What are you looking for?

The year was 2005. I was a junior in college, and it felt like the world was both beckoning me to a wide open future and coming apart at the seams. We millennials may joke about the “dumpster fire” of the past few years, but I humbly submit that the fire sparked long ago, and I didn’t notice the smoke until the turn of the millennium. In 2004, I was finally old enough to vote in a Presidential election. Twitter and iPhones didn’t exist yet, but the ugly divisiveness of partisan politics was already sneaking into my life. The wounds of 9/11 were fresh and raw, the War on Terror was just beginning, anyone with cable TV could pick their 24 hour news cycle poison, and I was spending my days running between my small town comfort and the diverse world of a city university. Oh, also the certainty I used to feel in my faith was beginning to crack. Just a little. If anything, I needed music to capture the vague despair and fear and anger in the air and spin it into hope. I needed Switchfoot, a band I’d casually enjoyed since high school, and a record called Nothing is Sound. Of all the bands I loved in my younger years (the time of life that supposedly shapes your musical tastes forever), there’s something about Switchfoot that continues to stick with me. If you listen to their early work — especially 1998’s fabulous New Way to Be Human — you find smart, philosophical songwriting tucked into a surf-punk vibe. Skip ahead twenty years to 2019’s Native Tongue and you find relentless hope in a world that seems to be perpetually on fire. But I would humbly suggest Nothing is Sound might be their greatest achievement. It came just two short years after they broke big in the mainstream, but to some it was considered a commercial flop. Instead of peppy melodies and self-aware anthems, the sound took a darker tone and the lyrics dwelled on empty consumerism, disconnect, loneliness, and war. It’s Psalms and Ecclesiastes and Lamentations all at once. And somehow, in all that, it lands on hope in the end. Permission to be angry. Permission to lament. Permission to, in spite of it all, not lose hope. Just what a quiet, uncertain, and confused young woman in a lonely world needed. “I want more than my lonely nation“ The album opens with dirty guitars and an introduction to an unnamed character: “she turns like the ocean / she tells no emotion… she’s been breaking up inside.” I’m only now realizing how 21 year old me, growing up and discovering the complicated ache of the world, might have recognized herself in this nameless “she.” The aggressive, dark-tinged rock hints toward a rage under the surface, while the lyrics address a weary loneliness, frustration, and longing to see the world set right. Two years before, this band declared “We want more than this world’s got to offer,” and it felt like a fist-pumping empowerment anthem. But here, the desire takes on a whole new urgency: “I want more than my desperation / I want more than my lonely nation.” But how can the world be set right when the people tasked to care for it appear to tune out, chasing after empty pleasure? After all: We’re just numb and amused and We’re just used to bad news and We are slaves of what we want… Or consider this line from from the most notable single “Stars” Stars looking at a planet Watching entropy and pain And maybe start to wonder how the chaos in our lives can pass as sane. Then there’s the Bob Dylan-inspired rumination “Happy is a Yuppie Word.” As the specter of war loomed large and the economic prosperity of previous decades came to an end, Foreman meditates on the failure of empires and empty consumerism, tapping into the well of full-on Ecclesiastical lament: Everything fails Everything runs its course A time and a place For all of this love and war Everyone buys Everyone’s got a price But nothing is new When will all the failures rise? And so the story goes. “Nothing is new,” says the author of Ecclesiastes, and “Nothing is sound!” screams a singer into the pain. Nothing is steady, “nothing is right-side right,” and when I hear these words, I’m once again sitting on the university quad, wondering about the future and the pain of war and the violence of words and talking heads on TV news. And in 2019… nothing is new, is it? The second-by-second social media news cycle, the pundits escaping the boundaries of cable news and pontificating from my phone, even Instagram squeezing pristine influencers and finely targeted ads between pictures of friends and their kids and their vacation photos. I can’t help but think “Easier Than Love,” a song about commercializing sex to distract from loneliness, is an apt lament for the disconnection and perfectionism of the Instagram age: “It’s easier to fake and smile and brag… it’s harder to face our souls at night.” I can’t help but realize I’ve never related more to the unbridled roar of a line like “I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians.” Nothing is new indeed. “But these scars will heal” If there’s one thing that has marked Switchfoot all these years though, it’s this: joy is inescapable. Somehow, even as they rail against the empty promises of a materialistic American Dream, there’s a hope that can’t be suppressed. You hear it in the album’s most joyful track, “We Are One Tonight,” an anthem of solidarity that would almost feel out of place if it wasn’t such a necessary counterpoint. “And the world is flawed / but these scars will heal,” the song declares against all odds. Somehow, in the midst of fear and fighting and loneliness, healing waits. There’s still beauty, still sunshine on the edges of the shadows, still friendship and love and waves to catch and songs to sing. When I listened in my early-twenties angst, I might have overlooked the more joyful songs. When I listen today though, I cling to them. And I can’t help but notice how the closer “Daisy” brings it all full circle. The album opens with the image of a woman who is “breaking up inside,” and ends with a gentle invitation and an affirmation. I’d like to think these two characters are the same person: Open up your fist This fallen world doesn’t hold your interest it doesn’t own your soul Daisy, let it go… We can’t escape the fallen world. We can rage against injustice, interrogate our desires, sit in our loneliness, and keep our gluttony in check. We can choose: will we be just another consumer, or will we live fully alive in the world as it is? If I had any quibble with these lines today, it would be that this fallen world does have interest, as I imagine all it can be. It’s a promise and a shadow of the world to come… and well… “the shadow proves the sunshine,” doesn’t it? But no, it doesn’t own my soul either. Sometimes I need songs to remind me. Click here to listen to Nothing is Sound on Spotify

Here at the end of Part I of The Fiddler’s Gun, I sat down with poet, writer, Rabbit Room staff member, and reader of fine books Shigé Clark to discuss some “behind the scenes”-type stuff. Shigé only recently read the book for the first time and came to the studio full of great questions. We’ve limited the discussion to the content of Part I, so don’t worry, no spoilers for Part II, but we do get to talk about a lot of fun stuff. What it’s like to read the book for the first time in ten years? How historically accurate (or inaccurate) is the book? What was the research process like? What would I do differently today? It’s a fun discussion. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Look for Part II (chapters 13-25) of the book to go live in the coming weeks. In the meantime, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review.

“Golowara. I think I know where this word comes from, but. . .what would that word mean to the people who are in the village churches?” It was a typical overcast Bangui morning. That meant that the second-story office was relatively cool. The translation office windows were open and shaded by a mango tree. One could gaze through the dust haze of the dry season harmattan and see school kids playing soccer across the street. The Mandja Bible translation team—Edmond, Magloire and Samuel—immediately looked upwards, stroking their chins, contemplating a response to my question. I was working with them on an accuracy check of their translation of 1 Thessalonians. Pastor Edmond broke the brief silence and met my eyes. As an experienced translator, he smiled a smile that silently communicated, Ha! I understand, and know what we must do next. He then responded out loud as the team coordinator—and thus the final decision maker of the translation team—saying, “It’s just a church word that people say, but don’t really know what it means. It means nothing, really.” I smiled back at Edmond and the rest of the team and said, “Okay. Communicating wrong meaning in the translation is bad and communicating no meaning is almost as bad. What can we do to make it better?” Now, as the Apostle Paul did with his Hebrew heritage, I myself could go on about my Hillbilly pedigree: A veritable son of the holler—Burrell Holler to be exact. A winding narrow valley of bubbling fountains and hardwoods crowned with a shining, yet hidden, lake at the end. The taller mountain of the holler is nameless on the maps except what my grandfather and his eleven siblings called it: “Piney Spur.” All while the single road that runs through it bears my family’s name. I’m the seventh generation that has lived on the land. We even have a ghost story, generations old, that features my relatives and is set on the same road and in the same holler. My notions of home are tightly bound up in this little familial kingdom nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But to zoom out only slightly further (a twenty-minute drive through the country, to be exact), the crowning jewel of the Blue Ridge and of the larger region is the Biltmore Estate. A 250-room Loire-Valley-esque mansion surrounded by miles of woods and gardens and filled with the wonders of its builder, railroad tycoon heir, art collector, and epic bibliophile, George Vanderbilt. By thinking about the power, beauty, and goodness of him who made all power, beauty, and goodness, our hearts saw the glory of God and together we, like Paul says elsewhere, 'were being changed from one degree of glory to the next.' Adam Huntley Now, since I was a kid, I’ve had this theory that the great draw and wonder of visiting the Biltmore is not only its beauty, but the pleasant imagination of the guest. When you wander through the ornate leather-lined and Renoir-covered walls of the breakfast room, the room with Napoleon’s chess set (I mean, of course Napoleon would play chess, right?), the library with its painted ceiling imported from a Venetian home filled with tens of thousands of leather-bound volumes, the underground swimming pool, countless servants’ quarters, the rotisserie room, the stables, and especially the large separate bedrooms of Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt with their gorgeous mountain views, deep seats, and large fireplaces. . . You then, in your mind, become transformed. Your faded T-shirt and sweat-pant shorts crisp into formal dinner attire. Your five o’clock shadow smooths clean and a large gilded-age gentlemen handlebar moustache grows in its place. Your sockless crocs and comfy leggings bloom into a lacey gown undergirded with a whalebone corset and your ponytail forms up into a tight and tasteful bun and your neck is suddenly spangled with tasteful pearls. You no longer are a visitor who has paid for his ticket. You’ve become a Vanderbilt. You’re not getting in your car to dutifully leave at the end of visitor hours. You are home. And in those imaginative moments, you participate in the greatness, the grandeur, the glory of a great lord of a glorious estate. Back in Bangui, the passage we’re looking at is 1 Thessalonians, chapter two, verse twelve, where Paul says to one of the first churches he planted, “We exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.” You see, Paul was worried. The church at Thessaloniki had only existed for a matter of weeks before he and his fellow teachers were run out of town by a murderous mob. How was the church doing now? Did the mob turn on the fledgling congregation soon after? In a time when communication only went as fast as a person could carry papyrus, a million what ifs? must have darkened Paul’s mind. His anxiety and love couldn’t wait any longer, so he decided to send his protégé Timothy to make quick tracks to Thessaloniki and see how things were. Thankfully, Timothy returned saying that the church still existed and, in general, was thriving. Because of this good report, Paul wrote a letter to the church that in the Bible is called “1 Thessalonians.” So in the verse we were looking at, Paul wants them to continue to follow the word of God by first looking at the worth of their salvation and then acting accordingly. You see, our behavior is always determined by what we think will give us the most pleasure—or said in another way, by what we most value. We humans are ceaseless appraisers. And our actions are inexorably drawn to that which we most value. For there to be lasting change in us, we should never just try to mitigate behavior—rather, we must change what we value. While it is only God who can do this in us, God’s means does not equal our passivity: we are to consider and develop our deep-down value of knowing God himself. And this is what Paul is telling the Christians in Thessaloniki to do in this verse (restated in my own words): “Live your lives before God in proper response to having been given such a tremendously valuable status: a member of God’s kingdom, promised to enter into the very glory of God.” Now, most of us can understand those words fair enough until we get to the word glory. What does it really mean? That’s the same question that the Mandja team was considering. In our verse, the translation for the word “glory” was the Mandja word golowara. Golowara is the Mandja adaptation of the French word gloire (meaning glory). Since the word was, by the translators’ estimation, “just a church-y word” that meant nothing, it was my job to start an informed conversation about how to find a different translation solution for our word glory. I needed to help them move from a word with zero meaning to a translation that is accurate, clear, and natural in Mandja. I started going through every use of glory in the Scriptures that I could think of: “Glory is simply the greatness of something. People can have glory. Valuable things can have glory. ‘Glory’ is even used of women’s hair-dos in 1 Corinthians! Don’t you think ‘wow!’ when you first see your wife just after she gets her hair done? That’s glory.“ This caused a great deal of laughter, and subsequent jokes, as women in the Central African Republic put a premium on having their hair done. “But in our verse here, ‘glory’ doesn’t mean the greatness of any created thing, but rather of the Creator himself. The one whose resume includes making all things that were, are, and ever will be. The one who sustains all things moment by moment. If he for one moment decided that we wouldn’t continue to be, we wouldn’t become a puff of smoke—we would become nothing. That sort of greatness or glory is something that we we’ll never completely understand but should rightly stand in awe of. And in this verse his glory is something that we ourselves enter into. We enter into it partially now, but will enter into it completely in the next age.” Suddenly Magloire (whose name means “my glory” in French) suddenly shot up his head with his eyes all aglitter in a eureka moment and said,“Gbahuru hini!” Samuel smiled, nodded, and pointed at Magloire indicating strong agreement. Then they both looked at the final decision maker, Edmond. He quickly said, “Gbahuru hini is good.” “Okay, what does it mean?” Edmond responded, “Gbahuru hini is basically greatness or glory. Imagine a wealthy and powerful man with a great home and kingdom; that greatness is gbahuru hini. But this word also means that it’s a kind of glory that others can participate in and enter into. For example, if you’re associated with this person of gbahuru hini, then you enter into it. You share the greatness and benefits and become great like the person of gbahuru hini himself. In this verse, believers enter into the gbahuru hini of God and they themselves share his glory.” Following that was a brief silence, one of those special times that make me especially love the process of doing Bible translation with my fellow Christian brothers in the Central African Republic. A process that, if done right, will involve serious contemplation of God’s word. By thinking about the power, beauty, and goodness of him who made all power, beauty, and goodness, our hearts saw the glory of God and together we, like Paul says elsewhere, “were being changed from one degree of glory to the next.” In those imaginative moments we, in a little way, are transformed: no longer am I just a backwards white boy far from his beloved holler home. Instead, together we are brothers who imagine our future home that none of us have yet seen. We saw ourselves at home in the grandeur of our Lord’s glorious estate. It was a gbahuru hini moment for sure. A kind that even George Vanderbilt himself couldn’t conjure. Adam Huntley is a translator with Wycliffe Bible Translators in the Central African Republic. He and Ruth and their family live in Bangui. Artwork Credit: “Biltmore Afternoon” by Gary Cooley

