In the past couple of years, we’ve enjoyed working with Oasis Audio to bring a number of Rabbit Room Press titles to the audiobook format. Just this year we’ve seen the releases of Henry & the Chalk Dragon (read by Rebecca Reynolds), Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1 (read by Fernando Ortega & Rebecca Reynolds), The Door on Half-Bald Hill (read by Robert Hook, Janet Devlin and Nigel Patterson), and my own stage adaptation of Frankenstein, which was nominated for an Audie Award for Best Audio Drama thanks to the great work of the Oasis team and the incredible cast of actors. Today we’re excited to announce that Oasis Audio and Rabbit Room Press have entered an exclusive partnership in order to continue bringing you audiobook versions of Rabbit Room Press titles, both new and old. Yes, we’ll be digging into our backlist to breathe new life into some old favorites! We look forward to the wealth of high-quality work this relationship will enable us to bring to our readers, and we’re incredibly grateful for the good people at Oasis Audio and their belief in our work. All our audiobooks are available on Audible, in the Rabbit Room Store, and anywhere else audiobooks are sold. Click here for our current list of available audiobooks.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Stephen Roach, host of the Makers and Mystics podcast, founder of The Breath & the Clay creative arts movement, and co-author (with Ned Bustard) of Naming the Animals: An Invitation to Creativity. Stephen Roach is a poet, musician, speaker, and creative coach. He hosts the Makers and Mystics podcast and is the founder of The Breath and the Clay, a creative arts movement. His latest book, a collaboration with Ned Bustard, is Naming the Animals: An Invitation to Creativity. In it, Stephen and Ned make the case that creativity isn’t just a talent given to the chosen few, but an invitation extended to all, an essential part of God’s design for partnership for humanity. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 16 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

The Hutchmoot Podcast features some of our favorite sessions recorded at our annual conference which celebrates art, music, story, and faith in all their many intersections. Today, it is our pleasure to share a session led by Jonathan Rogers and Helena Sorensen called “Recovery, Escape, & Consolation: The Gifts of Fantasy” from 2020’s Hutchmoot: Homebound, in both video and audio form. J. R. R. Tolkien and G. K. Chesterton both make cases for the necessity of fantasy literature. Here, Jonathan & Helena discuss three of Tolkien’s primary arguments. Click here to listen to this episode of The Hutchmoot Podcast.

For close to a decade now, I’ve been working on a project that is close to my heart—a series of all-ages graphic novels called the Dragon Lord Saga. It’s a story about adventure and imagination and redemption and community, and it has slapstick humor and talking animals and dragons. I believe in the story that I’m telling and in the work that I’m doing, but in the day-to-day grind of drawing each panel, promoting my comics, and scraping and searching for paying work, it’s disconcertingly easy to forget that what I do has any value. It takes years of slow progress to draw a graphic novel, and in a world competing for attention, it’s exhausting to get even a single pair of eyes to rest on my work long enough to care about it. Some days I begin to wonder if anyone is listening. And I begin to wonder if it even matters. But every now and then, I get a letter from a kid who has read my books. Sometimes they thank me for creating the Dragon Lord Saga, but more often the letter is a plea to finish the next book so that they can read it. And often the letter includes their drawing of my characters. Letters like that stop me in my tracks, and brighten my eyes. The work is still hard, but those letters remind me why it matters. Last month, in the middle of a pandemic, in a busy work day, in my most despairing mood, I received a message that stopped me in my tracks. This one wasn’t from a reader, and it wasn’t anything surprising. It was just an automated reminder email from Patreon’s web service: “Your Patreon anniversary is coming up next month on April 13!” So many comic pages have been inked in the years since I launched my Patreon page. Back then, I didn’t know if Patreon was even worth wasting time on. All I knew was that I was working overtime creating comics, and for all that work, I was (at best) breaking even on costs. I needed a way to generate income from these comics, or I would have to stop making them. But asking fans to create an account, to pledge support—that’s a big ask. Would anyone show up? If you’ve never encountered it, Patreon is a service that allows creators to build member-supported content based on a monthly pledge. My Patreon backers choose an amount to pledge financially each month, and I keep the Patreon feed updated each week with new comic pages, along with other goodies like behind-the-scenes features, ebooks, and exclusive webcomics. Thank you for every Patreon you pledge to, and every Kickstarter you back. Thank you for buying books from your favorite authors, albums and t-shirts from your favorite bands. You stop us in our tracks and tell us that we matter. You matter, too. Jonny Jimison People showed up. It started slow, and it grew slower. Some people showed up for a few months and then discontinued, kindly stepping in to give me a few months of support. Others have honored me by staying since the very beginning. Patreon support doesn’t pay the bills, but it allows me to continue to pour my hours into making comics and pursue new opportunities. And the vote of confidence and interest indicated by the presence of so many Patreon backers is like a letter from a young fan, reminding me that what I do matters. We’ve created two books—and started work on a third! We’ve released 382 pages of comics—and that’s just the Dragon Lord Saga. That doesn’t include all the webcomics we’ve been able to create, including Getting Ethan comics for social media and the Patreon-exclusive Martin and Marco Mini comics. And last year, we began getting serious about merchandise. In addition to free quarterly gifts for top-tier backers, Patreon has allowed me to create limited-run books and postcard prints—and we have something special coming next week: a Patreon-exclusive pin featuring a certain penguin! Best of all: with the completion of volume two, The River Fox, I’m doing a final pass on the book, redrawing a few pages, addressing editor’s notes, and adding print necessities like the title page and covers. As I finish this work on the book, we’re posting two entire scenes each week, instead of our normal two pages! And to celebrate, for the next few weeks, those scenes will be open to read for free, even if you don’t have a Patreon account. If you haven’t visited the Patreon yet, now is the best time to check it out. And, friends: Thank you for every Patreon you pledge to, and every Kickstarter you back. Thank you for buying books from your favorite authors, albums and t-shirts from your favorite bands. You make a difference with every pledge, every purchase, every penny that you use to support us. You stop us in our tracks and tell us that we matter. You matter, too. Click here to visit Jonny’s Patreon page.

