought the Romans. I read about druids and about the role of bards in cultures with no written language. You may notice that I began with fairy tales and moved into history, and both were so appealing that I couldn’t let them go. The Door on Half-Bald Hill is overflowing with real historical details that I had no part in creating. But they resonated. They wouldn’t fall away any more than the ancient stories. They seemed bound together. And this is interesting, because it was the same with the people of ancient Ireland. When Christian monks attempted to chronicle Irish history, they found themselves befuddled by the seamless blending of history and mythology. The Irish people saw no problem with blurring the lines between life and death, between fact and myth. “If they can do it,” I thought, “why can’t I?” At this point in the research process, I had the chance to travel to Ireland. I went to the west coast, to a region called The Burren. I hiked with friends along the Cliffs of Moher and took a ferry to some of the islands off the coast. The islands were mazes of drystone walls, and on Inishmore there was a ring fort that backed up to a cliff. It was marvelous. On this wild edge of the Atlantic, I felt something I had never felt before. It was a sense that the land was speaking, telling its stories. I was almost certain that if I sat by a brook and listened long enough, the water would tell me everything I longed to know. I’ve never been to a place so saturated with its own history or so clear in its sense of itself. We visited a portal tomb (a dolmen). It’s nothing more than three enormous flat rocks in the shape of a table, but I challenge you to stand beside one and not believe there are doors between worlds. I took pictures of the dolmen and made sketches of drystone walls and flew back to Tennessee with my mind abuzz. Maybe the world of The Door on Half-Bald Hill is not just a world I loved but one I came to know, though I hope you won’t quiz me on details unless my notebooks are nearby. Perhaps there is no great distinction between knowing and loving, and that’s what the research process is about. Helena Sorensen I read about the hag who drops stones from her apron as she flies, and the fallen stones are hills. I read about the belief that the fairy folk “cannot pass cold iron,” and the ways people used iron to deter creatures from other worlds. I stumbled on the word “ollamh,” and then I couldn’t help myself. I’d seen this before and I had to know more about the roles of bard, ovate, and druid. I spent ages on druidry.org. I discovered the druidic year, the eight-fold wheel, and all of a sudden my story had an outline (a circular one!). I marked the eight celebrations on a huge sheet of blank paper and filled in the details. I learned that Halloween is based on the ancient celebration of Samhain, the most important feast of the Celtic year, when the doors between worlds are open. (Can you see it? Can you hear it? It’s coming together, ringing more true every minute. The story has a framework, a setting, a people. It has its lead characters. It’s becoming itself.) In Padraic O’Farrell’s Irish Fairy Tales, I discovered the banshee, hungry grass, and the puka. I began to name characters, and I love this part of the process because I always build characters out of the meanings of names. “Barra,” for example, means “spear.” “Engl” means “light.” “Brennan” means “sorrow.” Idris means “prophet.” His is the only Arabic name in the story. I decided the narrator should be the bard. Who better than the bard to tell a story?! But I could not forget the young woman in chains. And then I thought about those fairy folk who cannot pass through cold iron. (Can you see it?! It’s close now!) Because these people’s lives were so connected to the land, I needed to know the land. I studied trees and tree lore, herbs and herb lore, lunar charts, and the process of making clothes and food and weapons from the resources that might have been available. I learned that hazel branches were used for wands, that holly repels lightning, that the oldest known yew tree has been standing for 3,000 years. I made lists of flowers. I learned the many uses of gorse. I considered the ways Zinerva might be able to hurt someone without being caught. I stumbled on the metonic cycle, a 19-year cycle that unites the solar and lunar years (because 19 is a multiple for both). I built a history for the Antae (Those Who Remain), attempting to blend history and mythology and evoke the same feelings I’d experienced when I read James Stephens’ collection. I worked hard to shape the people—the beautiful, suffering people who have run out of ideas, who see their doom hurrying to meet them and yet refuse to give up. It’s for love of them that I fight through draft after draft. Once I’ve seen their faces, I can’t abandon them. We have to journey together to some good end. Last year I visited one of Jonathan Rogers’ creative writing classes and gave a talk to the students. I discussed that most famous piece of writing advice: “Write what you know.” “Fantasy writers can’t write what they know,” I said. “We have to write what we love.” But when Jonathan heard me talk about the notebooks full of information, the page upon page of lists and history and sketches, he said, “I think you’re writing what you know.” Maybe he’s right. Maybe the world of The Door on Half-Bald Hill is not just a world I loved but one I came to know, though I hope you won’t quiz me on details unless my notebooks are nearby. Perhaps there is no great distinction between knowing and loving, and that’s what the research process is about. It’s a wonderful contradiction! In doing the difficult, sustained work of preparing to write a novel, I am following a path of delight. Click here to view The Door on Half-Bald Hill in the Rabbit Room Store.

As a companion piece to Helena Sorensen’s reflection on the process of world-building in storytelling, here is another conversation about stories of a different kind: the sixth installment of “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” a special summer series of Jonathan Rogers’s Habit Podcast in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. This week, Jonathan is joined by author and professor Jessica Hooten Wilson. Jessica Hooten Wilson is Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She’s a much sought-after speaker and the author of books about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Spring of 2022 will see the release of her new book, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints. The academic world is a rich source of Sad Stories Told for Laughs. In this episode, Jessica Hooten Wilson tells some of hers. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 28 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.