It’s mid-July and unusually hot for Oxford. Sweat rolls down your spine, and your feet are on fire. Half a block down, you see an indie bookshop. No air conditioning, but they have a basement. Eighteen slapdash shelves—children’s books and clearance—this is going to be a hunt. Still, there’s that library smell. Oh, glory. It makes your arms tingle. A rattly dehumidifier gurgles in the next room. You can hear the owner and his son upstairs, arguing about the book of Exodus. Puccini is playing on Radio 4. Time is slow here. It could be 1936, or 1952, or whatever it is now. You’ve forgotten. Doesn’t matter. You thumb through the shelves, daydreaming about finding a long-lost epic. Imagine—a story forgotten by all but a few dusty old folks who name their cats “Winfred” and smell faintly of breakfast sausages, rose powder, and menthol. Then, you see it—two volumes, leather-bound book, nearly a thousand pages total. On the spine, faded letters you can barely make out…The Faerie Queene. A Lost Epic That’s not how I discovered The Faerie Queene, but it’s how I want you to feel when you discover it. For the most part, this story has been forgotten for over 400 years, just waiting for us to find it. Perhaps that’s been for the best. Perhaps a story this dangerous and powerful needed to sleep for a few centuries before waking up again. Perhaps The Faerie Queene is our generation’s Excalibur, holding still until the perfect generation of souls arrived. After all, most treasures are worth more after being underground for a while. My favorite writer, C. S. Lewis, loved The Faerie Queene dearly. He once said that it should be enjoyed on a rainy day by young men and women “between the ages of twelve and sixteen.” I agree with him completely, though I’m still smitten at forty-seven. (The best fairy tales get better as we age.) Still, there’s a reason most twelve to sixteen year-olds haven’t read this epic. Though The Faerie Queene was written about the same time as Shakespeare, for most readers, Spenser’s original language is much more difficult than the Bard’s. (I’ll explain more about why this text is particularly difficult in my next post.) When the rare lit teacher assigns an excerpt of The Faerie Queene, it’s often used as a brief exercise in old language. Two or three bookish girls get excited. Everyone else is miserable. I tried teaching original Spenser once, but very quickly, I realized most of my students were missing the joy and awe of the tale. They could not drink it down in delight like Lewis had hoped they would. His language is different from mine, but his story still resounds. Rebecca Reynolds Genre differences come into play here. While etymological labor almost always pays off for young folks reading Shakespeare, meticulous, line-by-line research can kill the natural and healthy, young delight of a fairy tale. When you are twelve years old, you usually can’t hold your breath (and your reader’s trance) while a monster attacks—as you search the OED for the nuance of a forgotten adjective. That’s not how stories should work at that age. At twelve, you need a comfy chair, a steaming mug of tea, your imagination, and permission to be a child on a dangerous journey. Engaging with original Spenser, my students learned that Elizabethan language was tough, but they never fell in love with the story. This broke my heart. So after school was over, I spent most of a long night transposing several pages of the text. Could I catch every textual nuance? No. But when I read these pages to my students the next day, they loved it. And they wanted more. From that moment on, I knew this had to be done large scale. Why “Transposition”? Why am I using the word “transposition?” Somehow it just seems to fit better for this project. It’s a smaller, gentler term. We use the word “translation” to refer to a story interpreted from an entirely different language—something like Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, or Dorothy Sayers’s Dante, or Julie Rose’s Les Mis. In this case, I’m doing more of a “key shift.” I’m taking English from the late 1500s to 2020. In this transposition, I’m trying to keep the heart and heft of the text. Some loss of meaning is inevitable of course, and I grieve when I can’t catch the full weight of an idiom or pun. But I can walk as close to the original language as possible while whetting appetites. I can show older readers why they should go back and hack through Spenser’s original text. And I can give them a tool that will help you on that journey. Consider my work an introduction to a party you can attend for the rest of your life. What will this entail? Over the next two years, I will be creating a text-faithful transposition of Spenser’s entire epic. I’ll be keeping you updated here on the Rabbit Room so you can follow the process and be a part of some decisions I’m making along the way. I’ll also be asking a few twelve to sixteen year-olds to participate in the Order of the Red Cross—a special group of young readers commissioned to give wise and honest feedback as we go. (You Rabbits are good folk. I can’t think of companions I’d rather have on this journey.) Thanks to the brilliant artistry of renowned illustrator Michael Kaluta, this story is also gaining gorgeous new illustrations. I’ve had so much fun brainstorming with Kaluta and my publisher, deciding which scenes should be incorporated visually. By Michael Kaluta I’m including one of those illustrations here, along with a chance for you to sign up for a free version of this print (signed by Kaluta and by me) if you register here before August 20th. (Enter your email in the “Send me Updates” box. Warning: Dangerous Fairy Tale Ahead I should give you one warning before you continue, though. Don’t let the delicate title lull you into a false sense of security. The Faerie Queene is not a safe story. It’s bloody, and it’s scandalous, and it’s complicated. You will meet seducers, spirits, monsters, and beautiful, deadly women. You’ll need the stomach for dismemberment, and exploding bodies, and ghastly battles. Heads will be split in half and chopped off. Hellish creatures will tear the flesh of good men, and brave souls will make terrible mistakes. Yet, through all of this, you’ll learn about courage, and humility, and discernment. You’ll learn that it’s possible to grow through your mistakes. You’ll find out who you can trust and who you shouldn’t. You’ll walk away wiser and hopefully a little braver—understanding more about yourself and the world you’re about to face. While working on The Faerie Queene, I’ve often found myself sitting at a library table, surrounded by books written by Spenserian experts—covered in goosebumps—because a particular story element had caught my own fears, failures, and hopes so accurately. His language is different from mine, but his story still resounds. I have needed his images during the chaos of the last few years as a call to keep fighting, keep getting back up when I fall, keep confessing, keep growing. For as Chesterton once said, monsters can still be defeated—even when we feel small and stupid—and even when the world feels so very dark. Click here to learn more about this project at its website.