[Editor’s note: A full year ago, Doug McKelvey debuted his (probably fictional?) advice column “(Whatever You Do, Don’t) Ask Doug!”. In it, he began to trace the curious and entirely improbable tale of Paul Harvey, complete with extensive and dubious footnotes. Well, fret not, for the tale continues. Read on for the next installment in this far-flung adventure, and stay tuned to see what happens next.] Dear Ask Doug Or Not!1, I’m a little embarrassed to ask this, but I actually need some romantic advice. There’s a girl I’ve known for a long time. Well, technically I’ve only known of her—but I’ve done that for a really long time. And by that, I mean that I’ve been aware of girls—generally speaking—as a genre, though not necessarily of this particular girl. But now I am. Aware of her in particular, I mean. Kind of. What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to be a contestant on a reality show this Fall, and 23 other guys will be vying for my woman’s hand. Technically, we haven’t met. But I already know she’s the one for me. How? My palms feel tingly when I think about her. So I’ve got physical science on my side. And also possibly magic. And if our connection is already this amazing when we haven’t even met yet, think how heartbroken I’ll be if she accidentally chooses one of the wrong guys just because he’s smarter, richer, wittier, more fun and handsome and romantic, and a better listener than me! Is there anything you can do to help me win this? I guess what I’m really Ask-Doug-ing2 is “Do you know any of the producers on the show, and if so, do you have any dirt on them that I could use for leverage?” Signed, A Lot to Chew On in Chattanooga. Dear Chattanooga Chew-Chew3, I’m sorry, but do I frequently interrupt you when you’re talking? No? Then pray tell why are you interrupting me? If you read my most recent4 Ask Doug! column, you would know that I’m still in the middle of telling a story about the golden age of radio—and not about reality dating shows. And if you didn’t read my previous column, how did you even know to write to me with such an off-topic query? Stand down, sir. You are out of order. No, you are out of order! When last I checked, this column was still devoted to the exploration of sundry things Paul Harvey-ish—namely his popularity as a ruby-throated5 radio star, and the trouble brewing as his research staff grew increasingly lazy and began to feed poor Mr. Harvey less-than-entirely-factual facts for his most successful syndicated show “The Rest of the Story.” I had only just mentioned, in fact, Mr. Harvey’s small Spanish goat6, and how I was probably not going to write any more about it. So we will begin there, taking special care never to mention the goat again.7 If you really want a sensationalist advice column about torrid reality dating shows, I suggest you either contact Chuck Woolery or pen it yourself. Now please, dear readers, I sincerely beg you to cease these relentless interruptions and allow me to move forward with our story… Who Was This Paul Harvey & Why Should You Care About Part 2 of Who Was This Paul Harvey and Why Should You Care? Emboldened by the success of their initial subterfuge, and probably high on cheap adrenaline8, Harvey’s staff grew ever lazier and sloppier in their labors. Having introduced a few story compounds that were a scant 2% false and a walloping 98% true, they now began to experiment with broadcast stories that were 10%, 20%, or even 40% fabrications.9 This steady decline in “reality congruence”10 went on for six years—a time referred to now as “The Half-Score Affront To Honesty In Human Relationships, Specifically In the Area of Broadcasting and as Pertaining to the Question of Trust Between a Broadcaster and His Listeners, More Specifically When that Broadcaster Happens to be Paul Harvey, Good Day!™”11. Such a gross web of prevarication could not last though. In the spring of 1977 Paul Harvey signed on to the airwaves from his kobold-proof, diamond-studded booth,12 and delivered the following address, having no foreknowledge that his well-enunciated words—uttered in utter innocence and without sibilance—were destined not only to shock an already flabbergasted nation, but to threaten Harvey’s own seemingly impenetrable popularity, shaking both the one, and then the other, to their very foundations. The episode told a simple story about an obscure chapter in the life of one of America’s most popular presidents. But the ratio of truth-to-falsehood had been increased to a volatile mix. The story that aired that day was simultaneously 48% TRUE, and 73% FALSE, an unstable super-capacity formula that every mathematician worth his or her salt can tell you will “in igneous fervor combust most roundly and robustly”13 with even the slightest spark. And Paul Harvey was a chain smoker.14 ORIGINAL Script for PAUL HARVEY’S September 27, 1977 “The Rest of the Story” RADIO BROADCAST PAUL, CLEAR YOUR THROAT BEFORE TURNING THE MIC ON. NO, DON’T READ THIS PART OUT LOUD! THIS IS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE A NOTE OF INSTRUCTION BEFORE YOU BEGIN. PAUL! STOP READING THIS PART ON AIR! OH, NEVER MIND. JUST GO ON TO THE NEXT PART— Hello listeners, I’m Paul Harvey, and this… [COUNT SLOWLY TO 46 BEFORE COMPLETING THIS SENTENCE]15 …is the rest of the story! BOOM! The first blow lands on the man’s nose, like a hurtling meteor intent on extincting16 all dinosaur life on earth, if earth were represented by the man’s nose on which the blow had just landed. A second uppercut follows with lightning speed, catching the base of the jaw and turning the hapless fellow’s knees to jelly, as if part of his legs were jars, or maybe all of his legs were jars, and it just so happened that the jars that just so happened to be where his knees ought to have been just so happened to be jars that contained a fruity jelly, some of which just so happened to have spilled out because the jars just so