[Editor’s note: Our theme for this last day of North Wind Manor’s Opening Week is film, and this evening we’ll be enjoying a private screening of one of our favorite recent films. Here’s one of the most well-loved pieces from the past few years on the blog that engages with the craft of film: an essay by Jennifer Trafton on the mythologies of Mary Poppins and Bruce Springsteen and what they can teach us about freedom, imagination, and the human longing to reclaim playfulness.] My husband is a crier in movies; I am not. Occasionally something will tug out a tear or two, but it’s rare. And weeping? Unheard of. Confession: I was a blubbering mess by the end of Mary Poppins Returns. I’d been anticipating the sequel for months. The original Mary Poppins is a beloved piece of my childhood, and the trailer promised fidelity to its innocent, playful spirit. When the movie opened to an old-fashioned overture with credits, paintings that hearkened back to Bert’s chalk drawings, and musical riffs on the original score, I settled into my seat for a comfortable ride. So far, so good. Then a cold wind whipped through the park, and a little boy and a lamplighter were straining to control a rogue kite lost in the stormy clouds, and I was not sitting in the theatre anymore. I was a child on that grassy hill, staring up at the sky, waiting, breathless, yearning with all my might to see her burst through. She’s coming. She’s coming. And when Mary Poppins appeared, following the kite string down to us, I started to cry. You’ve come back to me. Oh, how I’ve missed you. It was an intensely and unexpectedly personal moment. And I basically didn’t stop crying for the next two hours. My own reaction shocked me. This wasn’t just nostalgia. Nostalgia is what I felt when an aging Han Solo and Chewbacca burst into the worse-for-wear Millennium Falcon in The Force Awakens, or even when Dick Van Dyke burst into the bank at the end of this movie, prancing on the desk like Bert the Chimney Sweep reborn. But I didn’t need Han, or Bert. I needed Mary. Desperately. And what I discovered when she came flying through that cloud was that the change of face meant nothing to me; it wasn’t Julie Andrews I was longing for. It was the character. Mary Poppins herself. Or perhaps something else, something Mary pointed to—something I glimpse through her. I sat down this week to write a review of the movie, a defense against the critics who’ve been grumbling about it—to compare it to the original movie, or to other recent crowd-pleasers like La La Land (which I loved) and The Greatest Showman (which I hated). But a sudden weariness overcame my soul. I will let others do those things. I’m no film critic. I’m a storyteller. And the truth is, I loved this movie beyond the reach of all criticism. Sometimes art is a beautiful lake we stare into deeply, and sometimes it is a stream that carries us forward, and it’s worthwhile to look through and past the art to what it is carrying us toward, and to stop and wonder—why? I often find myself reacting to a movie, or a story, or a song, or a painting as if I am a detective looking for clues to a great mystery, or Hansel and Gretel searching for breadcrumbs to lead them through a dark wood. I think the better the art, the more universal the clues, and the best way to respond is to call back to others behind you on the path, “Ho, there! I found another! Have a look!” Sometimes even flawed art, or art that seems mediocre or forgettable to other people, drops personal bread crumbs for me, like slips of paper God has stuck into a crack in my wall: an obscure out-of-print novel, for instance, pilfered from my mother’s bookshelf decades ago, which as far as I can tell no one on earth seems to have read but me, and which certainly no one on earth loves more. I won’t tell you the title because it would spoil the little secret between me and God. I happen to think the new Mary Poppins movie is excellent art, well-written, well-crafted, well-acted, and that it has something universal, not just personal, to say. But I’m not going to try to convince anyone of that. It doesn’t matter. Instead, I want to call back to my fellow travelers on the path and tell them of the bread crumbs I’ve found, because perhaps these aren’t only for me. Tucked away in my library of children’s book paraphernalia is the transcript of a talk P. L. Travers gave at the Library of Congress in 1966, in which she described her friendship with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, her fascination with the archetypes and meanings of old wives’ tales, and her gradual realization that the flying nanny in her imagination had flown straight out of the world of myth and fairy tale; that she had a family tree. An editor friend remarked to her that Mary Poppins, “had she lived in another age, in the old times to which she certainly belongs, would undoubtedly have had long golden tresses, a wreath of flowers in one hand, and perhaps a spear in the other. Her eyes would have been like the sea, her nose comely, and on her feet winged sandals.” But having come to the modern age, she arrived in proper English dress, umbrella in hand. The denouement—the gift of the nanny-goddess-fairy-angel—is a sky opening, a door opening, something that was bound finally coming loose again. Jennifer Trafton Travers was tapping into primal human longings—longings that find embodiment in larger-than-life beings who visit us from beyond the veil of our world and bring a bit of wisdom or magic, a spoonful of sugar or of salvation—Superman, Doctor Who, Greek gods, Celtic fairies, angelic messengers. As Tolkien would say, she was drawing her ingredients out of the great Cauldron of Story that is swirling with the images, characters, and conflicts that have haunted the human psyche for thousands of years. Mary Poppins flew out of the Pot and has passed back into it again, and if we retell her story in new ways we do so as Cooks tending a sacred stew. When you play with archetypes you are playing with fire, and you can’t complain when the fire rages out of your control. I am sorry, P. L. Travers, but Mary Poppins isn’t yours anymore. She was a feral thing, always—a wild being from the realm of myth, and she belongs to the world now. She belongs to me. One of the things Walt Disney added to the Pot when he got his hands on Travers’ character was, I think, the fact that she comes for the adults as much as she comes for the children. It is a sign of the angst and disenchantment of our modern world that the theme of grown-ups reawakening to the wonder of childhood has become a sentimental cliché. Find your inner child again! Remember the magic! But what does that even mean? Adults realize they are missing something, longing for something that they’ve lost—but, I suspect, they don’t really know how to define it. I find the language of childlike “wonder,” as it’s often used, unhelpfully vague. It so easily descends into whimsical cuteness, and certainly Disney as a domesticator of fairy tales is sometimes guilty of that. I don’t think “wonder” is enough, but I’ll come back to that in a minute. In Mary Poppins Returns, Mary is no Superman. She’s not there to save the family from their circumstances. The subplot of the imminent foreclosure, the missing share certificate—all of that is beside the point. The crisis is that Michael Banks has put aside his childhood memories, his paintings, his imagination in his grief over the death of his wife and the subsequent collapse of his well-ordered little world. His children have had to grow up too much and too quickly in order to take care of him. They’ve become the adults in the family, as they quickly assure the nanny they don’t think they need. (“Well, we’ll see what we can do about that,” quips Mary Poppins). That is the conflict; the resolution has nothing to do with the house, except in so far as the house is, throughout the movie, the embodiment of the lost mother: “She’s everywhere here.” What I love about the movie is not just that it’s about the rediscovery of imagination (music to a children’s book writer’s ears), but that, in each successive scene and song, it unpacks slowly the variety of gifts that imagination offers us, even in—especially in—our grief and confusion and need: Imagination frees us from the tyranny of logic and enables us to see life as an adventure (“Can You Imagine That”). It turns us upside-down in order to give us a new perspective on broken things (“Turning Turtle”). It helps us see behind outward appearances (“A Cover Is Not the Book”). It reconciles us with mystery, including the mystery that what is lost is not lost forever, though we cannot see it now, and that spring will return even though it lies beneath the snow (“The Place Where the Lost Things Go”). It offers light when the path ahead is uncertain, helping us to rise out of the gloom and envision new possibilities (“Trip a Little Light Fantastic”). It lifts us in hope above the past into a future that has not yet been written (“Nowhere to Go but Up”). After such revelations, a physical house is just the gravy. The denouement—the gift of the nanny-goddess-fairy-angel—is a sky opening, a door opening, something that was bound finally coming loose again. Reaching middle-age has felt to me like walls closing in—like that scene in the garbage compactor in the first Star Wars movie, or like Alice when she nibbles the cake and grows too big for the White Rabbit’s house. Life feels scrunched. Years whiz by. Worries press and pinch. Bones ache. Dreams shrink. I yearn for the space to let my heart and my imagination stretch out again. That’s what childhood feels like to me now: plenty of room. Freedom can be remembered but not seized, or created, or even chosen; it is something granted to us. Someone else has to loosen the chains and throw open the door. Jennifer Trafton Just a few days before we went to see Mary Poppins Returns for the first time (oh yes, there was a second time, and it won’t be the last time), Pete invited a bunch of guys over to watch Bruce Springsteen’s one-man Broadway show on Netflix. Now you have to understand that anyone who knows me would vote me Least Likely To Be a Bruce Springsteen Fan. I’m more of a Peter, Paul, and Mary girl myself. I don’t think I’d ever actually heard a Springsteen song all the way through until I married Pete and he made me sit and listen to every word of “Thunder Road.” But after hearing his gravely voice tell stories of his life with melancholy wit, after listening to the earthy poetry of his ballads that have sprung from a distinctly American cauldron, swirling with heartbreak and hope (“like something’s ending and something’s beginning,” Pete said)—I get it. I totally get why so many people like my husband have heard their own restless ache echoing in the chords of the E Street band. After spinning tales of his childhood in New Jersey, Springsteen remarked, “The one thing I miss in getting older is the beauty of the blank page—so much of life in front of you, its promise, its possibility, its mysteries, its adventures—that blank page just lying there daring you to write on it.” And later, he painted a bittersweet picture of marriage that has haunted me ever since: Cause in this life you make your choices, you take your stand, and you awaken from that youthful spell of immortality where it feels like the road’s gonna go on forever. And you walk alongside your chosen partner with the clock ticking. And you recognize that life is finite, that you’ve got just so much time. And so together you name the things that will give your life in that time its meaning, its purpose, its fullness, its very reality. And this is what you build together, this is what your love consists of. This is your life, you know? And these are things that you can hold onto when the storms come. As they will. That phrase “youthful spell of immortality” lodged itself deeply in my midlife-crisis-weary brain. So perhaps it’s not surprising that it was still there when I watched a certain nanny descend from the sky three days later, and why the two are now inextricably linked to me. “Thinking is linking,” P. L. Travers said in her Library of Congress speech, and my brain is an incurable linker, forever connecting dots no one else sees any connection between, and, well, that’s okay with me. I’m just following the bread crumbs. Mary Poppins came to London, to the heart of a land soaked in centuries of faërie, not to Chicago or Los Angeles; the American landscape feels as unmagical and unmythical as a cigarette butt on the New Jersey turnpike. Springsteen songs sound like sweat and dusty boots and engine grease—but there is the echo of something else as well. Big wheels roll through fields Where sunlight streams Meet me in a land of hope and dreams . . . Dreams will not be thwarted Faith will be rewarded Hear the steel wheels singing Bells of freedom ringing Springsteen fans can correct me, but this is what I, the bystander, the uninitiated, hear in those songs: a blessing—a kind of hallowing—of the very grit and grime of our relentlessly prosaic American lives, while at the same time a longing for something transcendent to redeem them. He, like me in the movie theatre, is stuck on the ground staring at the wide stormy sky above, waiting, breathless, yearning. Sky of blackness and sorrow (a dream of life) Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life) Sky of glory and sadness (a dream of life) Sky of mercy, sky of fear (a dream of life) Sky of memory and shadow (a dream of life) Your burning wind fills my arms tonight Sky of longing and emptiness Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life The point—the connection between these dots in my brain—is not really childlike wonder as much as childlike freedom. It is freedom we long for. The open sky. The open door. The open road. We were born to run. Wonder is easy to recapture, I think. And forget again, and recapture, and forget. The problem is not our capacity for wonder, per se, but our capacity, period. We run out of space. We are giant Alices in a shrinking rabbit house. We are Luke and Han and Leia struggling to wedge a saving grace into the rapidly closing walls of our lives, our hearts. We are characters in a Springsteen ballad wishing we could just throw a suitcase in the trunk, get out of this smothered town, and drive somewhere, anywhere, to the promised land. Our blank pages are cramped with scribbled failures. It is fear that crowds us—endless worries over money or health or family, the threat of foreclosures, responsibilities and cares that cast looming shadows over our fleeting days. It is our very mortality that crowds us—dead mothers and dying dreams. “Live life as if you’re going to die tomorrow,” we’re told. “Memento Mori.” The clock is ticking. And I think, Of course, and then, What a horrible way to have to live. There’s no room to play when you’re on death row. Freedom can be remembered but not seized, or created, or even chosen; it is something granted to us. Someone else has to loosen the chains and throw open the door. A nanny. A time lord. A superhero. A droid. An angel. A Messiah. In his wonderful little book Theology of Joy, Jurgen Moltmann quotes an old slave spiritual: “How can I play when I’m in a strange land?” In order to truly enjoy life, to laugh without burden and without fear, we must be free. “Only the innocent, namely children, or those liberated from guilt, namely the beloved, are able to play,” Moltmann observes. When we play, create, imagine even within our bondage, we anticipate the day when the chains will finally come off. “We discover with a laugh that things need not at all be as they are and as we have been told they have to be. When the fetters are suddenly removed, we try to walk upright.” Without this clear hope, without the actual promise of a future liberation, all the messages in the world about finding our inner child or reawakening childlike wonder are nothing but sentimental nostalgia. Moltmann warns, “Games [and I might add, Disney movies] become hopeless and witless if they serve only to help us forget for a while what we cannot change anyway.” But Christ suffered so that we might laugh again, he writes, and our memories of childhood offer us the gift of images of a new creation—brief experiences of innocent trust and unhindered joy that foreshadow what is to come. “Life is not a struggle but a prelude, not preparatory labour but a preview of the future life of rejoicing.” I realized after I left the theatre that Mary Poppins is the patron saint of those of us who are called to nurture the imaginations of children—all the children, not just the chronological ones. It starts with them, perhaps, but it doesn’t end with them. “I’ve come to look after the Banks children,” she says when she arrives. “Us?” the kids respond. “Oh yes, you too.” If there’s one theme that links both the old and the new Mary Poppins movies, it’s that you can’t get through to the adults unless you get through to the children first—and even when they grow up, they will need new children to remind them. For we do need children to remind us, not to look backward in nostalgia, but to look forward to a freedom that childhood merely prefigures. Art—imagination—has the power to temporarily let us romp on the other side of the prison door, and audiences of Mary Poppins Returns were given the gift of two hours to rest in pure, childlike delight, to experience a tiny glimpse of what will someday become our own happy denouement: A beloved, long-missed face, a dance in the sky together, and then, a return—to a familiar home suddenly made new. “I remember! It’s all true! Every impossible thing we imagined . . .” I’m looking to the clouds. I’m waiting, holding my breath. Maranatha. Come back soon.