“How do you know when you are finished with a piece of writing?”—Evie, age 10 Evie, you’ve asked a stumper. I wish I had a clear, concrete answer for you. Turn around three times, shout “Brahahahallooalloo!” and throw the paper against the wall. If it sticks there and darkens to a slightly bluish-purple shade, it’s finished. That would be handy, wouldn’t it? But alas, it’s not so simple. There’s a famous old saying—“Art is never finished, only abandoned”—which has been attributed to various painters and poets, but it doesn’t really matter who said it first because every artist knows it’s true. For something to be really truly finished, it would have to be complete, perfect, nothing lacking anywhere, nothing more to be improved. And we’re never going to make anything that’s perfect, no matter how brilliant and talented we might be, because we’re human. When an artist says, “Okay, I’m done,” what he or she really means is, “This is the best I can do right now, and it’s time to move on”—or even, “This is a mess, but tomorrow is the deadline and and so it’s going to be done whether I like it or not!” We write something, we set it aside and come back with fresh eyes, we revise it, we correct the mistakes, we give it to other people to read and let us know how they think we can make it better, and then we revise again, sometimes many times. I know a poet who fiddles with a single poem for a year before she’s ready to call it done. I took several years to revise both The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic and Henry and the Chalk Dragon. If I took another ten years to revise them, I’m sure they would turn out even better. But if I waited that long, why not take another 10 years after that, and then another 20 . . .? Would I ever finish anything? Would anyone ever get to read what I wrote? Usually if I start changing the same things over and over again, or if I have looked at this piece of writing so much and so long that I loathe the very sight of it, I know it’s time to stop and let it be whatever it is. Everything I write helps me write something better next time. It’s a little like blowing soap bubbles with a bubble wand. Sure, I can blow quickly and carelessly and send hundreds of tiny spheres cascading from my wand in all directions. But sometimes I want to go slow and steady, measuring my breath so the bubble is as big and beautiful as possible before it suddenly breaks free. And yes, inevitably it’s going to go splat on the pavement or pop on a blade of grass. But before it does, it will shimmer in the air awhile, all wobbly and misshapen and imperfect and fragile. And maybe someone else will see a glint of light in its surface and be delighted by it. And maybe a breeze will catch it and it will soar higher and farther than I ever imagined it would. Who knows? There are many things about that bubble and its path through the sky that I am not skillful enough to control. Yet each bubble is a little surprise, a little miracle. I get to blow a floating, silvery mirror-ball out of soap. Who cares if it wobbles a bit as it flies? It’s the same with writing, or any art. You do your best, and you let it go. And then you blow another bubble. Jennifer answers kids’ and parents’ questions in her e-newsletter, which also includes creative prompts, news about upcoming writing classes and events, recommended reading and family resources, free coloring pages, and more. You can subscribe at her website here: www.jennifertrafton.com

The moment he said it, I could feel its hooks sink deep. During my conversation with Drew Holcomb, the subject turned to the reason why he made music in the first place, why he chose a life of artistic pursuits. “…I was bearing witness to something good I had seen in music and the world around me and wanting to offer that to the world.” There it is, I thought when he first said it. I replayed it several times thereafter for the sake of memorization. The reason? I’ve felt that same impulse, too. In that succinct, splendid statement, Holcomb described exactly why I’m even interested in putting in the work (and it’s a lot of work) for this podcast. I’ve been changed by these conversations. I’ve been inspired by this music. I’ve witnessed and wanted to share. These days, Drew is offering much more to the world than just his music, although there’s plenty of that, too. His brand new album, Dragons, releases August 16 and is everything you’ve come to love from him (and his band, The Neighbors). He’s also curating festivals (Moon River Music Festival) and record selections (Magnolia Record Club) while making music with his wife, Ellie. In this episode of The Resistance, Drew talks to us about the posture needed to consistently create and how he’s learned to protect that initial spark that prompted any/all of this in the first place. Click here to listen to this week’s episode.

For years, Glen Phillips says, it felt personal. It makes sense when you listen to Phillips explain his career arc, a creative trajectory within which he says, “I peaked at probably 23 … and, in a commercial sense that anyone would notice, I was over by 26 or 27.” That’s a perplexing stage to have in the rearview mirror, especially for someone who’s continued to make music for another 20-plus years. It’s taken some time for Phillips to realize the ebb and flow of popularity and the shifting sands of the music industry have nothing to do with his value as a person or his worth as a cultural voice. These days, he’s “over” the idea of a career, he says. It’s simply about obedience to the creative impulses that he feels. These days, Phillips is still writing, recording, and releasing music as both a solo artist and with his longtime band. However, he’s also taking time to find his spiritual center via drum circles and helping his neighbors channel their own creativity. While Phillips sounds more at home than ever, it’s come at the cost of several battles with resistance—some of which are ongoing. Here’s our interview with Phillips about his early years, his latest work and the roles that resistance has played at each intersection. Click here to visit Glen Phillips‘ website.

When I asked Xavier Dphrepaulezz how I should refer to him in our pre-interview banter, he told me he’s always Fantastic Negrito unless he’s in his pajamas. “And Matt, I am most definitely not in my pajamas!” Even before the tape is rolling, when the conversations are informal with the two-time Grammy-winning musician (whose last two albums have won Blues Album of the Year), Negrito, as he is most often called, is filled with an activist’s ardor and clergyman’s cadence. It was immediately clear to me that Negrito would close our first season of The Resistance once we began our conversation. Here was a man speaking—nay, preaching—from a lifetime of hard-fought battles with resistance. Record label woes. A car accident and ensuing coma. The inability to use his hand—to literally make music. Relearning it all after his supposed prime had passed him by. Negrito has learned to sift through the silly for the serious, to put aside the concerns that don’t matter to stand militantly for the few things that do. He’s a transformed artist and the Grammy wins are simply the bits of hardware that tell him that we’re listening. What began with a Tiny Desk contest win in 2015 has blossomed into one of the most dynamic and diverse catalogs of the last few years. It’s rock and gospel, hip-hop and soul laid atop Negrito’s foundation of funk while the statesman diagnoses societal ills and packs political punches. We’re thrilled to close our first season of The Resistance with this revealing conversation with Fantastic Negrito—the lessons learned along the way and how the resistance looks to him at his most successful. Click here to listen to this episode of The Resistance. And here to visit Fantastic Negrito‘s website.

When Jake Speck called me about this time last year and asked if I’d be interested in adapting Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place for the stage, my response was “Heck yes! But hang on. Before I agree, let me go read the book and see if I like it.” The truth was I had only the faintest idea of who Corrie was and honestly didn’t know if hers was the kind of story that would suit my abilities as a writer. I ordered the book and ate it up in a couple of days. World War II. Nazis. The Resistance. Smuggling of Jews. The Holocaust. Faith in the face of nigh-unquenchable darkness. I called Jake back and told him I was in, but I had little idea what I was getting into. Things have come a long way since that phone call, both literally and figuratively. In October, Jennifer and I flew to the Netherlands to visit Corrie’s home, the “Beje,” in the city of Haarlem. We stayed an hour outside of Amsterdam at Dutch L’Abri, a cozy little commune in the countryside where we picked apples, foraged walnuts, installed solar panels, washed dishes, ate amazing home-cooked meals (including legit Dutch Apple Pie), and participated in a lot of rich convesation with people from all over the world. My thanks to Robb Ludwick and his family for their hospitality. After getting over our jet lag, we drove into Haarlem where we walked through the Grote Markt flush with flowers and fruit (though I’m sad we missed tulip season), we visited the gothic cathedral of St. Bavo where the Ten Booms went to church, we strolled alongside canals under the eaves of pastel colored houses, we ate stroopwafel by the yard and edam by the pound, and we found ourselves at last in an alley of the Barteljorristraat knocking at back door of the Ten Boom watch shop where Corrie and Betsie spent most of their lives. I’ve never been good at tourism. I dislike the fakery of it. I don’t usually care for the well-marked historical route or the guided tour. I want to be left alone to know a place in an intuitive rather than an instructive way. I want to get lost and find my own path and therefore come to the long-sought place in a way that can be said to be in some way authentic, even if only in my bumbling 21st-century American way. But my distaste for the tourist trap goes only so far. Its limits stop abruptly at my personal interest in a particular subject. For instance, the English countryside might be merely pretty (no small beauty, mind you!), until I cross into a hidden glade and discover that Samuel Coleridge walked here and wrote here, or Lewis and Tolkien ate there, drank here, read stories over that way. Then suddenly I’m all ears. I want the guide. I want the tour. I want the legend to the map that unlocks the stories of all the ghosts lingering nearby. So when I stepped into the backdoor of the Ten Boom’s Beje, I stepped into a world where the air hung thick with age-old laughter and tears and fears and time-tried faith and stories. So many stories. In this house, the Ten Booms led a prayer group for the Jewish people for a 100 years before that love of one’s neighbor culminated in the series of events told in The Hiding Place. I felt suddenly conscious of and humbled by the strange fact that I, of all people, had been invited to help tell the story of this place. Incredibly, I would get to join my small story to the mythic edifice of this old Beje and its giants of the Faith. The Beje’s ghosts took my hand, pulled me further in, and began to whisper. The tour guides led us through the home. Little of it was original, but it was furnished to look as it might have in the 1940s. The atmosphere felt oddly familiar, like the home of an elderly relative from some distant branch of the family tree. The carpets, the wallpaper, the wooden desk, the brittle chair, the winding stair: everything was burdened with history, pregnant with lost stories. Up and up we climbed until we entered Corrie’s bedroom, and there, through a hole in the false wall, the “Hiding Place” itself was, ironically, on public display. We crawled inside and felt its closeness. We listened as its silence told its tale. This then is the calling of the writer, the novelist—the playwright. To strive against the forgetfulness of the world. To proclaim a whisper in defiance of cacophony. . . . Only by story does the world remember. Pete Peterson After about an hour, the tour wound down and spit us back out into the alleyway where it began, but the ghostly whispers in my ears didn’t fade. They would follow me for the rest of the trip through the Netherlands and across Germany to our final destination and the darkness crouching there in the east. Eventually, those voices would grow, keen, wail, and thunder as we followed the Ten Boom path into the past, but for now, here in Haarlem, they whisper in quiet desperation, because in that alleyway surrounded by the cafes and restaurants and hotels and flowers and commerce and vacationing tourists, they are being drowned out. They fade. They wither. They are slowly forgotten. These insistent phantoms cry out for fear their stories will dwindle and vanish into the post-Christian din of a present rushing past. This then is the calling of the writer, the novelist—the playwright. To strive against the forgetfulness of the world. To proclaim a whisper in defiance of cacophony. To find the hidden nook, the lonely vale, the cobbled alley whose story is slipping toward mundanity and visit it with re-enchantment. For what is a writer if not an explorer who reminds the world of its own marvels? In the telling of our tales we give back to ghosts their voices, so they can speak to generations upon generations and remind them of the cloud of witnesses that have come before. We give back to the dead their testimonies, and they, in turn, they give them back to the ages. Only by story does the world remember. A few days later we left Haarlem and drove into Germany, my mind full of whispers. I have a story to tell. If I’m to tell it well, I must listen.