happened to have cracked and shattered, so that they no longer retained any rigid structure with which to support the man’s imbalanced weight.17 The assailant steps back, hopping lightly on the balls of his feet. He is unusually agile for such a tall, wiry fellow. His fists are split and bloodied, but he continues to dance around, hoping for more. “Come on, Mr. Davis, you rascal!” he cries, exhilarated by the rapture of the battle, “Come at me like a man and I’ll drive those Dixie Scouts of yours through the back of your head!” “Wha..? Dixie scouts?” The man is clearly confused. “I thought they changed their name to ‘The Chicks.18’” “Obviously I’m talking about your front teeth, buddy. Come on, get up!” But the man addressed as Mr. Davis has been hopelessly felled by the blows that came so suddenly, raining down on him in the cold darkness of the alley, as if those blows were a hail storm, only instead of ice clods, the hail just so happened to be made of iron daggers, daggers that just so happened to hit a man much like a fist. I don’t mean that it was the man who was much like a fist, but that the fists that hit the man were like a raining hail, a hail which just so happened to be like sharp, metal daggers, and what’s more, those daggers just so happened to be of the sort that tend to hit a man much like a fist. Which, again, isn’t to say that it was the man who was much like a fist… (NOTE TO EXALTED GRAMMARIAN & C.B.: Can you fix this? When Harvey reads this script on air it’s going to sound really confusing if you don’t. Thanks. P.S. I am also filling out the appropriate paperwork requesting that you brew a new pot of “Jolly Joe.” I know this will sound weird, but I think this six-day-old thick, silty stuff in my Harvey Flask™ tastes of wrath and resentment and also possibly of a dark desire to destroy this and perhaps also many other worlds. Thanks much! —Jimmy.19) The forlorn and dagger-like-hail-fist-pummeled man whispers wearily to himself “Can’t an underemployed minor philosopher find gentle solitude and peace of mind anywhere?” His head is swimming with “donkey whiz” swilled earlier at one of D.C.’s public gin tanks20, and now throbbing from the beating. His lip is swollen, and his nose thrown out of alignment21. He hears one of Schopenhauer’s chants reverberating in his head as he feels about existentially22 on the cobblestones for his glasses, but cannot find them. “What kind of a person would accost and harry a minor philosopher” he wonders, “seeing as how we do so much good for humankind?”23 Warily he raises his eyes and squints at his assailant. The apparition flitting before him in the lamplight would rival Ichabod Crane for general lankiness. Yet there is something so familiar about the fellow… if only he would hold still. That beard… that stovepipe hat… The victim’s numbed mind struggles to pull the picture together. “On your feet, General Lee! Or have you had enough of my ‘fists o’ thunder’?” The ominous scarecrow bellows at him a second time. Suddenly it all comes clear. This man is… is… no, it can’t be! But it is!24 “Oh Captain!” the tipsy philosopher cries mournfully, “My captain!” PAUSE HERE FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT, PAUL, BEFORE LAUNCHING INTO THE MAIN NARRATIVE. NO, PAUL, DON’T READ THIS PART ALOUD! THIS IS JUST A NOTE FOR YOU. STOP READING IT OUT LOUD! JUST MOVE ON TO THE NEXT PART! SHEESH! The summer of 1885 struck hard and fast, like a golfball slammed home down the windpipe, in a scenario where the golfball represents momentous events and the windpipe represents pretty much everything else. Rumors of war were in the air (and soil), and the Swedish Tobacco Crisis was causing shockwaves on Wall Street that threatened to shutter every last two-dollar mom-and-pop dime store in the country. The country had been too preoccupied to remember to vote, so President Lincoln was enjoying the onset of an unprecedented fifth term in office, when the news reached him over the Pinkerton Telegraph: The South had agreed to unconditional surrender on the basis of one condition—that they be allowed to permanently secede from the Union, and that they receive double compensation for the seventeen potato cruisers torpedoed by the North in the Battle of the Pleiades25, four months prior. Nevermind that the potato boats belonged to the North26 and were destroyed as part of Lincoln’s premature ‘scorched earth’ policy. Lincoln, whose temper was never a secret, ripped the telegraph wire out of the wall, mildly electrocuting himself in the process.27 Feeling “a great desire to exact some serious vengeance, no bones about it, people,” he then ordered that the entire telegraph line the message had traveled over be felled and burned pole-by-pole, from Washington to Chicago. Then he sent for Pinkerton and had him pilloried and publicly ridiculed, placing upon “his moist and squalid brow” a one-hundred-twenty-pound butternut squash, cultivated specifically for that purpose of “most incogitable and loathsome obloquy28.” These actions, though carried out in a fit of anger, were actually calculated to strike terror in the hearts of Southerners, for, as Lincoln himself said, “If we will not hesitate to so humiliate our truest friends, how much more terrible must be the ponderous and vengeful gourds we shall deposit upon the noggins of our enemies!”29 The South, however, responded with a bizarre string of proactive, preemptive attacks upon their own people, punitively perching ponderous prize pumpkins30 atop the heads of more than two hundred local mayors and mayoral hopefuls31. The state of South Carolina was so devastated by this cannibalistic infighting that she actually surrendered in confusion to the Southern government “like a whipped puppy with its tailward parts tucked neatly ‘neath,” to quote then Georgia Senator Ombudsman “Baconwrap” Montgomery.32 Lincoln, sensing a window of opportunity in this odd turn of events, disguised