[Editor’s note: As a companion piece to Jennifer Trafton’s essay this morning on the magic of Mary Poppins, here’s a conversation about the craft of scoring films with Emile Mosseri, known most recently for his work on Minari and The Last Black Man in San Francisco.] At this point, Emile Mosseri has every reason to avoid what “terrifies” him. As the Oscar-nominated composer for Minari along with myriad other projects—including The Last Black Man in San Francisco, season two of Homecoming, and Kajillionaire—Mosseri is undoubtedly going to become a go-to composer, an artist for whom work will come calling to fill his time and consume his energy. But Emile says that’s not quite enough. That’s not to say he’s ungrateful for the work or humbled by the process. The opposite is true. However, there’s also an internal drive, pushing him to create something deeply personal—something all his own. On this episode of The Resistance, we spoke with Emile to hear more about the devastating beauty of Minari, his journey to becoming a composer, and the tension of working toward someone else’s creative vision versus his own. Click here to listen to this episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast. P.S. In case you missed it, click here to read Jennifer Trafton’s beautiful reflection on the magic of film in Mary Poppins Returns and what it can teach us about freedom, imagination, and the human longing to reclaim playfulness.

For the past year, we’ve been hard at work developing Every Moment Holy as an app for iOS devices, and we’re happy to announce that today that work comes to fruition! Click here to download it now. Author Douglas McKelvey’s hope for Every Moment Holy (as well as our own) is to draw attention to the sacred nature of seemingly mundane moments in life, and while the book does a beautiful job of presenting these liturgies, it’s often difficult to have the bound copy on hand for all the moments in which one of these prayers might be wanted. So to the end that these prayers might be ready at hand when needed, we present the Every Moment Holy app. You’ll find it pre-loaded with a healthy dose of free liturgies the moment you install it (download it for free in the Apple App Store). These pre-loaded liturgies include those for table blessings, morning coffee, liturgies of the hours, and more, and all the rest of the liturgies in Every Moment Holy, Volume 1 are available to purchase individually, or in collections by topic, or as the entire volume. The content of Volume 2 will follow in the next few weeks. But the word liturgy carries with it a sense of communal experience, which is why many of the prayers are meant for use with a group of other people. So in the app we’ve included the ability for users to share their liturgies with those around them whenever necessary—even if the others around them don’t have the app itself. You can text a liturgy or share it via social media. Our hope is that this will allow these prayers to find their ways more fully into the lives of those who need them. There are other features to explore, but for now we’ll let you discover those on your own. If you’re an Android user, don’t despair. We’re eager to provide an app for that ecosystem as well, and we’re currently exploring options for ways to fund that development.

My 11 year-old son desperately wants a dog. It is a frequent topic of conversation with many natural on-ramps. Every dog we pass in the park merits a remark on its size, coloring, or temperament—all in comparison, of course, to what his future dog would be like. One thing has become increasingly clear to me through all our conversations on the subject: the criteria my son chiefly considers in a dog isn’t one of cuteness or cuddliness. It’s one of communion. He deeply desires fellowship with another living thing who will like him, while also being unlike him. In his superb lecture On Fairy Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien argues that my son’s desire strikes upon something essential to fairy stories (as well as the human condition). Tolkien says, “[Here is] one of the primal ‘desires’ that lie near the heart of Faërie: fairy stories scratch at mankind’s innate itch for unhuman communion—for meaningful interactions with living beings who are not like us.” If you doubt whether you have that itch, just ask yourself this question: Have you ever given in to the Doctor-Dolittle temptation of talking to animals? Whether it’s the robin singing in the hedge or the neighbor’s dog over for a visit, how long can you suppress the Oh, hello there! desire for some small but meaningful interaction? In fairy stories, we feel anew the bittersweet sting at what was lost as well as the hopeful wonder at what might one day be restored. K. J. Pugh It occurs to me that one can blame Eve for a lot of things, but one cannot blame her for conversing with a non-human creature. Why? Because the same desire for communion—both with angels and animals—lives on in us as well. This desire is so deeply rooted that no number of earthly disappointments can completely dislodge it from our hearts. We still talk to the animals, no matter how unsatisfactory our past experiences have been. Here we find another application for the famous maxim of C. S. Lewis, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Christianity teaches that we were indeed made for another world. The Bible promises us a world renewed, which will perfectly fulfill all the deepest longings of our hearts. There will be an age to come when “the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6 KJV). More than just hold congress with angelic powers, the Bible says that we shall judge them (1 Corinthians 6:3). Fairy stories serve us best when they stir our hearts with longing for this kind of restoration. When they offer us glimpses of broken fellowship that will one day be rekindled. When they give us foretastes of a world reordered by God, where good things can run wild. Tolkien understood how certain stories could produce these feelings in our hearts. This is probably one of the reasons why he made the following distinction in On Fairy Stories: The magical understanding by men of the proper languages of birds and beasts and trees, that is much nearer to the true purposes of Faërie. But in stories in which no human being is concerned; or in which the animals are the heroes and heroines, and men and women, if they appear, are mere adjuncts; and above all those in which the animal form is only a mask upon a human face, a device of the satirist or the preacher, in these we have beast-fable and not fairy-story. —J. R. R. Tolkien For Tolkien, it was essential that human and beast share one world together—even though their fellowship within that one world is almost entirely broken. What lies near the heart of fairy stories, therefore, is the restoration of creatures formerly sundered from one another. Human from beast, elf from dwarf, ent from entwife—all those who have grown estranged through their own selfish conceit and the devious works of the Enemy. In fairy stories, we feel anew the bittersweet sting at what was lost as well as the hopeful wonder at what might one day be restored. These are the kinds of stories that I want to read, write, and pass on to my children. My family and I have lived in England and France over the past six years, helping new churches get started. We’ve never had a pet, as our sojourning life in Europe has been far from conducive for keeping one. Thus far, I have been coldhearted and unyielding on this point. But in writing out these thoughts, I feel my own arguments turning on me, like enthusiastic dogs jumping upon their reluctant owner. I can’t fight them off, and I don’t know if I want to any longer. So (to the great joy of my 11 year-old son!), it looks like a four-legged friend will be joining our family in the not-too-distant future. K. J. Pugh is an American who has spent most of his 30s planting churches in Europe with his wife and two lovely kids. Out of this experience, K. J. wrote his first book for Read-Aloud Adventures. He enjoys walking, cycling, and making cups of Yorkshire Tea, as well as inserting quotes from Tolkien and Lewis into casual conversations. Art by Andrew Bosley—click here to visit his website.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan is joined by Doug McKelvey for the seventh installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. Doug McKelvey is best known as the author of Every Moment Holy, “new liturgies for daily life.” He has also been a songwriter and a screenwriter. In this episode, the Sad Stories Told for Laughs series continues with Doug’s stories of fan letters gone wrong, fostering misunderstanding for the sake of humor, and a finger puppet. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 29 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.