I’ve been a fan of Jonny Jimison’s work for a long time. In fact, a few weeks ago when I sat down with the original Kickstarter version of Martin and Marco, I got a little teary-eyed when I got to the end and read through the list of backers, because it seemed like I knew every one of them, and most were part of the Rabbit Room community. Sadly, though, that book has been out of print for what seems like ages, and people ask for it all the time. We’ve been setting up Rabbit Room booths at homeschool conventions for three years and every time I go I wish I had copies of Jonny’s book to give to kids (and adults for that matter). So it seems like destiny (or more properly the Holy Spirit) when all these years later we find ourselves finally able to welcome Jonny to Rabbit Room Press in order to first re-issue Martin and Marco in full-color (it looks AWESOME, let me tell you), and then to ensure that the rest of the Dragon Lord Saga has a publisher and a home and will find its way into the world over the course of the new few years. If you’re new to Jonny’s work, you might recall that he’s the cartoonist behind the Rabbit Trails cartoon here on the site. He’s also done several other webcomics over the years like Getting Ethan and Noma. But no matter what it is he’s working on, it’s always something fun and always a joy to read. The Dragon Lord Saga is Jonny’s epic and we like to say it traces its lineage from forebears like the Lord of the Rings and Calvin and Hobbes. Yes, the story is full of dragons, and swords, and armies, but it’s also full of playful sibling rivalry, a talking horse, and more comic hijinks than you can shake a satchel at. What I enjoy most about the books, though, is the heart that Jonny puts into them. Sure, it’s colorful, and funny, and easy to read, but it’s also about two brothers who are growing in their relationships with one another and with everyone around them—and they’re also learning some hard truths about their own hearts along the way. These are good books. They are the kind of good books that are a pleasure to put into the hands of a child. The kind of good books that disappear into the bedroom and aren’t seen again until they are fully read and tattered at the edges. The kind of good books that a kid will read again and again and again. I’m so happy that Rabbit Room Press gets to be a part of the ongoing story of the Dragon Lord Saga. The wait is nearly over. The adventure begins with Volume One: Martin and Marco which is set for release on October 11th. You can pre-order today in the Rabbit Room store.* *Coming to Hutchmoot? You can pre-order now and pick up your book at the merch table. We’ll refund your shipping charge once you’ve picked up the book. Click here to pre-order Martin and Marco in the Rabbit Room Store.

I remember the first time I read The Princess Bride. I was a senior in high school and my sister was home from college for Christmas break, brandishing a thick paperback with the familiar title. Of course, I had seen the movie a handful of times, and I always assumed there was a book to go along, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. “I’m going to read it to you,” Connie insisted, but the tables quickly turned. She came down with a case of pneumonia and I ended up reading the whole book to her instead. Fifteen years have passed since then and I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve read it together. It is, hands down, our favorite novel. Besides the witty narration and fun characters, what draws us most to this epic tale is its impossible challenges. As Connie and I deal with our own struggles in life, we are encouraged time and time again to see Buttercup survive the snow sand, Fezzik strangle the Arabian Garstini (snake), and Westley come back from the dead. Sure, it’s fiction, but it reminds us that “impossible” is a silly word, and you only say you’ll not survive the Fire Swamp because no one ever has (but that doesn’t mean you won’t). My sister and I share a love for reading, but we also share a disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. This essentially jumbles the message that runs from our brains to our spinal cords, causing our muscles to not work well and atrophy over time. We have used power wheelchairs for most of our lives, learned our way around a few hospitals over the years, and depended on others to take care of our personal needs for as long as we can remember. So it may come as no surprise that we like stories in which impossible challenges are overcome. It may also come as no surprise that we always have a good laugh at the absurd-yet-relatable antics of the gang as a rag doll Westley slowly comes back to life. “My brains, your strength, and his steel against a hundred troops? And you think a little head-jiggle is supposed to make me happy?” There is something silly and yet profound about watching Westley, Fezzik, and Inigo storm the castle gates by working together and getting creative with their unique skills. But it didn’t start here. This wasn’t the first disabled man Inigo had encountered, nor the first time he’d had to think outside the box in such a scenario. Impossible is a silly word, isn't it? Kevan Chandler There’s a minor character, tucked deep into a page that touches briefly on Inigo’s past. As he prepares to battle a hoard of king bats, the Spaniard recalls his time spent one summer with the crippled MacPherson, “the only Scot who ever understood swords.” MacPherson openly mocked Inigo’s formal training, showing how it was fine for a fancy sport but useless on a mountainside, or if your opponent threw acid in your eyes. Goldman explains, simply, “his legs stopped at the knee, and so he had a special feel for adversity.” He forced Inigo to break the mold of what was deemed proper strategy, and this affected the way Inigo lived his life, how he saw challenges and took on the world, all the way to the gates of Florin. So when even the problem-solving Westley, who days earlier wrestled an R.O.U.S., looks at their situation on the wall and announces, “It’s impossible,” Inigo steps in to say otherwise. He admits that he doesn’t know how it’s possible, but he knows it is and assures Westley they’ll figure it out—and they do! There’s a lot to be said here about disabilities, but I think the takeaway of MacPherson, Inigo, and the gang runs deeper. It’s a message we can all relate to because, at the end of the day, everyone faces impossible challenges, and the question is, what will we do with them? MacPherson had nothing below the knees, but his life didn’t stop there. He took on whatever obstacles stood in his way, from dressing himself in the morning to mastering swordplay on the side of a mountain. And because of his will to persist, his path crossed with Inigo’s for the learning Spaniard to grow in his skills. Inigo was always a caring and resolute achiever, but their time together honed this in tandem with innovation, so that by the time he sat on a castle wall with Westley’s limp-necked head flopped against his shoulder, there was nothing weird or impossible to him about the situation. I look at my own life and have to remember two reasons why I push through my own impossible challenges. First, God has given me life, to live to the fullest as best I can. It’s a gift to unwrap and enjoy, so I’m going to do just that! And it may not always be easy, but it is always worth it. Secondly, as a Christian, I am called to love others and pour into their lives. As I overcome (or even simply deal with) my own struggles, I invite others to learn and grow with me—and who knows what castle wall that will land them on in the future? My hope is that, as folks’ paths cross mine, they are enriched because of the impossible challenges I’ve faced and handled well. After all, “impossible” is a silly word, isn’t it?

While I was reflecting recently on Quentin Tarantino’s latest film Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, I was reminded of something T. S. Eliot wrote (unlikely pair, I know): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” Eliot stated in his essay on Philip Massinger. “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” For those unfamiliar with Tarantino’s filmography, the self-taught director’s entire career is steeped in this philosophy—stealing images, aesthetics, and even whole scenes from cinematic history in order to create something wholly innovative. In his most recent film (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt), Tarantino reimagines the Hollywood of 1969 in a fictitious tale about a has-been TV western star, his stunt man, and the real-life events surrounding the Manson Family murders. But instead of merely imitating Hollywood history and the classic cowboy genre, Tarantino transcends his source material. He offers a mesmerizing pastiche, filled with snapshots from classics like Gunsmoke or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly all sewn together into a cohesive patchwork quilt. This film (and much of Tarantino’s work) proves Eliot’s thesis: that art can never exist in a vacuum. Instead, artists combine, repurpose, and breathe life into an endless supply of “stolen” artistic ingredients in an attempt to make sense of our present world, situations, and stories. When I first discovered that artists were allowed (nay, encouraged) to heavily borrow from the past instead of attempting to imagine wholly novel ideas, it felt as though I was lifted from under the weight of every artist, musician, and author I ever admired. Now, I was able to stand firmly on their shoulders, hoisted by the strength of their collective creativity, knowledge, and wisdom. So although Tarantino’s films are often objectionable (and not recommended for those sensitive to crass language and gratuitous violence), I’m beyond thankful for his incomparable grasp on his art form and for his ability to transform borrowed and stolen experiences into something, well, Tarantinoesque. Yes, that’s a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Now, the term “stealing” in this case may appear self-serving, but the thievery employed by Tarantino and described by Eliot is not a zero-sum game. Instead, it’s a powerful form of collaboration where the thief introduces his unique voice and the thieved artist is immortalized. While we do celebrate this collaborative connection to the past, it must be remembered that collaboration isn’t constrained to one-way conversations with dead poets. We live in community with other passion-filled artists—artists who help shape our worldview and whose collective voices are often louder, bolder, and more inspiring than a single voice. The most original parts of an artist's work may be those in which other artists, both dead and still living, assert their immortality most vigorously. Chris Thiessen The power of collaboration is displayed time and again in the music community. Most recently, I was blown away by its presence on Bon Iver’s album i,i. Just three years ago, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon delivered a computery, inward-looking record titled 22, A Million. His experimental extremes throughout the album convey a feeling of isolation and wintry lonesomeness which remain haunting and beautiful today. However, on i,i, Bon Iver’s tone has shifted remarkably as Vernon steers the band into meaningful collaboration with a broader musical community to create something uplifting and transformative. The piano-driven, gospel-inspired song “U (Man Like)” is a perfect example of what I mean. The second verse reads, “Well, I know that we set off for a common place / And the lines have run too deep / How much caring is there of some American love / When there’s lovers sleeping in our streets?” The message is one of unity, of striving together toward a better “common place.” However, instead of just delivering this message himself, Vernon invited singer-songwriter Bruce Hornsby to sing the first lyric, art-pop artist Moses Sumney the second, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus the third before Vernon is finally heard again. While it would be easy to think more collaborative voices would distort the distinct identity Bon Iver has crafted over their career, Vernon and company are more assured and confident here than they’ve ever been as they embrace the life-giving energy of community. Indeed, their identity is made all the more vivid because of the artists they’ve gathered around them—artists which have included Kanye West, James Blake, The National, and so many more in recent years. Often, individuality and originality are the most prized qualities to the critical eye, not collaboration. But if I may again paraphrase Eliot, the most original parts of an artist’s work may be those in which other artists, both dead and still living, assert their immortality most vigorously. I know that my arguments here for collaboration are just “stealing” and rehashing Eliot’s ideas as well as the Rabbit Room mantra that art nourishes community and community nourishes art. But I’m so encouraged that it’s not just something we say. It’s something I see in the work of Tarantino and Bon Iver. It’s something I see in hip-hop, a genre where you’ll be hard-pressed to find a project that doesn’t promote a deep sense of collaboration. Lastly, it’s something I see in my own work, even this essay which is the fruit of conversations, shared thoughts, and lots of encouragement from the community around me. So I apologize if you were hoping for some original, individualistic wisdom about art; I have none to share. Instead, I offer an invitation to create collaboratively and to steal confidently. Image by Tom Killion