himself, first as Jefferson Davis, then as Davis’ wife Begonia Cleopatra Happenstance Elizabeth33, and set out by rail for a clandestine tour of South Carolina, hoping to win the beleaguered populace back to the fold of the Union. This may have given rise to the historical myth that Davis’ wife was a tall, gangly, bearded woman.34 Though easily explained in light of Lincoln’s charades, this curious myth still persists, finding its way into numerous history books, movies, and epic poems about Jefferson Davis. In reality, President Davis was an advanced polygamist (LVL 17) who had fifty-five wives, twelve of whom were numbered amongst the “Virginia sharpshooters” that fell in the assault on Sherman’s forces at Appomatox.35 Though enemies never succeeded in identifying and unmasking the well-disguised Lincoln, he was able to effect little in the way of swaying public sentiment. After a two-week bout with the “Carolina Malaria36,” he returned to Washington, D.C., broken, humbled, and deeply frustrated, “like a man with his hindermost parts where his head should have been,” remarked acting Secretary of State John “Cookie-Heart” Admantle. White House aids silently adopted the “fifty foot” rule, refusing to approach any nearer the chief executive out of fear for their own safety. Those who accidentally violated this dictum more often than not found themselves immobilized in a vicious bear hug, headlock, or full nelson, grappling with the president, who would not release his victims till other staffers came and pried his arms and legs loose from the hapless target, at which point Abe would immediately ensare one of the would-be rescuers. “A president never lets go!” he would shout.37 This exhausting cycle sometimes repeated for up to six hours before the president tired of the game and fell asleep in a crumpled heap on the floor. Within a matter of days, Lincoln’s mood had turned even more morose, sullen and angry. He was often overheard muttering his dark thoughts aloud. Even his wife, Mary Toad38 found herself powerless to “pull the tall man” from the icy depths of self. Abey is scarce himself, she wrote in her diary dated March 17, 1885. He takes his breakfast in the tub, submerging his scrambled eggs for several minutes before consuming them, as he has known the raccoons to do, and he does not sing when his back is scrubbed with the bristle brush, as he used. Even the light tickling of his feet brings scarcely a smile, and once he even rebuked me for my pains. I fear for the Union, and most of all for the minor philosophers. Mary always feared for the minor philosophers.39 The next evening, Mary Toad, along with Colonel “High-Steppin’” Wilhelm and Vice President Eliazer “Immortal-Biscuit-Mix” York40, cornered Lincoln in his study and bolted the doors behind them. There is no record of what was said in that fateful meeting that lasted less than five minutes, but eyewitnesses report that when the doors were unlocked, Lincoln burst out “like a man stuffed full of angry ants all half-drunk on rancid linseed oil,” ripping off his shirt so that “fiyve buttons did flye moste erratically and did stryke a gentle page upon hyne41 orb of eye.” The president then rushed from the White House and into the street, where he bellowed an ululating, open-throated cry, hailing one of D.C.’s storied and infamous moose-drawn cabs. Prickly knees! Sticky knees! Dry, scaley, scabby knees! Say, friends, are your knees too often unsightly and imperfect? Do you dread summer, when your friends and co-workers pressure you to wear shorts, and then you have to walk bent over double with your hands covering your knees, just so random strangers won’t heap deep shame upon you? Well fear no more! There’s a product that can make those unsightly knees glow like yine orb of eye: Uncle Dorsey’s Premium Knee Shine & Polish. Just three applications is all it takes. Wipe it on. Lie motionless in bed for a debtor’s week42, and wipe it off. Repeat, and repeat again. It’s as easy as that! Uncle Dorsey’s Premium Knee Shine & Polish—available wherever Uncle Dorsey’s Premium Knee Shine & Polish is sold! And at that commercial break, dear reader, we shall also momentarily leave off lest this, our second installment of “Don’t Ask Doug!” expand to an unwieldy length. Here we shall resume and complete our narrative when next we convene. Till then, may you each remain undisputed champions of whatever spheres and realms you inhabit. Cordially, and with utmost haste, I remain, Ask Doug. #DKM #humor #PaulHarvey #TheRestoftheStory

[Editor’s note: This is the second of Amy Stimson’s posts engaging with Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Click here to read the first.] I have been thinking a lot about grace lately. It occurred to me today that we have seasons in the church calendar dedicated to the attributes of God. If you, like me, grew up in a church in which “church calendar” meant either Easter or Christmas, let me paint you a picture: at Easter, we meditate on God’s great love in terms of sacrifice, atonement, and eternity and at Christmas we rejoice in hope, peace, giving—though of course there is overlap. The grace of God doesn’t seem to have its own period. Recently, I asked a friend for an unchurched definition of grace, and his response was, “Oh I don’t know, like elegance?” It strikes me now as funny that for many people like him, women named Grace are assumed to be named for a quality of person rather than a quality of God. What prompted this discussion in the first place was this passage from Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Jack (2020). A pastor is talking with the titular character, a man who is broken, lonely, and despairing. Jack is not a Christ character, at least not deliberately, and yet he is (as many of us might believe ourselves to be) “a man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering” (Isaiah 53:3). He and Reverend Hutchins have been talking