[Editor’s note: Hanging above the mantle in North Wind Manor’s library is a starkly beautiful piece of art made by Tim Joyner, in collaboration with the old North Wind Manor. See, this work is comprised of found elements from the Manor as the Rabbit Room staff knew it from before it was restored: fragments and pieces of a history we wanted to preserve. The finished work is called As It Is, and one of the greatest joys of Opening Week was hearing Tim describe how it came to be, from conception to completion. Here is the text that he read to us.] As it Is depicts the original Rabbit Room in The Eagle and Child. It snapshots the top edge of the dark oak paneling and the firelight-honeyed plaster—the spot right above where the heads of the Inklings would be gathered in discussion. The subtle swirls of soot call to mind the ideas rising like the pipe smoke of the friends just out of view. Here they convive, naming the stuff of earth and dreaming the stuff of heaven. Lewis invites us “Further up! Further in!” into the ever-deeper nature of all created things. Barfield shows us the Word hiding in the word. Williams reminds us of the love that binds the whole world together. Tolkien offers recovered vision that sees magic and wonder and holiness latent in Creation and sub-creation alike. Their imaginations, friendship, and work claim this space as sacred, but never sanctimonious. They remain grounded by pure enjoyment of the smell of the fire and good beer, the earthiest and simplest pleasures. In short, these were men who understood things as they are and as they one day will be—earth as it is in heaven. Their way of looking at the world is echoed in the pigment choices for this piece. For the most part, these are simple and raw materials. But even just a little attention, a little care, brings out their deeper essence. Just to name the pigments is a sort of poem, or even a spell: Oak Char, Gold Leaf Acorn Cap Ink (add a few drops of Oak Lye and watch it ease into a rich auburn) Iron Glimmer (yes, that’s really what it’s called) Mica Flakes, Copper Flakes Brick, Soil, and Chips of Paint from North Wind Manor Lamp Black, Verdigris, pickled Rock Tripe Oak-Leaf and Acorn Dust Oak Gall Ink (brewed from a recipe used by the old Illuminators) It really doesn’t take much to coax magic from the mundane. And if even dirt and ash and last year’s decaying leaves are brimming over with magic and beauty and story, just waiting to astound and inspire, then how much brighter the glories hidden in you and me as icons of the Living God. You might notice that many of the pigments for this particular painting are derived from the oak tree. This was an intentional choice, an attempt to unveil the hidden glories of the oak, to join the Inklings in their work of seeing the redeemed, truer nature of earthly things. As It Is Tim Joyner, 2020 natural and found pigments on board-mounted paper 24” x 48” To know Oak, we start by remembering Ramandu’s lesson: the oak tree is not roots and trunk, branches and leaves—that’s just what it’s made of. It’s rippled light filtering through leaves, home to furred and feathered hosts, dappled shade on a hot afternoon. It’s fragile shoots, flexible saplings, unshakeable giants. It’s acorn meal and depression-desperation coffee and firewood and furniture. It’s the paneling of the Rabbit Room. It shares the knowledge of afternoons-in-late-summer-sun and autumn-evenings-by-the-fire with wine and whiskey. And it’s full of secret colors. There’s the velvety black of charcoal, still warm with the memory of flame. Then there’s purplish oak-gall-black, born of the symbiosis of tree and wasp, the ink that for so many centuries was used to copy sacred texts. Acorn cap ink is the lively, quicksilver gray of the squirrel’s tail—but add the dead, dull gray of oak ash and it alchemizes into the luminous brown of a polished acorn. Oak is also the stories we tell of it. It’s Boo’s oak, the Hundred-Acre Wood, the wisdom of Treebeard, Zeus’s oracle, and the oaks of Mamre where Abraham ate with God. Before we can see the oak as it is, we must recover the knowledge of all it has been and will ever be. To truly know any part of a thing, we must in some sense know all of it. Of course this is an endless quest (“for now we know in part”). This was work at which the Inklings excelled and that the Rabbit Room community has continued. As this community gathers at the hearths of North Wind Manor (or in their own homes and churches and places of comfort around the world), though separated by time and space, I imagine us joining those men in a conversation; our dreams, ideas, friendships, and songs rising to swirl and meld with their own. We are sub-creators, sub-artists, sub-knowers—made in the image of the Artist who knows us, knows the secrets of our flesh, the intimacies of our stories. He reveals all the truth of what we are and what we are destined to become. And when he sees us as we are—in the fullness of all that we are—the histories that shaped us, the bare truth of our present selves, the hope of what me might and will become—he sees in our simple and raw selves hidden glory, secret colors waiting to be coaxed out and burnished and enjoyed. May we be on earth as we will be in heaven. May it be on earth as it is in heaven.

Today we get to share with you the first of a new series of topical discussions around visual art. This category of content has been in mind since the conception of this project and is the main reason behind the name “artists &,” so we’re very excited to share it with you. Aptly, this maiden voyage of content is called “artists & the pit of despair,” where Jamin Still and Kyra Hinton talk with illustrator, author, and educator John Hendrix about the arc of every long project. Click here to join the artists & group on Facebook. Click here to begin with the first installment of artists & their stories.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan is joined by Buddy Greene and Jeff Taylor for the eighth installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. For a decade and a half, Buddy Greene and Jeff Taylor have been making music together in a wide variety of venues and a wide variety of costumes. They are remarkable as performers, but even more remarkable is their friendship and good humor. As Jeff says, even a worst-case scenario performance is redeemed when it becomes a sad story told for laughs shared between friends. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 30 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.

Hutchmoot: Homebound is not just for adults. Right alongside the deep discussions and bookish hallways is an entire space dedicated to children called the Playroom (not to mention scavenger hunts and kazoos, which are for the enjoyment of children and adults alike). What might a child find in the Playroom, you ask? Well, we are only too glad to tell you. This year, visitors of the Playroom will be treated to special concerts from Randall Goodgame and Michael J. Tinker, episodes of The Slugs & Bugs show and Adventures of the Juniper, talks from favorite authors like S. D. Smith, Randall Goodgame, James Witmer, Carolyn Leiloglou, and Dorena Williamson, illustrators John Hendrix and Ken Priebe, and even a Poetry Jam hosted by Jennifer Trafton and featuring jam-related kids’ recipes demonstrated by Rachel Matar. Basically, it’s going to be tons of fun. Rabbit Room Members, Guess What! We’ll have some fun, special Hutchmoot content for members again this year! As for what it is? You’ll just have to wait—or become a member—to find out. If you want to learn more about what membership means you can read about it on the blog or on our Become a Member page.

For more than a decade, Thomas McKenzie was a beloved member of the Nashville community (and far, far beyond). Yesterday, on August 23rd, 2021, he was killed in an interstate crash along with his oldest daughter, Charlie (Ella). This loss is unreal and unfathomable to many of us. He was husband to Laura, father to Charlie (Ella) and Sophie, pastor to the Church of the Redeemer in Nashville, author of books beloved to many, speaker at nearly every Hutchmoot, lover of stories (especially movies), lover of the Body of Christ the Church, and my favorite person on earth from whom to hear the Gospel preached. He was also my dear friend. He was the reason I met my wife, and he married us. For the past decade, Thomas and I met every Wednesday at Waffle House for “Dude Breakfast,” along with my brother, Jonathan Rogers, Randall Goodgame, and a wealth of others down through the years, folks like Steve Guthrie, John Cal, Josh Shive, Rob Wheeler, even my dad. Thomas, though, was the anchor. If I overslept on a Wednesday, it was Thomas’s text that woke me up wondering where I was, and I’d hightail it to the booth by the window (usually) to order up my eggs and fixin’s, served by our delightful waitress, Moe. Thomas knew all the waitresses better than I did and he liked to keep them on their toes by refusing to settle into a “usual” (the man wasn’t afraid of a Waffle House cheeseburger at any time of day). And so for a decade we told our stories and shared our burdens and wondered over just about anything there was to wonder. There was a lot of laughter. It was good. Of stories told over eggs and waffles is fellowship formed. Thus has it been since time began. Thus it was for us. Thus will it be. It seems trite now to recount all the ways Thomas loved us, all the ways he loved his wife, all the ways he loved his daughters. Those who grieve nearly always make such accountings. Yet, I think anyone who knew Thomas would tell you he was a breed apart. As a pastor he was blunt, matter of fact, and could be shockingly irreverent, yet his love for Christ and his church was apparent beyond the rags of his indisputable humanity. And it was those ragged edges that drew many to him. It was those ragged edges that made us love him, because he was also kind and thoughtful and gracious in ways that never ceased to surprise and amaze me. He loved us as Christ did, and we did our best to return the favor. I received the Eucharist from his hands untold times. I admired his commitments to kindness and justice and love of his neighbors. He often spoke up when others thought he should have been silent, and the world is better for his voice and its wisdom. I can say with certainty that Thomas McKenzie is one of the reasons for my love of the Gospel today. I saw it in him. And because of him I wanted people to see it in me too. But yesterday his part in the epic story of Creation came to an abrupt halt. His thread in the tapestry was clipped and tied off. And for now, we go on without him. The fellowship is broken, and we cannot now know the full measure of his contribution to the great Story. But I see evidence of it everywhere. And while I trust in that day when the Storyteller will weave all things right and new, today the world is plainly broken and what I know seems so much smaller than what I don’t. This I know: My friend, long present, is now absent, and the unique shape he filled in our lives, in my life, no other human can assume. Damn death. And yet here we are. So be it. Fare forward, Thomas. Not fare well, but fare forward. Forward into the fulfillment of promises made when the world was young. I’ll meet you in the renewal of all things. There will be eggs and waffles. Until then, I will miss your laughter. I will miss your mostly-right opinions on movies. I will miss your wake up texts for Dude Breakfast. I’ll miss my dungeon master on D&D nights. But amidst all the things I’ll miss, I also recall how he loved his daughter and I find myself thinking over and over again that maybe in some way, by leaving us here, he was present, ready, and eager to escort his beloved child into the throne room of the King. When I try to see it in that light, I find I’m willing, perhaps, to carry my own missing of my friend a feather lighter. Maybe. Maybe not. It seems a thin comfort. Certainly it’s a mystery, and we do not sit well with mystery. I don’t know. Today I’m in a studio in Nashville recording a piece of a new stage musical. In the room next to me as I write this, a group of wildly talented musicians and singers are piecing together a song out of nothing, bringing art out of thin air, order out of chaos. The song they’re singing is called “Broken Things,” and it feels truer today than it did yesterday. “We’re in the business of broken—” goes the tune. “Holding our world up with clothespins / We might never break, but we’re still incomplete / in the business of broken things.” The song winds to a close and a character says “We run an orphanage. We’re proof that things have gone very wrong indeed.” That’s the business of hope: broken things. And days like today make it clear that things are off the rails. We’ve got our work cut out for us. Oh God, there’s a new widow in the world. Our hearts are broken with her and for her. And only a mystery can heal them. Put me to work, Lord. Let me be about the business of the broken until it’s made right. As Thomas blessed all of us so often at the close of the Sunday liturgy, I offer back this blessing for him: “Thomas and Laura and Charlie and Sophie, may the peace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. And may the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be with you, and remain with you always.” Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.