Our first stop in Germany was to visit my brother- and sister-in-law in the small, industrial town of Hagen. We drove, we got lost, we got found, we ate, we visited, and then the next day we went to Cologne to see the famous cathedral there. The black facade of the church is the largest in the world, and the building took a staggering eight hundred years to complete. This means that for nearly a millennium, architects and engineers and masons and laborers spent their lives in service of a final work they knew they would not live to see. But when the building was finished in the late 19th century (still working off the original plans!), the king swung a ceremonial golden hammer and struck a ceremonial golden spike to mark the church’s completion. In his speech he proclaimed that after generations of back-breaking (and bank-breaking) labor, the work was finally done and the church would stand for millenia as a sign of the greatness of, wait for it, “our great city.” Do you hear that dissonant note? After climbing hundreds of tower steps and walking the cavernous nave and marveling at the craftsmanship and dedication involved in raising up something so beautiful, that speech landed on me like the final episode of Lost. Eight hundred years invested in a church building—and in the end it’s all for the glory of your city? That golden hammer went wide of the mark. How tragic to fumble the final act after such a storied history. I’d think about this a lot during our trip through Germany—the way that people and cultures so often stray over time, winding up at destinations far afield. We visited Wittenburg and stood at the door of the church and walked through Wartburg Castle where Luther fled in the aftermath of his defiance. We stood in the room where he translated the Bible into the language of the people. Eventually we’d even stand in Charlemagne’s throne room, the very seat of Christendom. Everywhere we went, the land was marked by history. The Church itself had marched through these ancient woods, through time, through space, always setting out with the grandest of intentions—often ending up elsewhere. Germany is a land built in the shadows of giants. And yet, those weren’t the shadows we’d come to see. We’d sometimes find ourselves talking to our AirBnB hosts, or to a local waiter or waitress, and they’d ask what brought us all the way from Tennessee. They’d inquire with a friendly smile and piqued curiosity, but upon hearing my answer, they’d change. “I’m doing research for a play. I’m here to visit a concentration camp.” Then followed the faded smile. And then the solemn nod, as if to say “Ah, that old spectre. Two thousand years of theology, and philosophy, and civilization, and music, and architecture, and art—but the swastika has blotted it out. We really messed things up. How long will it haunt us?” It was only ever an instant that I saw the disappointment, then they’d put on a good face and cover it up. But it was there, and I felt the pain of it, something like embarrassment. I wonder if the king ever felt that way after he swung his golden hammer. I suppose not. But the spectre of the swastika is what brought us here. A short drive north of Berlin, out in the wooded countryside, we entered Ravensbrück, the camp where Corrie and Betsie ten Boom were imprisoned in 1944. The SS command center sat like a crude industrial blight on the shores of a small lake, and the ruin behind the building spread across the ground like a salted field that would have to lay fallow for a generation before it could bear fruit again. I didn’t know what to expect. A few plaques? A memorial? A list of names? I had no idea. But I’ve come to think of the experience as a mirror image of the experience of visiting the Grand Canyon. The ground and stones themselves cried out, adding name after name to the same lament they sang for Abel. Pete Peterson When you go to the Grand Canyon the first time, you think you know what to expect. You’ve seen a million pictures of it. You’ve seen it in movies. You’ve heard people talk about it, oooh and aaaah over it. Maybe you’re just going to do your time and see it for yourself. But when you walk up to the rim and see the vast chasm of glories sprawling out below you, your jaw drops, you’re speechless, you can’t believe how big it is and all you can do is keep on looking at it as you try to comprehend its size. It’s hard to turn away. It’s so much grander than you ever thought it would be. The opposite is true at a concentration camp. You think you know. You think you’ve comprehended it. But the reality is so much darker. The chasm of horror so much deeper and wider and more incomprehensible than you imagined. You just keep looking at it in disbelief. You can’t fathom its size or its depth and it threatens to swallow you. Tragende (Ravensbrück Memorial) I stood in the crematorium where Betsie ten Boom was committed to smoke and ash, and I trembled under the din of the ghostly silence screaming from the oven’s mouth. Later I would stand with my back against a wall in Dachau where untold numbers of men were executed by firing squad. The ground and the stones themselves cried out, adding name after name to the same lament they sang for Abel. We spent about four hours at Ravensbrück, the same at Dachau, and we only scratched the surface. It was overwhelming—the artifacts, the photos, the documents, the testimonies, the terrible quiet, the evidence of a gradual and years-long build from a relatively pleasant place of political confinement to a swirling horror of death and suffering and hate. It’s hard to even know how to react. When we got back into the car, all we could do was cry. This is the creeping shadow under which modern Germany lives and breathes and goes about its life. Fifteen-hundred years of history is nearly obscured by it. It’s tragic on an epic cultural scale. As we retreated back into the relative safety of the world at hand, I grew more and more anxious. I’d agreed to tell the story of the Hiding Place, but the story of the Ten Boom family is so much more than their own. It’s the story of a darkness more vast than I can imagine—and of the light that pierces it. It’s a tale of ponderous weight, and tremendous hope. And I worry that it’s more than I can tell. I worry that I’ve been handed a golden hammer. Yet, thankfully, the insistent ghosts that found me at the Beje and drove me to Ravensbrück beckon me forward still. If it’s by story that the world remembers, then it’s by silence the world forgets. If I’ve learned anything of Corrie ten Boom, it’s this: she did not keep silent. She saw into the darkness of human suffering and evil. She saw what lay beyond it. And she spent the rest of her life testifying to what she she’d seen. The ghosts won’t let me keep silent either. Act 1. Scene 1. Time to write. I whisper a prayer for the Holy Spirit’s help. I close my eyes. And I swing my hammer.

The week after Hutchmoot last year, I did two things: bought a guitar I’d been eyeing up all summer and wrote this song on it. When my wife, Kelsey, went to bed, I was strumming five chords. When she woke up, I had five verses. Each of the first four verses explores a strategy as old as Eden for avoiding suffering: distraction via decadence, works righteousness, pedestalizing creativity, and the quest to eliminate mystery. When we reach the end of these dead-ends, life often drags us, kicking and screaming, into the darkness. Then the fifth verse presents another way—not a way out, but a way through. I’ll give you this spoiler alert: the darkness is not the enemy. The darkness, it turns out, is one of the greatest friends available to us, if only we have the honesty and humility to receive it. If you want to help me give this song its best shot in the world, then share it with your friends! Add it to a playlist. Sing it around your house. Songs love to be sung and heard. Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.

Speaking of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote. . . it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long been forgotten, descending into the deeps. I think of this remark whenever people ask writers about their “influences.” Writers aren’t always aware of their most important influences. Their answer will always be incomplete because they can only speak to their conscious influences—to the writers that they are trying to be influenced by, that they hope to be influenced by. As Tolkien says, everything you observe, think, or read goes onto the compost heap that decomposes into a humus that ultimately nourishes new life. I’ve got a big leaf pile in my back yard. One thing I have learned from digging humus is that it isn’t really humus until you can no longer tell from looking at it that it used to be leaves. Its old life has to be forgotten. When I was in elementary school, we used to collect pretty leaves, put them between sheets of wax paper, and run an iron over them. (Do schoolchildren still do this?) It’s a good way to preserve a leaf as-is, but a leaf pressed between sheets of wax paper doesn’t have the potential to give life to something new. A leaf that decomposes to leaf-mould does. I’m probably mixing metaphors here, but if you think too much and too consciously about your influences, you may find yourself stuck in imitation mode. You can end up like a grade-schooler drawing a picture of a leaf preserved in wax paper. When The Secret of the Swamp King came out, a reviewer remarked that I was obviously influenced by Mark Twain, and especially Huckleberry Finn. I was indignant. I hadn’t spent ten minutes thinking about Huckleberry Finn while I was writing The Secret of the Swamp King. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the reviewer was right. Of course I was influenced by Huckleberry Finn. I love that book; and the fact that I wasn’t consciously thinking about Huck Finn while I was writing doesn’t mean I was free from its influence. There’s a whole lot of Mark Twain in the leaf-mould of my mind. One thing I have learned from digging humus is that it isn't really humus until you can no longer tell from looking at it that it used to be leaves. Its old life has to be forgotten. Jonathan Rogers I started thinking about all this because I’m revisiting Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers for the first time in about thirty years. I have been astonished to realize how much that book shaped me as a writer. I would have never listed Charles Dickens as an “influence” on my work. But I can point to little things in all four of my novels that have Dickens’s fingerprints all over them. I’m realizing what an arbitrary question it is to ask a writer to name his or her influences. As it turns out, I don’t know who my influences are. Or perhaps I should say, my influences are everybody I’ve ever read. Your unique voice is shaped by everything that goes on the compost heap of the mind. Those conscious influences that you value so highly? Throw them onto the heap too, and let them decompose into something no longer recognizable, something that is mixed and mingled with everything else in a combination unlike the one in anybody else’s mind. This piece originally appeared in The Habit, a weekly letter about writing from Jonathan Rogers. If you’d like letters like these delivered directly to your inbox every week, then click here to sign up.