about forgiveness, and the pastor muses: “If the Lord thinks you need punishing, you can trust Him to see to it. He knows where to find you. If He’s showing you a little grace in the meantime, He probably won’t mind if you enjoy it” (167). What struck me though was Jack’s response: “It’s not always clear to me how to tell grace from, you know, punishment.” Grace as punishment. Grace as punishment. Rachmaninoff’s piano music always used to unsettle me because it sounded frenetic and on the brink of utter chaos. This idea was like that, jangling discordantly within me, mostly because it didn’t feel like chaos. It felt true. I suppose it’s a lot like feeling the power of a large wave. Its full force, its threat, its life-taking power only bears down upon the one who is determined to remain unmoved. Amy Stimson I have often found that Robinson’s writing makes unseen things seen. She writes about loneliness in a way that is profound and all-seeing, but somehow private and human and unobtrusive. The tragedy of Jack is that he appears to be irredeemable. The prodigal son of a forgiving minister, the beneficiary of an understanding brother, the love of a wonderful woman, and yet he finds himself at odds with the world in so many seemingly insubstantial ways that you cannot but despair with him. His greatest hope for his life is to be harmless, to avoid inflicting harm upon his fellow man, but even this seems too much to hope for. Ever since I first met Jack in Gilead (2005), the first of this collection, questions about what grace is for Jack have been on my mind. We talk so often about grace as amazing, in the words of the great hymn. And indeed it is. It is grace that reaches far, that reaches where no one else would, that does the unthinkable, and redeems the irredeemable. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that the message of the story of Beauty and the Beast was that “a thing needs to be loved before it is lovable.” The redeeming grace of the story is not in it being a tale of unlikely romance, but of something irredeemable being redeemed, humanised, made new. But what about grace as punishment? Grace as burdensome? Grace as a heavy weight, obligation, requiring response? To come back to the conversation with my friend, we began to talk about whether grace could exist if you didn’t believe in God. Well, yes, I said. Grace is as water to a fish; in it we live and move and have our being. We are complexly and inextricably wound up in it, so that everything is a grace in our lives. Granting those terms, even what feels like a punishment might even be considered a grace. I’m reminded of a story Corrie ten Boom tells of her days in Ravensbruck, a Nazi concentration camp. On top of everything else, their barracks were infested with fleas. In her prayers, attempting to be thankful in all circumstances, Corrie’s sister Betsie even thanked God for the fleas. Corrie felt this had taken it too far. It became apparent, however, that the guards who may have separated them, confiscated the smuggled Bible, and punished them, were avoiding that room—because of the fleas. Can one distinguish grace from punishment? I suppose it’s a lot like feeling the power of a large wave. If you swim with it, if you’re carried along by it, you are aware of its power only in a small way. It’s only felt when you resist; its full force, its threat, its life-taking power only bears down upon the one who is determined to remain unmoved. Timothy Keller has written that “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.” To have someone know the worst and be loyal all the same—this is what grace is. It stares baldly into the fathomless depths, and it doesn’t baulk at what it sees; “illusionless compassion” is one way of looking at it. It is unbearable. Most of us come from cultures that have privatised vulnerability: it is revealed only to the select few. If it escapes us accidentally, if we show weakness where we wanted to be perceived strong, we feel insecure and exposed. Robinson uses the imagery of an unbearable light, exposing, “light indeed, rid of the dilutions that sometimes made them into warmth and illumination, those blandishments.” Something similar happens when you read Psalm 139 as if you were a fugitive evading capture: all that light imagery suddenly becomes terrifying, and the promises that you will be seen, you will be revealed wherever you are, whatever you are, make the light fearsome and terrible. In the same way, amazing as it is, grace can also be terrible. That devastating awareness of how far grace had to descend in order to find you. It is knowledge you can’t un-know once you do. It is heavy and huge. The thing that Jack eventually comes to verbalise is the question of whether you could enjoy a moment of grace and refuse it at the same time. I have sat with these ideas a long time, and as I have prayed over them, I am reminded of how pervasive grace is as well. Pervasive is not really a hymn-like word, but it describes the kind of complexity I have been pondering. God pursues relentlessly, and his grace manifests and envelops in ways we cannot even understand. His grace is both terrible and great, but also small and moment-sized. Jack is a book all about grace. The grace of moments—small mercies, as some would say. And the grace of eternity, bearing down like Francis Thompson’s hound of heaven upon a fleeing man. To conclude all these barely-tethered ponderings, what is grace? The meeting of guilt, perhaps, with the knowledge of good—and all the weight of glory that brings. Click here to read Amy’s first post about Jack—“Loneliness in Marilynne Robinson’s Jack.“