We have been eagerly awaiting the day when we can announce a brand new book from Rabbit Room Press, and that day is finally here! Now available for pre-order is Letters from the Mountain by Ben Palpant. Read on to learn more about Ben, his new book, and our upcoming online course where we will read and explore it together. In this memoir of the craft, Ben Palpant unpacks a lifetime of wisdom gained through the long, hard work of learning to write and to live well. Delivered as a series of letters from father to daughter, he patiently and gracefully paints a vision of what it means to enter into one’s creative work as an act of generative obedience—an act that blesses the writer, the work itself, and the world that receives it. Palpant reveals the creative process not only as an act of love and attentive artisanship, but as the work of shaping a life and a heart that points toward the coming of a Kingdom and the renewal of Creation itself. Upcoming Online Course Think of this reading group as a chance to read over the author’s shoulder as he pens letters to his daughter on matters of faith and creativity in community. It’s your opportunity to enter the intimate friendship that they share, to ask questions that spring up along the way as they discuss living generatively, and to be shepherded both by the author and by each other as we learn to use the gifts God has given us for the life of the world. You’ll also be given a prompt each week to make something beautiful (in word, art, music, or whatever form you’d like) and share with the group. Letters from the Mountain is not just for artists and writers. It’s a book that addresses the issues every Christian faces: learning to see what God sees, handling criticism, facing anxiety, the gift of the mundane, dealing with self-doubt, and much more. Click here to register for the online course. Praise for Letters from the Mountain “Sometimes you can read just one sentence and know that the writer has a gift. Ben Palpant is one of those people. This book on writing, framed as a series of letters to his daughter, is a window into his big, generous, and pastoral soul. There’s a lot of wisdom here, and I’m grateful for the way Palpant is using his gift to give it away.” —Andrew Peterson, singer/songwriter, author of the Wingfeather Saga “This book is a beautiful work of grace, bound by love and fueled by art, a blessing in every sense to the reader. I enjoyed every word.” —Jeff Goins, author of The Art of Work “In the beautiful epistolary tradition evocative of Rilke, Ben Palpant examines what it means to be an attentive writer of faith, and to pass the creative commending of God’s mighty works to a future generation.” —Carolyn Weber, author of Surprised by Oxford About the Author BEN PALPANT is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and one dog named Chesterton. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest. Pre-order Letters from the Mountain here.

Andy Gullahorn is a fixture on the Behold the Lamb of God tour. I’ve watched him play and sing nearly every year at the Ryman, marveling at the clarity of his voice, his touch, dynamics, tone, and sweet sense of taste on the guitar. He seems to do everything with ease, a kind of graceful, offhanded carelessness. Andy gave me a copy of Fault Lines after the Ryman show in 2016. On the way home, I put it in my van’s CD player and heard the first cut, “Not Too Late.” I’m a listener first, a lover of music, so when I first listen to an album I don’t hear it as a musician, trying to figure out chords or structure or rhyme schemes. What hits me initially is the “sonic landscape” and the lyrics. Fault Lines is an album to explore; it stands the test of repeated listening. The landscape of Fault Lines is built on Andy’s tone-filled, tasteful guitar playing, but the heart is of course lyrical. Andy’s understated vocals deliver his words with all the power of a trusted friend putting his hand on your shoulder. Driving home that night, I listened: Death has a strong grip, But there’s nothing like the power the hand of God can bring I’ve been to hell, And that’s how I can tell you with authority It’s not too late to change your mind, It’s not too late for the truth this time Not too late to fall on your knees, Not too late for apologies Grace is more than a concept to believe in It’s something more real than your beating heart It runs to the depths of where you are It follows you there, retracing your steps Whispering over and over again… That it’s not too late, not too late, not too late. Halfway through I had tears in my eyes, and when the song ended I hit replay. And this time I noticed the bubbling joy of the guitar lines down underneath, It’s not too late, not too late. Like his vocals, the guitar lines are still understated but they contrast the sparser verses, underscoring the revelation: it’s not too late. I had tears in my eyes again. The next song, “Is It Real?” grabbed me with the opening guitar tones, and then the lyrics began, sung in that same winsome attitude: There’s a man who looks like Donald Trump in front of me in the communion line… I smiled at the image contrasted with the incongruity of soft guitar and a sensitive vocal. As he finished the verse (hilariously written) I burst out laughing. Here’s a unique thing about Andy. He has a singular way of occasionally using an absurd and unexpected image to loosen tight lips and closed-up hearts. You let your guard down. Laughter opens your soul, and then he can put any number of good things in it. The next verse made me reflect and remember. By the end of the bridge I was crying, and by the end I was reflecting again—not just mental reflection but the kind that engages the heart. Fault Lines stayed in my CD player for at least a solid month. I soaked in it every time I drove anywhere. The most obvious words that come to mind about Andy’s music are honesty and grace. It’s honest to the bones, music without pretense in a world addicted to appearance, image, likes, and wanting to seem. His lyrics, singing, guitar playing, arranging, and production are infused with a bald-faced truthfulness, and a devil-may-care sense of ease. There’s a feeling of grace about it all, grace both as the unmerited favor of God and also grace as Jesus had it—the grace of a gymnast or ballet dancer coming from a deep core of strength. Although I’m sure he worked hard on this album, nothing in Fault Lines sounds labored. Everything, including the lyrics, sounds like it just fell out of Andy’s mouth or hands. C. S. Lewis wrote, “A sentence must both sound and say.” Andy’s words roll off the tongue like a conversation but carry images that go deep into the listener. He said “You’re never gonna lose my love. Go ahead and try.” So you drank from the river Until it all ran dry And you run from your conscience As fast as you can ‘Cause you’re going to Hell Again and again But oh, even then There is hope There is grace Even Hell is not a God-forsaken place From a musical perspective, the arrangements never get too big. There’s a temptation in popular music forms to take every song from a quiet beginning to a giant crescendo filled with guitars, keyboards, pounding drums, and singers belting at full lung capacity. This trick can easily turn into a way to manipulate the listener. Andy doesn’t go for manipulation; the simple honesty infusing his music is a much more devastating musical weapon. He maintains a gentle, subtle touch on songs like “I Want to Be Well,” even at their biggest moments. At a high dynamic of the album on “Make It Through,” as he sings harder, with more instruments playing, the production isn’t overdone; everything supports the lyric. Other songs, like “Not Going Anywhere” and “Freedom 2.0” (which, again, will make you laugh and cry), are sparse guitar treatments where the guitar playing, singing, and lyrics will keep your mind and heart engaged. George MacDonald wrote, “Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.” Andy’s music feels like the music of a friend who can be lovingly honest because he’s honest with himself. Listening to Fault Lines will always be a cathartic musical experience for me. If you’ve been wanting an album with depth, humor, insight, memorable melodies, and the real power that comes from honesty and grace, Fault Lines is it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll reflect, and you’ll enjoy a sense of being washed and cleansed. Click here to view Fault Lines in the Rabbit Room Store. And click here to read our first Old Favorites post about Andrew Peterson’s Clear to Venus, here for our second about Arthur Alligood’s One Silver Needle, and here for our third about Sandra McCracken’s “Dynamite.”