For those who aren’t familiar with Corrie ten Boom and her story, she and her family were watchmakers outside of Amsterdam. When Nazi Germany invaded, they spent two years hiding Jewish refugees in their home (saving some 800 people) until they were caught in 1944 and sent to various prisons and some, ultimately, to Ravensbrück concentration camp. After the war, Corrie would go on to travel the world and testify about her experience for the rest of her life. What stands out about Corrie, and is clearly evident in her book, is her family’s unshakable faith in the sovereignty of God and their uncanny ability to embody gratitude, even in the midst of the darkest days of the 20th century (if not the history of civilization). In the context of the genocide of millions and the suffering of millions more, gratitude and faith are difficult concepts to accept. After all, what kind of god allows such dehumanization and destruction? How can anyone in the midst of holocaust believe in God’s goodness? A story needs a meaty question to wrestle with, and this one is as meaty as they come. Humankind has been chewing on it for thousands of years and we still don’t have an answer we swallow entirely. As I sat down to write, it occurred to me that I’ve danced around these ideas before. My first play, The Battle of Franklin, took on slavery and war and the consequences of dehumanization. Then in Frankenstein, I wrestled with the idea of how we might be shaped either by kindness or by cruelty and how a relationship to our creator might ultimately damn or redeem us. Now, in The Hiding Place, I came to realize that the story was ultimately a journey of theodicy. What good can be said of a god that permits the extermination of millions? The question seems insurmountable. Unanswerable even. But maybe, in the shadow of the unanswerable, we’re called to enter the ring and wrestle, even if all we go away with is a blessing and a limp. In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan puts forward an argument of unsettling power, suggesting that no matter what ultimate good God intends, it is not worth the suffering of even one innocent child. “I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. … You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that … I, too, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then … It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child … It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony … I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him … the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive … Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. … too high a price is asked for harmony … And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket … And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.” What if the culmination of theodicy is not an answer, but an action? God doesn't tell us why. Instead, he shows us how. Pete Peterson If you’re anything like me, you can’t turn away from Ivan’s defiance without being haunted by it. It’s a demand for justice that we all carry around with us, and we feel it when we hear rumors of famine in far off lands and see pictures of children on the cusp of starvation. We feel it when we see videos of ISIS executions, or hear testimonies from refugees, or witness 70,000 people left homeless in the wake of a hurricane. And right here in America we’ve worked hard to deafen our ears to the cries of our victims but in flashes and gunshots and protests we’re gradually awakening to the screams of our own ghosts as they spill out of the past where we’ve tried to bury them. The world is swollen with suffering. We’ve all partaken—and we’ve all participated. It’s easy to shake a fist at the Almighty and refuse his ticket. It’s hard to listen. It’s harder to receive an answer that’s as difficult as the question itself. Visit a concentration camp, and you’ll find it’s your job to listen. It’s not a place to stage an argument. It’s not a place to stroll through and visit with scant attention. And yet, neither is it a place of despair. It’s a place to listen, to give ghosts their voices. Listen: “Our father who art in heaven And who sees our homeless life, Take your loyal children into your care, Staunch the tears that darken our souls. Hallowed be thy name here on foreign soil, Where, violently torn from our paternal home, We must pray secretly among our enemies. Thy will be done! We humbly cry In the belief that sorrow and joy must come from you, That you give us everything, great and Almighty God, And this deep faith will sweeten our misery. Give us strength to survive and the belief in our souls That our exile is not without purpose … Deliver us from all that is evil And give us a joyful homecoming.” —Urszula Winska, prisoner of Ravensbrück Listen: “O Lord, remember not only the people of good will but also the people of evil will. And remember not only all of the suffering they have caused but also the fruits that have been borne of this suffering: our friendship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity. Remember the greatness of heart that sprang from this. And when we face the Last Judgement, let all of the fruits we have borne secure their forgiveness. Amen.” —Mother Maria (Elizaveta Skobcova), imprisoned and executed at Ravensbrück Like Betsie and Corrie ten Boom, many who went into great darkness found there a light that was greater yet. They sat in the depths of the pit, and they gave thanks. They prayed for their oppressors. They kindled love between one another. They sang and they suffered. And they saw something in all of it that most of us miss. They are witnesses, and we owe them a hearing of their testimony. In the writing of The Hiding Place and my wrestling with Ivan’s rebellion, I could find no answer to why God permits such things. But while I’m angry about suffering in the world and I cry out for vengeance, I also need to humble myself and hear the voices of those who have gone before and seen things more closely and more clearly. Listen: I happened across a story of the communion host being smuggled into the concentration camp by a Red Cross worker. Seeing this revelation, prisoners gathered around in wonder as if a miracle had come among them. Maybe it had. What if the culmination of theodicy is not an answer, but an action? God doesn’t tell us why. Instead, he shows us how. He answers mystery with mystery. His response to suffering is to partake of it himself, and he partakes of it still in each of us. He dies with us, groans with us, suffers with us. But to what end? In the mystery of Communion we acknowledge that we are not merely secured to Christ; he is also secured to us, the eternal intersecting with the temporal as he joins himself to each of us in our own suffering and death—and therefore joins us to his resurrection. To Ivan, I say yes, there is one who can forgive and atone and who has the right to do so, for the Creator suffers as we suffer. The child’s death is his death too, and therefore his resurrection will be the child’s. He takes all suffering into himself—and he transfigures it. His body, too, was broken. His blood, too, was spilled. Our bodies, too, will be made new. This is the testimony of the martyrs and saints. This is the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. Betsie ten Boom saw it. Corrie ten Boom testifies to it. An empty tomb proclaims it. Listen.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers interviews Randall Goodgame, the mastermind behind the Slugs & Bugs franchise. Randall Goodgame is the creator of Slugs & Bugs, a family music and entertainment brand that includes eight albums, two books, and now a television show. It starts streaming on September 27. In this episode, Randall and Jonathan talk about the truth-telling of a childhood perspective, the relationship between silliness and sincerity, collaboration, and the sticking to one’s vision even when the other people in the room know more than you do. Preorder the Slugs and Bugs TV Show. Writers who make Randall want to write: J. R. R. Tolkien Kate DiCamillo Maurice Sendak Click here to listen to Episode 17 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

One of the great words of the New Testament, to which Jesus himself gave the greatest importance when he used it in instituting the Eucharist, is anamnesis, remembrance. Christ’s institution placed at the center of our lives a gift and a discipline. The discipline is recalling a Person from the back of our minds into the focus our mind’s eye. The gift is that the Person we recall is Christ himself. As a new father, I am just starting to see how parenthood likewise requires of us discipline in recalling and graces us with gifts in the remembering. As we watch our children wonder at things for the first time, we call to mind those times and places where we first found those very things wonderful. When our children confront challenges for the first time, we help them by recalling when we first faced those challenges. And when we remember the myriad guises in which grace met us in those challenges—whether to grant us success in meeting them, or to pick us up when we stumbled—we find fresh grace not only for our children but for ourselves. We often find that we are made better—wiser, kinder, more thankful and joyful—by the remembering that is a staple discipline of parenthood. In remembering we find ourselves just a bit better fitted to receive the Kingdom of God like little children. It may seem odd to begin a review of The Slugs & Bugs Show with meditations on anamnesis, but as I watched episode after episode the word kept coming to mind. The show recalls so many places I’ve been and, as it calls those things to mind, it spotlights things my daughter will soon encounter for the first time. The show finds those places where remembrance and discovery meet, and keeps coming back to them. Notably, its approach to these holy places is via the Gospel rather than moralism: the characters (sometimes despite themselves) find delight in music, thankfulness in feasts, understanding after confusion, satisfaction in collaboration through conflict, reconciliation after wrongdoing. Not all shows are so careful as the Slugs & Bugs Show in drawing out the practical, gritty ways that the Gospel of grace alone makes life in family and community possible. This is one of many reasons I am thankful that my wife, daughter and I will have the benefit of watching and learning from The Slugs & Bugs Show together. The show finds those places where remembrance and discovery meet, and keeps coming back to them. David Mitchel And I should add that, as we learn from The Slugs & Bugs Show together, we’ll be enjoying it together, because The Slugs & Bugs Show imparts its graces and the serious lessons of remembrance with a wonderfully light touch. Here great credit goes to the whole The Slugs & Bugs Show creative team. Producer J. Chris Wall (VeggieTales, The Wingfeather Saga film) saw in the Slugs & Bugs albums a little world (the show’s delightful Slugs & Bugs Workshop) from which such songs might have emerged, and the potential for a full cast of characters whose existence the Slugs & Bugs albums had suggested. Randall Goodgame, host of the show and communal hub of the Slugs & Bugs Workshop, holds the matter of the show together much the way he does on the Slugs & Bugs albums—fitting silly pieces to profound ones with joy, warmth, and understanding. The show’s writers—Wall, Douglas McKelvey, and others—deliver to Randall finely-shaped pieces to fit together. The principal characters (Doug the Slug, Sparky the Lightning Bug, Maggie and Morty Racoon) all appear with recognizably distinct personalities; the recurring characters (e.g. Amy Goodgame as herself and as Carla the Delivery Person) are memorable and fun; and both the writers and Randall as host draw forth fine performances from the various guests who appear on the show. The many songs featured in the shows are set appropriately and, as one would expect, the musical performances are both skillful and drenched in joy. It takes vision, artistic and literary craftsmanship, and a great deal of love to create a space where parents can remember things as their children discover them, where adults and children can satisfy together their “eternal appetite of infancy,” as they grow younger together in the graces of the Father who “is younger than we.” I am thankful to the creators and performers who have made The Slugs & Bugs Show such a space.

One of the most brilliant aspects of The Faerie Queene also makes this work inaccessible to most modern readers. For approximately 35,000 lines, Spenser writes in verse (tight poetic form). Because I’m a recovering English teacher, I’m going to explain a bit about how meter and verse function in this poem. (Lit nerds who already get it, move along.) In 2019, very few people seem to understand this stuff, so I’m starting at ground zero because I want you to see an important choice I’ve had to make along the way. Metrical Feet So, a stanza is a big chunk of poetry. It’s sort of like a whole verse in a song. These big chunks of poetry are broken up into two smaller units—lines and metrical feet. You know what a line is. We still use that term for music and poetry today. But a “metrical foot” is a little less common. This is a specific unit of stressed and unstressed syllables. To simplify that—imagine the name “Julie.” That word has two syllables, and the stress is on the first syllable. The name “Bernard” also has two syllables, but (at least in the US), we stress the second. Lit nerds have special names for all of these wee little metrical units, and Wikipedia has a decent chart here. Rhyme Spenser primarily used pentameter in The Faerie Queene, which means (for the most part) he had five of these metrical feet per line. He also used a very particular rhyme scheme as he put these lines together. Here it is: A B A B B C B C C Each letter there represents the ending sound of one line within a single stanza. So, lines 1 and 3 rhyme, lines 2, 4, 5, and 7 rhyme, and so on. Why did he do this for 35,000 lines? Well, because at the time, readers were used to looking for rhyme schemes and meter in poems. Just like the rhythm and lyrics of a modern song help imitate the song’s meaning, these tools helped a poem’s form enhance its meaning. (You can read more about this in Kaske’s “Introduction” to Book One of The Faerie Queene, if you’re interested. Photo below.) But the problem is that today, most Twitter-trained readers get bogged down trying to read such complicated forms. Not only is Spenser’s language archaic (which is difficult in itself), but the nuanced connections he tries to make between stanzas while holding to a very tight and complicated formula can make his work almost impossible to understand. I can tell these translators weren't just converting one language to another, but that they had a deep inner fire and respect for the story. Rebecca Reynolds When I first started transposing The Faerie Queene, I tried to keep to Spenser’s meter and rhyme. Very quickly, though, I realized that it would be impossible. Too many common words and phrases used in the Elizabethan era are not used by people today, so they require many more words to explain. In the end, I decided it would be kindest to complete a vivid, stanza-by-stanza, prose transposition that catches most of Spenser’s meaning while preserving as much of his musicality as possible. My Inspiration? As I thought about all of my favorite translators, I realized they had each chosen narrative heart over pedantic precision at times. I’ve loved Beowulf for decades, but Seamus Heaney’s made me weep in my kitchen. Dorothy Sayers’s Dante is electric. Les Mis is gorgeous in all forms, but (despite those few distracting too-modern idioms the critics gripe about), my favorite English Les Mis was given to us by Julie Rose. I can tell these translators weren’t just converting one language to another, but that they had a deep inner fire and respect for the story. They didn’t just translate denotatively but connotatively. Of course, some losses are inevitable with this choice—especially in a poem like The Faerie Queene. Not all double meanings, elements of wit, or bits of irony can be caught in prose. However, as I’ve spoken with people who’ve read The Faerie Queene in school, almost all admit to skimming over bits that were difficult to understand. So, I think there’s a huge value to preserving as much as I can, providing a segue into the main plot for the common reader, and then urging those who fall in love with Spenser to head back into the archaic text to discover what I could not capture. Consider me the salt on the oats.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers interviews Sarah MacKenzie, champion of the read-aloud revival. Sarah MacKenzie is the host of Read-Aloud Revival and the author of The Read-Aloud Family. In this episode, Jonathan and Sarah discuss the curious connection between the writer who works in quiet solitude and the family reading aloud together, the instructive power of life’s limitations, and Sarah’s recent forays into writing picture books. Writers who make Sarah want to write: Jeanie Birdsall (The Penderwicks) Karina Yan Glaser (The Vanderbleekers) Barbara Cooney (Miss Rumphius) Sarah Stewart (The Gardener, The Library) Click here to listen to Episode 18 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

In the spirit of fall, here’s a “lost verse” from Douglas McKelvey’s liturgy of “Praise to the King of Creation.” You are the King of Autumn, You are the Master Painter of trees, You are the Progenitor of Pumpkins. You are the Cider King, the Harvest King. You are the Lord of Gourds, You are the Emperor of Apples. You sit enthroned among the oaks, upon your brow a wreath of golden birch leaves, within your hand a staff of yellowed corn stalk, your robe a rich maple leaf red. You are the King of golden fields, You are the Lord of lengthened nights. You are the source of Hallowed delights. You are the King of Autumn. [Editor’s note: By “lost verse,” Chris means that he wrote this poem himself, inspired by McKelvey’s liturgy of “Praise to the King of Creation,” found in Every Moment Holy.]