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with blogger, poet, and memoirist Janna Barber about her new book Hidden in Shadow: Tales of Grief, Lamentation, and Faith. Janna Barber is a blogger, poet, and memoirist. Her most recent book is  Hidden in Shadow: Tales of Grief, Lamentation, and Faith . This memoir is one woman’s honest reckoning with the truth that even as our faith waxes and wanes, God is constant, and he loves his children even when they don’t know what he’s up to. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 17 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

What if it’s terribly awkward? That was my first question when a filmmaker named The Arctic told me he wanted to conduct a video experiment with my song “To Cry for You.” His proposal was simple: “I’ll just ask people to let me film them while they listen to the song.” I’m shy. I’m Canadian. I’m deeply uncomfortable with displays of intense feeling. So, you might ask yourself, why did I record a song about crying in the first place? It couldn’t be helped. In a season of deep loss, I wrote “To Cry for You” out of the discovery that constantly fighting my tears was beating up my soul. Though I’ve tended to view grief as something to be avoided at all costs, the song documents my journey towards understanding that grieving is a necessary and even beautiful form of loving. So, I understood why The Arctic wanted to see how the song affected other people. But when he pitched his idea, my shy Canadian-ness kicked in, and I felt apprehensive about the possibility of two opposite but equally horrifying outcomes: What if the participants don’t have an emotional reaction to the song? What if they do? Still, The Arctic convinced me to let him try his experiment. Now, looking at the footage of the brave, beautiful souls who came into his studio and allowed themselves to be vulnerable, I’m so glad. Some participants are visibly moved. Others just listen intently, offering the holy gifts of their presence and focus. Together they teach me that there is no right or wrong way to process loss or emotion, and that Simone Weil is right: Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. There will always be a level of risk and embarrassment inherent in the courageous choice to be fully present to sorrow within ourselves and each other. Carolyn Arends Watching the video, I realize that my impulse to avoid anything too awkward is connected to my delayed capacity to grieve. There will always be a level of risk and embarrassment inherent in the courageous choice to be fully present to sorrow within ourselves and each other. We’ll stammer. We’ll blunder. Tears will evade us when we need them, only to suddenly arrive at the most inopportune times. But here’s what I’m learning. If we refuse to bail—if we just show up and hang in there with each other and with our lives—there is a level of connection on the far side of awkwardness that is rare and holy. What if it’s terribly awkward? Well, then, it’s human, and real. On my best and bravest days, I’m in. Click here to read our in-depth interview with Carolyn about her new album, Recognition. And click here to visit her website.

The world is filled with so much music. As a music and arts enthusiast, it’s hard to make sense of the constant noise. Where do you start? How do you keep up? In the streaming and digital era, it’s hard enough to keep up with your favorite artists, let alone try to discover new favorites. It’s for this reason we’ve created the Rabbit Room Discovery playlist. While you’ll always see familiar names like Andrew Peterson or Taylor Leonhardt or the Gray Havens on the Discovery playlist whenever they release new music, we also have our ears to the ground for something new. Something hopeful, soulful, graceful—something that leads us deeper in our love of God and neighbor. And so our hope with the Rabbit Room Discovery playlist is that you’ll be encouraged by the wonderful music your favorite artists have to share with the world, and too, that your new favorite artist might be discovered right around the corner. For weekly updates every Friday, make sure you Follow the Rabbit Room Discovery playlist on Spotify or Apple Music. And to learn about the other streaming playlists we curate on a regular basis, visit RabbitRoom.com/playlists.

It’s not enough to say Taylor Swift sings about romance as if it were just a topic of interest to her (though it is). Romantic relationships are the entire genre, language, and viewpoint through which she interprets the world around her. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that few in recent years have mined the myriad angles and experiences of romantic relationships better, or at least more thoroughly, than Taylor Swift. In her catalog, we find every sort of human emotion fathomable expressed as a reaction to or result of romance, from infatuation (“Enchanted”) to vengeful rage (“Better Than Revenge”), wistful longing (“Teardrops on My Guitar”) to sorrowful regret (“Back to December”), and so on and so on. Sure, these songs are explicitly about relationships. But through each romantic encounter, Swift is exploring something in herself, her story, and in the human story. Through romance, she wrestles like Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction with whether our story is a tragedy or a comedy. Is the world headed for a Happy Ever After or a “Sad Beautiful Tragic” ending? And here in this tension is where I realized Taylor Swift meets J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of eucatastrophe and decides that, in the end, love conquers. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien coins the term “eucatastrophe” as the “highest function” of the fairy tale, “the sudden joyous turn [that]…denies universal final defeat” and gives “a glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” It’s the moment Gandalf appears gleaming like the sun at the break of dawn to lead the Rohirrim’s charge against the forces of evil at Helm’s Deep. It’s the moment in Avengers: Endgame where all hope is lost, and Thanos has won. But then suddenly, resurrected reinforcements arrive; death is overcome; evil is undone. In Taylor Swift’s music, we see the same eucatastrophe at play, not in fantastically epic battles, but in the intimate relationships we share with each other. We see an early glimpse of this in the smash hit “Love Story,” a song we’ve heard so many times, it’s easy to miss the significance of what Swift accomplishes. In this 2008 country-pop hit, Swift inserts herself into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but dares to reimagine one of literature’s most famous tragedies as an act of eucatastrophe. She sings in the bridge: I got tired of waiting Wonderin’ if you were ever comin’ around My faith in you was fading When I met you on the outskirts of town —Taylor Swift, “Love Story” She then sings the chorus, replacing her infatuation earlier in the song with quiet lines of doubt and feeling like the relationship is over: “Romeo, save me, I’ve been feeling so alone / I keep waiting for you, but you never come / Is this in my head? I don’t know what to think.” When Swift is feeling her lowest, when the tragedy should strike, Romeo kneels on the ground, pulls out a ring, and the song modulates—a joyous turn in the darkest night. This scene plays out almost exactly the same way on Speak Now opener, “Mine.” Again, Swift uses the bridge to present the dark night before turn: And I remember that fight, two-thirty AM ‘Cause everything was slipping right out of our hands I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street Braced myself for the goodbye, ‘Cause that’s all I’ve ever known Then, you took me by surprise You said, “I’ll never leave you alone” —Taylor Swift, “Mine” The great strength of the eucatastrophe is its surprise, something Swift expresses in both these songs. In “Mine,” it’s explicit; in “Love Story,” the surprise comes through rewriting Shakespeare. Both effect joy and keep us coming back to these songs over and over. Our story does indeed end in joy, and our current pain won’t be for evermore. Chris Thiessen Swift has been criticized, especially around the release of these songs a decade ago, of offering unrealistic expectations for young girls, of writing a Happy Ever After story that only exists in Disney movies. And to be fair, in his discussion of eucatastrophe, Tolkien writes, “It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance.” However, any critics that have made this argument must have missed songs like “White Horse” where Swift admits “this ain’t a fairy tale” or “Fifteen” where her childhood friend “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind.” Good news is only good because we are simultaneously surrounded by bad news, bad endings. The power of eucatastrophe, however, lies in its argument that the bad endings are only temporary. It may take a while, but joy eternal is still around the corner. I’ll admit, while I love the eucatastrophic stories of “Love Story” and “Mine,” they have room for improvement. That improvement finally came on “Evermore,” the title track from Swift’s second 2020 album, the greatest example of eucatastrophe in her entire catalog. The song begins with a simple, yearning piano line played by William Bowery as Swift recounts months of gray, a sense of intangible something’s-wrong-ness: “And I was catching my breath / Staring out an open window / Catching my death.” The scene is cold, merciless, unrelenting as Swift concedes, “I had a feeling so peculiar / That this pain would be for evermore.” In the second verse, Swift can’t remember what she used to fight for. The stories of joy and hope she used to sing no longer light the fog, no longer anchor her spirit. Her thoughts are consumed with only heartbreak, and she sings, “I rewind the tape but all it does is pause / On the very moment all was lost.” Then the fast-forward button hits, the quiet dread turns to billowing storm, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon enters like a narrator of Swift’s swimming inner thoughts. Their lyrics swirl around each other—images of shipwreck, waves being tossed, violence—but Swift tries to hold on to the cracks of light through the wreckage. The swelling voices and spiraling piano rise unfettered. But suddenly, Swift remembers hope. She remembers that an unnamed “You” was there with her, and the waves are told, “Peace, be still.” The storm settles. Swift catches her breath and exhales, “this pain wouldn’t be for evermore.” “There’s no way this doesn’t end in tragedy,” you can hear in Swift’s voice at the beginning of the song. But it doesn’t. It ends in beautiful hope of an eternity without grief, without death, without endless winters and the violence of the dog days. I can’t argue that Swift is trying to make grand theological statements. I don’t know enough of what she believes to do that (though she has explicitly identified as a Christian). However, it’s undeniable that she argues again and again that life is a love story, an idea Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) would agree with: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.” And thus, every exploration of human love stories holds within it the potential for divine metaphor, for revealing something of Christ to us in a way that intellect simply can’t comprehend. It’s too fantastical and mysterious a story to be boiled down to doctrine. The Christian life is a fairytale, something Swift and Tolkien would agree on, as he writes in his discussion of eucatastrophe: The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. —J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” Not every chapter ends in beauty. Not every relationship is a happily ever after. But like Tolkien, Swift argues that love is victorious at the last. When it’s snuffed out momentarily, we watch it “Begin Again.” When currents sweep it out to sea, love returns “alive, back from the dead.” Our story does indeed end in joy, and our current pain won’t be for evermore. Click here to read more of Chris’s writing at Quarter Notes.