[Editor’s note: The newest addition to the Rabbit Room Press catalogue is Letters from the Mountain by Ben Palpant, a memoir of the craft of writing and living delivered as a series of letters to his daughter, Kiale. In this special piece that follows, Kiale interviews Ben about the intersections between art, vocation, family, and faith.] Kiale Palpant: You began writing Letters from the Mountain over two years ago. What’s it like looking back at the origins of the process? And perhaps more importantly, what was the first idea or image or conversation that sparked what would eventually become this book? Ben Palpant: I started writing emails to you when you went off to college as a way of continuing what had long been our habit of talking about the intersection of your faith and your creativity. You’ve been imitating me since you were a little girl. You’d watch me writing at my desk or corresponding with other writers or underlining in the books on my shelf. I’d find you sitting in a corner with one and writing in it with complete seriousness at the age of three or four. Just yesterday, I pulled a book off the shelf and found your old underlines throughout. At any rate, I knew that you would need more than just imitation, you would need guidance if you were to avoid my pitfalls. You have always asked such thought provoking questions. I think it was your questions about creativity and faith as much as my own desire to learn more that forced me to read so much about it. And then, what’s more natural than to pass that knowledge along? And at the end of day, who would I rather write for than my own daughter? KP: It’s interesting hearing your side of those interactions. I mostly remember the admiration I felt for you. In a lot ways, it was inspiring getting to follow in your footsteps and have such a great role model but, as we’ve talked about before, it also came with its own set of pressures. You worked hard to make sure that I was still able to be my own person and have the freedom to explore the things that I felt called to the most without standing in your shadow. I think we’ve been able to navigate a lot of those pressures well, but I am wondering what kind of pressures exist on the other side of that relationship? Do you feel a sense of pressure or tension having a artistic daughter who imitates you? How do you handle that pressure? What is it like when you aren’t just a writer for yourself, but also a writer for me? BP: Hmm, how honest should I be on this one? I’m not quite ready to demythologize the picture you have of your father. Of course, the myth is probably standing on one leg already. I might as well admit to feeling quite overwhelmed, especially early on. But I feel a bit awed by it even to this day. It’s not as if there are easy answers to these kinds of questions on creativity and faith. The older I get, the less confident I feel in my answers. One of the ways that I navigated that pressure to be right in my daughter’s eyes was to offer her principles rather than simplistic answers. Principles allow us to move fluidly with wisdom rather than paint by numbers and I think this area in particular needs that kind of navigation. I wanted my letters to be helpful in navigating some of the practical difficulties that arise, but I also wanted to establish the why. Typically speaking, once we figure out the why, the how follows quite naturally. But I might be veering from your question. The real pressure that every father feels deep down in his bones is the need to be right, to not make mistakes. Generally speaking, the temptation is threaded through every man‘s efforts. Navigating that temptation with my daughter is, I suppose, like navigating it in life. I had to throw off the desire to be praised, the longing to have my preciousness petted. I had to practice living honestly and humbly in front of you. Creativity is a hard and stumbling road up the mountain with periodic vistas to enjoy, but mostly it’s just a long, hard slog. One step and then the next. You have to put your head down and trudge forward. Life is like that, too. You were always so observant and I knew that you would see me trip a lot. On my best days, I did not hide it from you. On my best days, I gave you a chance to see me not only fall, but get up again. That’s life, isn’t it? Quite a bit of falling on your face, but a lot of getting up again in God‘s grace to move forward in the power of his spirit. Living openly in front of people, especially one’s children, is as good a teacher as any, I suppose. But I thought it might be helpful to have something that you could physically pick up and read once I was gone, rather than relying on your memory which might fade with time. That’s a meandering and long answer. I’ll try to behave myself and stay concise in my upcoming responses. KP: Probably mostly from watching you, but also from our conversations, I learned very early on that tripping up in life is an enormous part of creativity. But I believe a large part of your admission of failure involved not just showing me the moments of tripping up but actually celebrating them. Many of my clearest memories are from the moments when you would throw a dinner party over a rejection letter or pat me on the back when I failed an assignment. How did this reversal in technique (from being ashamed of failure to celebrating it) come about in your life? How did teaching me to celebrate failure impact your own ability to cope with it? And how does the act of failure change when it is admitted to others, especially to your daughter? BP: Ah yes, I remember some of those celebrations! Celebrating failure was a great idea that I wish I could claim! Alas, it came from talking to successful people or reading about them. Regardless of their field, failure seemed to be a common denominator. Even the most spectacular failures proved to be steppingstones to growth. One of the most egregious myths about successful artists is that they were born with a level of talent that the rest of us lack. Sometimes that’s true. Most of the time, however, successful artists, like any successful people, have simply finished the work that others dropped at the first sign of opposition. If a person fears failure too much (we all fear failure to some degree or another), that person will not likely accomplish much. True achievement requires not only a high tolerance for failure, but an embrace of it. I wanted my children to learn it sooner than I learned it. As you know all too well, I had high expectations for my kids, but those expectations would have strangled you if I had not embraced failure along the way. To be human is to fail. The most noble and Christlike people I know have learned to turn failure into something beautiful. KP: Well the heart of this book is the idea that we are all traveling up a mountain, watching and following those who have come before us. You quote Antoine de Saint-Exupery at the beginning of the book when he says, “Think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they could do, I can do.’” Obviously some of those people inspired this spirit of celebration, but many of them also inspired your writing and art. If you are this person for me, who are the authors and artists who have served as guides in your life? BP: Yes, yes! I wanted you to know that you’re not alone. That’s what so many other authors have done for me. You are familiar with many of my guides already: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engel, Thomas Howard, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson come to mind. That’s a short list of people who have encouraged me in the old sense of that word—they’ve given me courage. As far as I can tell they haven’t tried to make a name for themselves so much as give their gift away. They’ve also given me different ways to see what God has made beautiful and what I’ve been missing along the way. So they’ve helped me to think better and live better and they’ve been a good example of steady faithful productivity over a lifetime. You have your own list, I’m sure. Who have I missed on my list that you would push to the top? Who are the writers who make you feel less alone? KP: I think this idea of giving courage is really important, and I think it connects to a second part of encouragement and mentorship that you have consistently reminded me of: gratitude. Those who have gone ahead of me have not only taught me how to have courage but have also taught me how to be grateful along the journey, both of which are essential to being able to keep your eyes focused upward on the mountain. Gratitude seems to prevent me from constantly looking down, something that’s easy for me to do when I’m afraid or unsure about who I am or what I am doing. I think my some of my favorite authors—Rainer Rilke, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Maclean, Mary Oliver, Dostoevsky—have shown me the idea of gratefulness and courage, and the people I most admire—like you and mom, my grandparents, my teachers and professors—have shown me how to live those traits out. How do you think this dynamic between people in your life and writers you have read has looked in your life? And perhaps a second, less related question: as our relationship has developed and changed, how have our places on the mountain looked in your life? Have there ever been moments when I gave you a hand up the mountain or has it been pretty consistent? How has this felt for you? BP: I may be misunderstanding your question about the dynamic between people in my life and authors but I think there’s a connection between the direction my parents set in my life and the authors I’m reading along the way. My parents tried to point me in the direction of the mountain and I’m trying to follow it with varying degrees of success. The authors that meant a lot to my parents have had their impact on me as well and I have added to my parents’ list as I climbed behind them. In terms of your second question, I think there is a fluctuation in distance that’s quite natural. Early in your life, the distance was easy to see. As you’ve grown up, that distance has shrunk. There have been distinct moments when I felt that you were right on my heels and might even pass me if I didn’t keep climbing faithfully. It’s one of the most beautiful parts of parenting, to witness your children surpassing you in so many areas. Our job is to continue climbing. It’s not a race. It’s a calling. We’re simply answering the call. What are the ways that your childhood and my parenting helped you hear the call and answer it? KP: Well I think “the call” can be interpreted in a lot of ways. That’s part of the fun in life and also a cause for quite a lot of the confusion found in trying to figure out “calling.” My childhood and your parenting clarified that calling in a couple of ways. The first one was your constant reminder that, at the root of it all, I was called to do very simple things, usually explained by Micah 6:8, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” The second thing that I found growing up was that both you and mom constantly encouraged me in any pursuit I felt drawn to at a certain age, whether that was art or writing or even science. That encouragement helped me feel comfortable with some of this uncertainty around what a calling is, helped me simply enjoy the process of figuring it out. And in the meantime, I tried to fulfill those simple commands in Micah that you both reminded me of constantly. How has being a parent helped you hear the call and answer it? BP: I think parenting has helped me remember some of the things that I shouldn’t forget. Parenting forces the issues. I can’t very well forget the principles that I keep repeating to my children and my children tend to need those reminders on a regular basis. That doesn’t change too much with age. But yes, we feel so much pressure when it comes to “God’s calling” and much of that pressure