You would have laughed to see it—that mound of walruses piled on the Russian coast. Laughter was my first inclination. I wondered when a male walrus would begin an awkward mating dance or heave his bulk at a pesky seagull. I was waiting for the comic soundtrack, the thumping of a tuba, when I began to understand. This was a story of suffering. The animals were struggling to find a place to rest. Behind them, each surge of water brought a fresh wave of walruses, so they lumbered over the bodies of their fellows to cliffs hundreds of feet above the sea. I held my breath and asked myself how they would get down. I watched them fall. For a few seconds they were weightless. It was almost funny—their huge bodies, so ungainly, all whiskers and tusks and flab. Until they landed. You would have wept to see them die. And when you turned and saw the tears on your children’s faces, what would you have said? They'll ask how we failed to see that we were crowned with glory and honor, how we failed to understand dominion. Helena Sorensen I am running out of time; a decision must be made. By accident, in overheard conversations, in news stories and library books, my children are discovering the darkness in the world. They’re catching glimpses of the wide, haunted eyes of children driven from their homes. They’re beginning to learn that people—bearers of the life and image of God—are bought and sold, used and discarded. They’re hearing rumors of genocide and death camps and girls shot in the head for daring to go to school. And what am I to say? Would you sit beside your little boy and tell him that the laws are bad, the governments corrupt, the systems broken? Would you tell him that the world is full of evil men who do not know who they are unless their hands are full of things to break? “My son, there are giants in the land.” They’re seeing pictures of little seabirds lying dead in their nests with bellies burst open. Diligent parents flew over the sea in search of food. They scooped bright offerings into their beaks and dropped them into the mouths of their hungry babies. They flew out and returned, flew out and returned, until the fragile chicks could hold no more and they choked on the pretty scraps of plastic I threw away and forgot. What do I tell my daughter when she finds that there is no such place as “away”? Do I tell her that creation groans, that the planet writhes in pain? Do I sit with her and grieve that we are trapped in the “not yet”? Do I tell her we are powerless and only God can fix the problem? That He will come to enact a grand rescue, undoing all the consequences of our choices on some distant golden daybreak? “My daughter, we are as grasshoppers.” I have only so much time. One day my children’s children will come to me and ask me why. I can imagine their confusion. “You must have seen the signs,” they’ll say. “How could you believe you had no choice but to dominate or wait?” They’ll ask about my generation and those that came before. They’ll ask how we failed to see that we were crowned with glory and honor, how we failed to understand dominion. What excuse will I give? Will I tell them we were small and nameless, that we waited for evil to crush us under its boot? Will I look back and see our great numbers? Will I remember how we descended on the earth’s abundance and the incomprehensible gift of humanity and devoured it, unthinking? Will I confess my unbelief when my children’s children reap what I have sown? My friend, there are giants in the land. And we are as grasshoppers in our own eyes. Numbers 13:33, Joshua 2:9, Psalm 8

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of attending the debut of Ella Mine’s concept show Dream War. The conceptual project delves into the depths of hopelessness, pain, and internal turmoil with such grit and vulnerability, yet it offers a beam of light to those who find themselves in the midst of similar fights. From beginning to end, the show’s poetic songwriting and diverse art rock sensibilities display Ella’s passion and intense dedication to the project. “I’ve given myself completely to this work,” she tells me at a local coffee shop. “I love all the music projects I’m involved in, but when I started writing Dream War I realized this is what I need to do.” Ella Mine is performing Dream War in its entirety on October 11th as part of The Art of Evocation’s Hutchmoot show titled “Well – Exploring the Healing Power of Art.” In anticipation of the show, as well as her Local Show tonight, I sat down with Ella to talk about the show’s origins and her personal journey through the darkness. Chris: Before we dive into your personal experiences, emotions, and struggles that led to Dream War, what were some musical or literary influences that informed the project? Ella: In middle and high school, I studied classical piano in a vigorous program in Nashville. So some of my earliest musical romances are with composers Frédéric Chopin and Claude Debussy. After that, I’d say the Waterboys, Glen Hansard, Lone Justice, and Beck. Waterdeep changed my world too. As for literary inspirations in Dream War, there’s one song (“Where Is She Now?”) taken from Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy right before she takes her life, and the next song (“Sound + Fury”) is based on Macbeth’s response to that news. Another song, “Wheel of Love,” is primarily taken from my reflections on the book The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason. It carries the idea that when you give yourself to anything, you’re opening yourself up to pain, which is essentially the premise of the whole work. Chris: So the show you’re performing at Hutchmoot centers around mental health and the healing power of art. How does Dream War engage that conversation? Ella: Well I’ve walked through a lot since age 17, and in Dream War I wrote what I needed to hear to help me through it. But really it’s about any struggle through darkness—wanting to love or dream or believe in something and then having that affection, hope, or trust ravaged. How do we move on into loving or dreaming again? Chris: To the extent that you’re comfortable, can you talk about some of what you’ve lived through? Ella: I was diagnosed with a pain condition called Central Sensitization Syndrome when I was 17. To help with the pain, I was prescribed an SSRI designed to treat depression, but commonly offered off-label for physical pain like mine. After two months, my personality was completely altered. It took me and the people around me completely off guard. We didn’t know that the medication would have psychoactive effects. I became apathetic and hateful, two emotional states I had never experienced before. It was terrible. I got off the SSRI slowly, thinking, “Now I’ll be back to normal.” Sadly, that’s often not how it works. Getting off of the medication was even worse. I experienced psychosis, a confusing, terrifying state where I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. Visual and auditory hallucinations made it difficult to know whether or not what I was seeing or hearing was real. The drug also caused akathisia and mild cognitive impairment that made math, logic, and even speaking difficult. I had compulsions and impulses that were completely foreign and terrifying. That’s hard to live through. At that point, it’s a choice to keep living. And five years later, I’m still on an incline of recovery. Chris: That is such a difficult journey. So how were the impulses and feelings and pain fueled into Dream War? Ella: I lived through a darkness that was so oppressive and surrounding and really inside of me that I could truly relate with and write a song from Lady Macbeth’s perspective, wondering if I’d ever be clean again. I had to fight so hard against the terrible things I thought and the terrible things I had impulses to do. The thoughts and impulses felt so organic and personal, and at the same time so foreign. But I knew this was wickedness, especially when harmful thoughts were directly correlated to the people I cared about the most. I can still feel the horror of thinking those thoughts. The chorus of the song “Dream War” is my weary white flag: “Calling off the dream war cause I Can’t keep the waves from breaking on this shore Calling off the dream war cause I Already lost the dreams I was fighting for” I couldn’t keep doing it. During that time, my dad (Douglas McKelvey) was talking to me about how fear works, how sometimes fear is the weapon. I didn’t get it at first, but now I realize that the fear itself was the dangerous thing. So the verse in that song which says “If I ran, then I ran with the fire of fear” speaks to the idea that I’m running from something that seems real, but maybe it’s just the fear. Chris: So dreams are a running theme throughout the show. Did that come from real experience as well? In those moments of clarity, it was like getting my head above water before being thrown back under the sea. I would take in the deepest breath of air that I possibly could. Then back under the waves, I would hold that breath as long as I could. Ella Mine Ella: Every night I’d have to make the decision between staying awake with akathisia in a dark house, not knowing what my tired brain was going to do, or go to sleep and experience the creepy, violent dreams I’d have. I would wake up and still be half in that awful dream state, and that was when I most wanted not to be alive. As real and organic as these experiences felt, I was aware that up until that year, I had lived as a completely different person in a different life. I had believed in goodness, loved living, loved people, known truth. So I recognized the difference. And I knew that of those two experiences, the one that I wanted to be reality was not the one I now found myself in. Dream War is full of ocean and water imagery because in those moments of clarity, it was like getting my head above water before being thrown back under the sea. I would take in the deepest breath of air that I possibly could. Then back under the waves, I would hold that breath as long as I could. In the recovery community, they call that sort of cycle “windows and waves.” In the windows, I would find truth and bury it inside of me. Not bury as in hide it, but as in secure it somewhere safe so that when I feel like I can’t reach it, I can still remember that it exists. Chris: What were those things you were able to hold onto? Ella: Scripture, love, moments where I knew God—I took those things that in moments of clarity I knew to be true and just held them tightly. And then in confusion, mania, and psychosis, when I was capable of it, I chose to believe what I in other times knew to be true. That took a lot of energy, and I learned how much I needed other people. Chris: So in other people, you found the energy to continue? Ella: Not necessarily. In other people, I felt the freedom to relax. It was like after a boxing match, where you’ve fought hard and you’re worn out and you can just fall into the arms of the person in your corner. In stages where I felt too weak to fight for myself, I knew that my family, mentors, and friends were supporting me. Sometimes we have to get to that point where we can’t take care of ourselves in order to recognize how much someone else can. Chris: So if they were the relief, what energized you in your fight? Ella: That’s a good question. I think we know that a fight for what’s good is worth the struggle. Maybe stories helped, being steeped in stories all my life. In stories, there’s usually darkness and a fight. There’s tension before resolution. If you can see your own life as a story, it helps to stay in the fight and maintain at least a shred of hope. Chris: In a lot of stories that portray the fight between light and darkness, light wins, and the darkness just goes away. That’s not the case with your show. I want the hope that's offered to be a hard-earned hope, not an easy answer. Ella Mine Ella: That was important to me in this work. I didn’t want to take my listeners through this intense journey and then slap on a happy ending or solution. Sometimes as artists, we just need to ask the question. But I also didn’t want to leave those who’ve walked through this journey with me in a dark place. I wanted the work to be as true and inviting as possible, but also as worthwhile as possible. If you see this show, I want you to be glad you did, even if it’s not easy listening. I want the hope that’s offered to be a hard-earned hope, not an easy answer. I want it to be the sort of hope that has survived the worst that darkness can throw at us. Chris: Was it hard to balance creating a hopeful story, but not a happy story? Ella: The biggest struggle I had in writing was moving from the place of “I don’t want to dream or love or believe in something again” to deciding, “I will dream again.” I spent months asking people the question, “As humans, how do we do this?” Often after being hurt we think, “I’ll never hope for the best again,” or “I’ll never be able to trust someone like that again.” But at some point, we go, “OK, I can do this again.” So what is it that causes that change in us? From that struggle, I wrote “Wheel of Love,” which is mainly asking those questions. It never answers them; it just invites the listener into the question. The decision to keep going comes later, and is made in the context of recognizing that the world won’t necessarily support me, and that people I love might still hurt me, and that love is something we’re going to have to fight for. But it is worthwhile. The most important lines of the show are the bridge of “Fire”: “I’ll lay down in my burning bed Though darkened thoughts run through my head I’ll focus on the light instead and Close my eyes and dream again” Living is painful, but I’m still gonna do it. I’m gonna focus on the light. As someone who still experiences physical pain on an everyday basis, I know that sometimes all you can do is shift the focus and accept that you’re feeling it, but it’s OK. Chris: It’s great that even though you wrote the things you needed to hear, the songs are able to speak into other people’s journeys. Ella: As I wrote, I was hoping and praying that this would be what it needs to be for myself, but that it would also meet the needs of others. I read recently, “One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through, and it will be someone else’s survival guide.” That’s one of the redemptive results I’ve already seen from what I’ve gone through. So many people I know have experienced similar reactions to medications and gone through similar life patterns to what I experienced. And when nobody else in their circles can understand what they’re going through, I can. Chris: What is your hope for people who come to see the show at Hutchmoot or elsewhere? Ella: I want this experience to be an invitation for anybody who is hurting or struggling or in the middle of a fight to continue the walk through the struggle. I want this music to create space to feel what we don’t normally allow ourselves to feel. We often try to shut off our feelings because they’re painful or we don’t have time for them. I want to offer a space for people to enter into their struggle, and then in a kind way, walk with them until we’re again within sight of the light that’s always been there.