is entirely unnecessary. Life is full of complications, but much of our calling in life is rather straightforward. I spend some effort in this book to help remind us all of some of those basics. I think by keeping the vision clear and achievable, next steps and practices are likewise more down to earth and achievable. Much of artistry comes down to just getting to work and much of the Christian life is the same. That being said, life has many competing demands and learning to prioritize is a necessary part of growing up. I can’t say I have achieved it, but having children has helped me realize that some of the urgency I felt in other areas of life could not compete with the little souls in front of me. Writing that poem or finishing that novel is important and not to be neglected in the long run, but real people in real time are far more important than the audience I may or may not have for my work. Calling and community are inseparable and we tend to find our calling by seeing the needs within our community and identifying the gifts God has given us to meet those needs. KP: Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about how community shapes creativity and faith, but another part of our ongoing conversation has also touched on the importance of place in our creativity. For instance, rivers are really important to both of us and have dramatically shaped both our imaginations. The memories of you taking me fishing on the St. Joe River have grounded some of the most significant things that I have created and written. How do you think the place and landscape of one’s childhood contributes to creativity, or even further one’s calling? How should Christians, whether as artists or otherwise, pay attention to the place they are in? What are ways they can learn to do that well? BP: Place plays a gigantic role in shaping us and, therefore, in shaping our creativity. Ironically, the impact is so huge that it’s practically invisible to most of us. An author I respect very much even went so far as to suggest that we are shaped by relationships and not by geography. He’s one of the wisest people I know so I feel sheepish disagreeing with him. We are, indeed, shaped by the people around us but we are also shaped by place. How can we not expect a country kid and a kid raised in a slum to be impacted differently by their surroundings? I have difficulty sleeping at night when I travel to cities because I grew up in the silence of countryside. I know people who have a hard time sleeping in the country because it’s so quiet. The quiet is too loud to them. Anyways, I think each of us is shaped by those things and what we make is colored by not only our relationships but our placeness. Someone growing up in the inner city will write differently than someone raised in the jungles of Asia and neither has an advantage over the other. They can be equally excellent. That’s why you should embrace what Faulkner called your “little stamp of native soil.” Explore it. Maximize it. Brand it on your memory. Find in it what is beautiful and redemptive. It’s really about paying attention and we are notoriously bad at it. As an artist or writer, your job is to pay attention. Artists rarely make something entirely new; they generally just wake us up to what we have failed to see all along. This might seem tangential, but it’s worth exploring how the desire to be exceptional is connected to our desire to be someone else with someone else’s experiences rather than being content with our place and our childhood. Don’t we all feel discontented, as though we might have done something worthwhile had we been born at a different time and in a different place? KP: Your last question, I think, is why it is so important to pay attention to the place we are in and find the aspects of it that we should listen to and let feed into us. As Mary Oliver writes in her often-quoted poem, we should “pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” That, I think, is a very succinct way of describing the way place ought to feed into creativity and how equally important it is to be content where we are. How easily our focus strays to other places or people or times that we wish we could experience. In some ways, the place we live in becomes its own being and character by influencing us. To what extent do you think place is just a context? Or does it function with its own kind of character and life and being? How does place and land function as its own kind of character within the books that you’ve read and your books in particular? BP: I think that’s a great way of looking at our “little postage stamp of native soil.” It is its own character in our lives, touching us and shaping us in unique and deep ways. Growing up on a small river—the sound of running water over stones, the call of Osprey, the anxious behavior of the sandpiper, the smell of river water—has shaped my heart’s speed and inclination. The rhythms in my prose and poetry find their source in the countless hours I spent walking up and down that river fishing each morning and evening. That’s why I am drawn back to water so much. When I’m away from it, I grieve its loss as I would grieve the loss of a dear friend. I miss the way it makes me feel, the way it informs my thinking, and the way it steadies my restless heart. C. S. Lewis famously said that every good author makes the geography of the book as compelling as its characters. His beef with Alexander Dumas was that Dumas had no place in his stories, only plot. Many of us don’t slow down to pay attention and are in grave danger of losing place-ness in our art. The rate of living and the technological push to live more efficiently have robbed us of the ability to know even the names of the plants at our feet or the names of birds that we hear singing in the long grass. I’m as guilty as the next man. I’m not saying, by the way, that place is as important as people. I’m saying that the effect on my soul is similar. KP: Dad, let’s shift trajectories as we come in for a landing. This book of yours gets to go into the world and have its own effects on people’s souls. What are your hopes as the book goes from your own mind and heart and into the lives of other people? How do you think this book might effect and encourage people in ways that your other books might not have? BP: To some degree every book is like a child. You raise the child as we’ve raised you and send her into the world and trust God to use the child (or the book) for good, but you can’t control the results. The results are often surprising. My first book, A Small Cup of Light, recounted my journey through suffering and a health crisis that has impacted me to this day. That book has encouraged many people through their own valley of despair and I give thanks that the Lord has redeemed my suffering in that way. My two poetry books have likewise had an impact, but largely in strengthening souls for the encounter with life and with God. This book is unique in that it is an intimate dialogue between a father with his daughter over ideas that are precious to both of them. I can’t predict how it will be received, but I know that it comes from a place of deep feeling and conviction and love. I hope it provides some of the why for Christian artists as well as the how. So, for example, why should you create? What is that thing that compels you to write? Or how does an artist deal with criticism or anxiety or ambition or balance a day job? Or how does craftsmanship and community work together to make something beautiful? So many other wonderful writers have written books on creativity and faith and I could never claim to be the final word on the topic or to have superseded them in excellence. All I know is that I did my best work for you, dear girl, and I trust that it will have a universal appeal as a result. The planting is finished, the harvest is up to the Lord. The timing of your question is also interesting. I am in the middle of reading The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. He writes, “Art begins when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.” I suppose that in the end, that’s all I have tried to do: create something beautiful, how I see creativity and faith mixed with the inside of me. I hope the results are lovely to more than just the two of us. KP: Well, I think your last comment about how art begins when someone interprets is key to both the writing process and the way in which this book takes on a life of its own upon entering the world. While you may give principles that are consistent and steady, the applications and nuances of these letters will change and take on character as each reader interacts with them and puts them into practice. It creates a kind of continuum, or perhaps a very tangible representation of what it means to travel on a mountain—each person adding to the handholds and giving a hand to others. BP: Indeed, you’re reaching an age that gives you more and more opportunities to lend a helping hand to your father as he continues up the mountain. What a joy for me! I don’t see this book as the end-all answer to all questions but as a continuation of our conversations and an invitation to more dialogue. Of course the book is full of principles that don’t change, no matter where you are on the mountain, but the applications might change given where you are in life. I’m hoping this book serves as a reference point as we continue together up the mountain. Here’s a question to wrap up this interview. How do you see our conversations on creativity and faith changing in the years to come? I certainly hope they continue for a long time. KP: I think you’re right that our conversations have gradually grown from you guiding me to a more mutual respect in each other’s writing projects. A huge part of this has been the fact that I have gotten to take my own path into the writing world. I think being able to accumulate my own arsenal of experiences has allowed me to bring new ideas to the conversation just as you have done for so many years. So, in answer to your question, I can only see the conversation growing as we grow—continually bringing in those new experiences and lessons, even while we share those key principles and creative longings that have made our relationship so close and sweet for all these years. This book is a reference point then, not just to review and look back to, but also to mark this moment in our lives even as we continue to move up, to find new paths up the mountain, and make mistakes and successes as we go. BP: I’m so glad you feel that way. If I believed in luck, I’d say I’m incredibly lucky to have such a sweet relationship with my daughter. I’m so very blessed that God would give me such a gift with you and your four siblings. Great relationships between a father and his kids seems to be more and more rare these days. How much more rare is it to actually share a similar calling and to be climbing the same mountain together? Well, this has been super fun! We’ll have to do it again some time. For now, whether it’s too smarmy or not, I’m going to close this interview with the blessing I used to speak over you at bedtime: The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and give you peace. I love you. KP: Thanks Dad! I love you too. Click here to pre-order Letters from the Mountain in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with singer-songwriter Taylor Leonhardt. Taylor Leonhardt‘s second solo album, Hold Still, releases in September, 2021. (You can hear several of the songs already on streaming services.) This week on The Habit Podcast, Taylor and Jonathan Rogers discuss what it means to be God’s idea, and coming to terms with the truth that we are all in suspense and incomplete. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 35 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to info@rabbitroom.com Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