It’s time at last to announce some mind-blowingly good news: the North Wind Manor fundraising is complete. Thanks to a lot of extremely generous people (this means you), we were able to meet our goal just a few weeks ago—in fact, we exceeded it by a few thousand dollars. Do you realize how amazing that is? I’ll answer that for you. Very, very amazing. In case you’re new around here and you’re wondering, “What’s North Wind Manor and why all the excitement?” I’ll give it to you in a nutshell: For years we’ve been operating out of an old farmhouse on a few acres in Nashville, and though we tried hard to make it work, the place was in desperate need of a deep renovation. It was adequate as a homey office space, and we hoped it would be a sort of retreat from the noise of the city, a place where we could host lectures and Bible studies and small concerts. We’ve had a handful of events out here, and people seemed to like them—even though the house, despite our best efforts, never quite felt right, like the clothes didn’t fit. And yet, the location is perfect—there are walking trails along the creek, a front porch tailor made for Tennessee sunsets, and there’s an undeniable feeling of peace and restfulness, all just minutes from Nashville. So after looking around Nashville for a while to see if we could find a place that would give us office space, shipping and storage facilities, and room for hosting events, we realized the best place was right under our feet; the thing to do was to stay put and dig in, with a long view of the future of the Rabbit Room. We decided to renovate and the place in order to make it more hospitable, functional, and beautiful. But that’s not all. The plan had two phases that reflect two key aspects of the Rabbit Room’s work: 1) Build a storage facility/shipping office/publishing house for the operations required to do all the things we do. What things? Publishing books (we have more than thirty in print now), shipping CDs, books, and art that we support, organizing the Local Show, planning Hutchmoot—those sorts of things, for starters. We were also paying for a couple of storage units to house the books, and we wanted to bring that in-house to save money. Well, thanks to you we secured the funding to begin construction on the barn in January 2019 and completed the project about a month ago, to much celebration. With the help of an army of wonderful volunteers, we immediately moved all the shipping and operations out of the old farmhouse (and out of the storage units), and into the new barn—and morale immediately improved. Turns out, it’s nice being in a space without mouse nests in the cupboards or vines growing through the walls. 2) Phase two, of course, was to renovate the farm house, a.k.a. “North Wind Manor.” Once the barn was finished we started on the house. Well, as renovations often go, we found out pretty quickly that the problems with the house were deep, and went straight through the bones and into the foundation. The footprint and plans haven’t changed at all, but we had to start with a new foundation and take the place apart. This was awesome because we got to save a lot of the old, fat, century-old beams, fireplace mantels, and cool hardwoods so that we can reincorporate them into the new place. I just love that we’re carrying the old, beautiful stuff over into the new. We also saved a ton of good foundation stones that we’ll incorporate into the gardens and landscaping. Here’s my favorite part: now that the operations have moved to the storage barn/publishing house, the manor will be used solely for ministry. There’s a big kitchen for hosting, a library (with a fireplace!) for reading and study, and a large room that will seat about 100 people for things like writing groups, lectures, symposiums, concerts, and feasting. Until now, the Rabbit Room has always had to put on its events elsewhere. This new space will allow us to dig into a place, to season these acres and these walls with good stories of the New Creation. So after literally years of dreaming, followed by years of planning, we pulled the trigger on the fundraising campaign almost exactly a year ago. In just one year, you helped us raise more than $450,000 and the Rabbit Room is flourishing like never before. That’s why I say it’s very, very amazing. These are exciting times in the Rabbit Room. We thank God for you every time we walk into the new office space and hear the sound of construction on the farm house. Hopefully in another year the house will be finished and we’ll enter a new season in this ministry, one that will hopefully last till long after we’re dead and gone. All that said, there will certainly be some overages in the project, and we’ll of course need to furnish it (we’ll need a piano, sound equipment, chairs, tables, etc.), so if you’ve been meaning to help financially we still need you. It’s kind of like in The Lord of the Rings, when Sauron has been defeated, but there are still like 100 pages left in the book for the scouring of the Shire and the voyage to the Grey Havens. My, wasn’t that a nerdy analogy? Here’s one for you sports people: We’ve crossed the finish line of the marathon, but we still need help with the cool-down. (Not as good as a LOTR analogy, but it’ll do.) The point is, there’s a lot to be thankful for. There’s a real sense around here that this is Kingdom work, and after twelve years we’re just getting started. From the board, the staff, and the many people connected to this ministry, thank you so much. Sincerely, gratefully, joyfully yours, AP

You mumble a phrase. It’s gibberish, but it suggests a melody. You’ve gotten melodies in your head before, but this one feels different, like it’s made of something stronger and older. You notice this because you’re able to repeat it, and you like it, and you sing it again and again, enough times that you pull out your phone and record it. As soon as you get it down, you forget about it and move on. Skip ahead a few days. Now you have your guitar in your lap. Fear and self-doubt are taunting ghosts at either shoulder. You try to find some combination of chords that doesn’t sound like everything else you’ve ever played, or everything everyone else has ever played. But after twenty minutes you’re sick of yourself and your guitar and the weather and your lack of talent. Then with a thrill of hope you remember that voicemail message you left yourself in the moment of mumbled inspiration. You listen to the voicemail, and you’re disappointed. It’s not terrible, but it’s missing whatever magic it had before. With nothing else to do, you try and find the chords that the mumbling melody wants. You play it through on the guitar a few times in standard tuning, key of G—the same four chords you learned when you were in eighth grade. Then you capo it up and try it with a different voicing. You happen upon a little pull-off with your index finger, a slightly different way of playing the same old chord. That sparks a melody that suits the gibberish a little better, and like a dying man in the desert who discovers a cactus, you get just enough juice to keep crawling. “O God,” you pray, “I’m so small and the universe is so big. What can I possibly say? What can I add to this explosion of glory? My mind is slow and unsteady, my heart is twisted and tired, my hands are smudged with sin. I have nothing—nothing—to offer.” Write about that. “What do you mean?” Write about your smallness. Write about your sin, your heart, your inability to say anything worth saying. Watch what happens. And so, with a deep breath, you strum the chords again, quieting the inner taunts, the self-mockery. And you sing something that feels somehow like an echo of the music and the murky waters you’re wallowing in and the words you mumbled several days ago. Then, after hours and days of the same miserable slog, something happens that you cannot explain: you realize you have a song. Behold, there is something new under the sun. Writing about writing is precarious. On one hand it could be terribly self-indulgent, while on the other it could be terribly boring—both of which are cardinal sins when it comes to the written word. I spent way too much money on books about writing before Reed Arvin, a record producer-turned-novelist, told me, “Trash all those books about writing. Just sit down and write the darn book.” (Only he didn’t say “darn.”) I didn’t throw all the books away, but I did stop reading them. There are a few that did me some good, and even fewer that did more than offer up pointers on writing—they taught me to think about the creative act as a kind of worship, as a way to be human. At times, characters become aware that they're part of a story, and that brings the realization that, first, there is an author, and second, they are not him. Andrew Peterson Since we were made to glorify God, worship happens when someone is doing exactly what he or she was made to do. I ask myself when I feel God’s pleasure, in the Eric Liddell sense, and it happens—seldom, to be sure, but it happens—when I’ve just broken through to a song after hours of effort, days of thinking, months of circling the song like an airplane low on fuel, searching desperately for the runway. Then I feel my own pleasure, too, a runner’s high, a rush of adrenaline. I literally tremble. There is no proper response but gratitude. The spark of the idea was hope; the work that led to the song was faith; the completion of the song leads to worship, because in that startling moment of clarity when the song exists in time and history and takes up narrative space in the story of the world,—a space that had been empty, unwritten, unknown by all who are subject to time—then it is obvious (and humbling) that a great mystery is at play. I hope it’s clear that I’m not talking about the quality (or lack thereof) of the song itself. That’s irrelevant. The point is, time is unfolding like a scroll, and we’re letters on the parchment, helping to make up the words that tell the story. Each of us is a character, in both senses of the word. At times, characters become aware that they’re part of a story, and that brings the realization that, first, there is an author, and second, they are not him. This realization is good and proper, and leads into the courts of praise, if not the throne room itself. I wish I were a contemplative like Merton. I wish I could order my thoughts and follow them to their ends. I wish I could track an idea to its logical or illogical conclusion the way C. S. Lewis did. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I can’t learn without doing; I won’t know the story until I write it down. As long as the idea stays in the conceptual realm it withers. Click here to order Adorning the Dark at the Rabbit Room Store. If you buy before October 15th, you can redeem your purchase at AdorningtheDark.com to get an unreleased new song titled “Linnea,” recorded by Andrew Peterson. Learn more at AdorningtheDark.com.