It’s time for our Fall 2021 season of The Local Show, live from North Wind Manor, beginning on Tuesday, September 7th with Becca Jordan, Drew Miller, Jeremy Casella, and Son of Laughter! Every other Tuesday night, starting on September 7th, North Wind Manor will be reverberating with good music and good company. Tickets are $10 and you can get them at RabbitRoom.com/events. And if you can’t join us in person, you’ll be able to tune in at 7:30pm CST on our Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube pages. Other artists who will make an appearance this season include Eric Peters, Jac Thompson, Andrew Peterson, David Keener, Zach & Maggie, Taylor Leonhardt, Andrew Osenga, Moda Spira, Jay White, Ella Mine, and many more! Stay tuned for more artist announcements as lineups are confirmed. Sponsoring the Local Show Our heartfelt thanks to our friends at Ronald Blue Trust for making this fall season of The Local Show possible. In order to create a quality Local Show livestream and offer it to the wider community, we need to reoutfit our equipment. We also want to care for our artists—especially now—by paying them well. If you’d like to be part of supporting The Local Show and the artists we love, please email us at info@rabbitroom.com for details on becoming a sponsor. Click here for tickets to the September 7th Local Show, and here to view all upcoming events at North Wind Manor.

As we head toward Hutchmoot: Homebound and the rundown/roundup/hoedown/low-downs are sent out, you may notice some messages to our Rabbit Room members. For folks seeing those messages and wondering what this whole membership thing is about, I’d like to take a moment to tell you what it means to us. After all, there are gym memberships and club memberships—the term can come with a whole host of assumptions or misunderstandings, and it’s often associated with some sort of exclusive access you can buy your way into. But at the Rabbit Room, we approach things with a different spirit. We chose the term “membership” intentionally back in 2013, and I want to take a moment to expound on what it means to be a Rabbit Room member. When we say membership, we mean it in the Wendell Berry sense. In The Wild Birds, Burley Coulter says, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything.” Membership is about coming together as a community in common belonging and purpose. Rabbit Room members are those who believe in the importance of the mission here and have committed to sharing in the responsibility for the well-being of this work, this place, and this people. Membership makes it possible for us to offer free and affordable works to the community. As always, we want to approach community from a Kingdom-centered mindset, and members are both beneficiaries of and partners in that. Shigé Clark This last year and a half, more than ever, have borne out the difference that membership makes. Because of our members, during a time of economic upheaval when other organizations have had to pull inward and batten down the hatches, the Rabbit Room has been able to turn and support artists, musicians, and ministers in need. Members create a foundation of support that the Rabbit Room can rely on to build programs and put new works into the world, and they help speak into that work. The Hutchmoots, the Molehills, the podcasts, the Local Shows, the book releases, (the secret projects)—all are possible due to the faithful involvement of a group of people who’ve decided that they have a place at the Rabbit Room in a deep and lasting sense. As Matt McCullough said in a blog post about the book Jayber Crow, to belong to a community is “to be implicated substantively, not just sympathetically, in the ups and downs of a place and its people.” This means that members join in stewarding the mission and are included in the ongoing vision. In that substantive sense, they share in the work by giving a recurring monthly donation of $25 or more, and we have updates and conversations on current happenings, as well as upcoming goals and projects we’re dreaming about together. We strive to embody that Berry-esque sense of mutual service toward each other. We want to live out membership from a place of gratitude, so we send quarterly gifts to our members to thank them for being a part of the work. Yet, it’s important to us that membership be inclusive. So, aside from the mug, there are no programs, products, or services offered that you can only get as a member At the end of the day, members are joining the Rabbit Room in a work of service. The support, prayer, and input they provide not only go toward the creation of new and wonderful things; they also enable us to operate from a place of generosity. We can offer free and affordable works to the community—like North Wind Manor events, the Podcast Network, and the Local Show—while putting donations toward new works and supporting artists and those in ministry. As always, we want to approach community from a Kingdom-centered mindset, and members are both beneficiaries of and partners in that. If this sounds like you, consider joining us in that service! If the Rabbit Room mission is your mission, if this has been a community that has blessed and bolstered you, if you love the work God is doing here and want to see it continued, if you’ve found your sense of place here, then know that this is for you. We have new dreams on the horizon, and we need our members to help us achieve them. Our goal is to reach 100% operational stability through membership—to get to a place where we as a membership (yep, that’s me too) cover all the administrative needs that keep the Rabbit Room running, so that every donation can go directly to the programs, services, and creative works that make up our mission. We believe what God is doing here through story, music, and art is vital, and we want you to be a part of it all! And to all those who are already participants in the membership of the Rabbit Room, thank you. It’s one of my greatest joys to get to see your faces at events or at our zoom gatherings, and I can’t wait until I can start seeing you more in person again. We’re glad and grateful to be doing this together, and I look forward to all of the cheeses, and befuddlements, and surprises yet to come. Only after joining this community did I finally come to understand when Paul says “I do not cease giving thanks for you.” And I don’t—for this place, and these people, and the work being done here, I’m unceasingly grateful. If you’d like to join the Rabbit Room membership, click here! (And just to make sure we’re not confusing any of our Tennessee folks, Rabbit Room membership doesn’t confer any legal rights of “membership” as defined under the Tennessee Nonprofit Corporation Act.)

by the Rabbit Room The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Dave Radford of The Gray Havens. The Gray Havens ‘s upcoming album, Blue Flower , is inspired by C. S. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy and explores “inconsolable longing” and every human’s homesickness for a place they’ve never been. In this episode, Dave and Jonathan discuss the ways that joy is both a spur and a guide for creative work. You might also check out the Blue Flower Podcast , in which Dave talks through the origins of each song on the album. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 36 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to info@rabbitroom.com Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by the Rabbit Room This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers talks with Ashley Hales , a writer, speaker, and host of the Finding Holy Podcast. Ashley Hales ’s new book is A Spacious Life: Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of Limits . In this episode, Jonathan and Ashley discuss a paradox: embracing your limitations can create more space and lead to greater creativity. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 37 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to info@rabbitroom.com Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by the Rabbit Room This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers talks with Ben Palpant, a poet, memoirist, novelist, and writer of nonfiction. Palpant’s new book, Letters from the Mountain , is a collection of letters to his daughter about writing, creativity, paying attention, and generativity. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 38 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to info@rabbitroom.com! Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Rabbit Room Press is pleased to add a new book to its collection: now available in the Rabbit Room Bookstore is Letters from the Mountain by Ben Palpant. Read on to learn more about Ben, his new book, and our upcoming online course where we will read and explore it together. In this memoir of the craft, Ben Palpant unpacks a lifetime of wisdom gained through the long, hard work of learning to write and to live well. Delivered as a series of letters from father to daughter, he patiently and gracefully paints a vision of what it means to enter into one’s creative work as an act of generative obedience—an act that blesses the writer, the work itself, and the world that receives it. Palpant reveals the creative process not only as an act of love and attentive artisanship, but as the work of shaping a life and a heart that points toward the coming of a Kingdom and the renewal of Creation itself. Upcoming Online Course Think of this reading group as a chance to read over the author’s shoulder as he pens letters to his daughter on matters of faith and creativity in community. It’s your opportunity to enter the intimate friendship that they share, to ask questions that spring up along the way as they discuss living generatively, and to be shepherded both by the author and by each other as we learn to use the gifts God has given us for the life of the world. You’ll also be given a prompt each week to make something beautiful (in word, art, music, or whatever form you’d like) and share with the group. Letters from the Mountain is not just for artists and writers. It’s a book that addresses the issues every Christian faces: learning to see what God sees, handling criticism, facing anxiety, the gift of the mundane, dealing with self-doubt, and much more. Click here to register for the online course. Praise for Letters from the Mountain “Sometimes you can read just one sentence and know that the writer has a gift. Ben Palpant is one of those people. This book on writing, framed as a series of letters to his daughter, is a window into his big, generous, and pastoral soul. There’s a lot of wisdom here, and I’m grateful for the way Palpant is using his gift to give it away.” —Andrew Peterson, singer/songwriter, author of the Wingfeather Saga “This book is a beautiful work of grace, bound by love and fueled by art, a blessing in every sense to the reader. I enjoyed every word.” —Jeff Goins, author of The Art of Work “In the beautiful epistolary tradition evocative of Rilke, Ben Palpant examines what it means to be an attentive writer of faith, and to pass the creative commending of God’s mighty works to a future generation.” —Carolyn Weber, author of Surprised by Oxford About the Author BEN PALPANT is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and one dog named Chesterton. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest. Purchase Letters from the Mountain here.

Leading up to Release Day for Ollister B. Pembrick’s Creaturepedia (tomorrow!), young aspiring fantasy writers were invited to submit their very own entries for a chance to receive a copy of the book signed by Andrew Peterson. The entries were hilarious, creative, and delightful (no doubt!), and it is with great pleasure that we announce the winners and runners up. Drumroll, please! Winning stories will be posted here at the Rabbit Room blog in the upcoming weeks, and as evidenced by their titles, readers sure are in for a treat (smelly!). For today, here are the names (and titles!) of the winning entries. Wonderful job, all of you! Ollister Pembrick would be so proud and pleased to see his work carried forward through your creativity. 9th-12th Grade Winner: Out of the Deeps of the Dragon King by Rose Swillum 6th-8th Grade Winner: Notes Regarding my Encounter with the Elusive Snorthog by Calen Lotspeich 3rd-5th Grade Winner: A Letter from Mr. Quiggle to Mr. Pembrick Regarding the Discovery of a Cronker by Annie Butler Click here to view Pembrick’s Creaturepedia in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

The Rabbit Room Store has just added a delightful new book to its collection: Pembrick’s Creaturepedia by Andrew Peterson. This detailed companion is essential to all who travel to the lands of Skree, and a must-have for all Wingfeather Saga fans. Now with all-new illustrations! Sketcher, adventurer, disguiser, and sneaker Ollister B. Pembrick roamed all of Skree with a sketchbook and pen, searching behind every tree stump and under every stone, in every river and on every hill, to discover and document the endless living wonders of the Maker’s world. He risked life and limb—quite literally—to compile sketches and details of the creatures of Skree, usually from the cover of a hollow log, a hedge, or a pile of leaves. Refer to this carefully documented Creaturepedia before traversing through the Stony Mountains or harvesting fartichokes within a fortnight after a sandstorm. The drawings and field notes about squeeblins, toothy cows, oiples, and more will surely save any explorer’s life and will definitely keep them—and their appendages—from being gobbled. Tread carefully, young adventurer. The creatures within are not to be trifled with. Click here to view Pembrick’s Creaturepedia in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers talks with poet and co-founder of Bandersnatch Books, Rachel Donahue. After years overseas, Rachel Donahue settled into life on a property that had been in her husband’s family for generations. Paying attention to that piece of land transformed her poetry. Beyond Chittering Cottage is a collection of the poems that grew out of that new attentiveness. In this episode, Rachel and Jonathan Rogers talk about stewardship, place, and writerly friendship. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 39 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to info@rabbitroom.com Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.