Songs from the Silent Passage is a new collection of essays by various members of the Chrysostom Society (Eugene Peterson, Matthew Dickerson, Luci Shaw, and more) which explores the breadth and depth of Walt Wangerin Jr, a writer who has wandered through a passage and returned with news of a far country. In celebration of the book’s release, Matthew Dickerson sat down with David McFadzean to talk about Wangerin and his influence. Matthew: Tell me about when you first met Walt. David: The first time I met Walt he was a professor at my college. The local PBS station invited a student (me) and a professor (Walt) to read our poetry on air. I fancied myself a poet (I’m not) and Walt was very gracious to share the stage with me. Later our paths crossed again when we were both founding board members of an arts organization, The New Harmony Project, which is a two-week conference for playwrights to test their works with a cast of professional actors. It was during this time that our relationship began to grow. Among the board members Walt immediately became the spokesperson for the mission of the conference and an inspiring critic for the playwrights.  He showed them the same grace he’d shown me on our first meeting. Matthew: How did your impression of him change over the years as you got to know him better? David: When I first met Walt, he was a successful writer, and I was a struggling playwright. So of course I was delighted. I never expected we would form a friendship lasting these many years. But I soon found out that Walt was an enthusiastic mentor. In later years I was doing a lot of speaking at colleges and screenwriting workshops, mostly on the structure of story. Each time I was slated to talk, I’d call Walt, pick his brain and furiously take down notes. I stole from the best. He was, to say the least, very generous with his insights. Matthew: What stories of interactions with Walt stand out as particularly memorable? Or funny? Or insightful? David: This example comes from the many hours of conversation we’ve had over the years: One time when Walt and I were talking, he asked me if I knew what it meant to understand an idea. Of course I knew. It meant you “get it.” You “get” what the idea means. Who doesn’t know that? Apparently me. Walt said, far from understanding meaning you “get it,” it means you stand under the idea, as you would stand under a tree. You spend time with it. Perhaps you meditate, perhaps you never really “get it.” But it is a beautiful thing to live under the idea as it grows and bears fruit. Matthew: Moving from Walt as a person to his books, tell me about his writings. What have his works meant to you personally? Which have been the most meaningful? David: St. Julian had a powerful effect on me. The sharp prose immersed me in the world of Julian and the orphic poetry compelled me to experience his pain. And as dark and degrading as the story is, I felt relief and hope in its picture of redemption. And I was reminded that the brutality of Julian’s world can be found in our world, as can the blessed humiliation of his redemption. Matthew: Have you thought, as I have, that Walt’s books have a lot to say of great importance to our modern church? David: Many of his books are aimed at the church. And they inform, but not in a text book way. Anyone who has read him knows that story and imagination are the foundations of his message. Story puts flesh on dogma and imagination brings it to life. I think for Walt, story is a living thing, as is the Church. When either becomes simply an offering of pleasant, unimaginative information, it dies. Matthew: What about the broader cultural response to his writings? I went to a secular New England college in the early 1980s. It wasn’t the sort of institution where I would have expected to find any of Wangerin’s pastoral (non-fiction) titles to be sitting on a faculty member’s desk or even buried on some bookshelf. And yet one day I was in a conversation with one of the better-known literature professors about speculative fiction (fantasy and sci-fi) and he recommended to me The Book of the Dun Cow (not knowing I had already read the book.) That title seemed to have spoken powerfully to a lot of readers. David: Good writing is good writing. You may not want to live in France, but you still drink their wine. Matthew: Did knowing Walt personally give you any insights into any of his writings? David: Once you know a writer it’s difficult to separate the person from the work. So, yes, knowing him did give me insights. But the insights were incidental compared to the depth of enjoyment I get from reading him. And even before I knew Walt well, I’d read several of his books. The Book of the Dun Cow, The Book of Sorrows and Potter come to mind. And they were and are among my favorites. To paraphrase Aristotle, reading Walt’s books before I knew him, I couldn’t conceive of who wrote them, but after knowing Walt, I realized only he could. Matthew: If you had a budget to pick any of his writings and make a film of them, what would it be? David: Several years ago I brought Horton Foote and Walt together to adapt his memoir, Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, into a film. They talked for days. Horton ended up writing a lovely screenplay that told the story of Walt’s life from birth into his early twenties. It was an engaging and poignant piece, as you would expect from the screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird. Several studios were interested. But it turns out that it was one of those projects (of which there are many) that was on everybody’s list to read, but nobody’s list to make. Another movie-worthy work of Walt’s is The Book of the Dun Cow. A friend of mine wrote an Off-Broadway musical version that is wonderful. And I’ve always thought The Book of the Dun Cow would make a terrific animated feature. And who knows? In Hollywood, great projects can sit on the shelf for years until suddenly they’re rediscovered. Click here to view Songs from the Silent Passage in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

Season Two of The Artist’s Creed begins today! Over the course of six episodes, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller will explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit. They’ll ask what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice, starting next week with “Episode 1: The Sound Breath Makes.” Tune in every Wednesday wherever you listen to podcasts. In Episode 1, Steve and Drew discuss sound as incarnational in an excarnational world, the dual American problems of loneliness and polarization, the vulnerability of speech, the voice as a glimpse into the soul, wind and breath as more than mere symbols of the Spirit of God, the human being as a musical instrument, and much more. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 1: “The Sound Breath Makes.” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 1: The Sound Breath Makes,” which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.

Artists & is a project created to meet the need for community among visual artists. Throughout this project, we will learn the stories of artists we know and respect, looking inside their studios and hearing about their work, process, and rhythms. In this third installment, we hear from Stephen Crotts and Breezy Brookshire. Stephen Crotts and Breezy Brookshire share their journeys as illustrators, their creative practices, struggles, aspirations, and the role of community in their work. Click here to join the artists & group on Facebook. And click here to watch the first installment of artists & their stories, and here to watch the second.

In celebration of summertime, here’s a liturgy from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1 about planting flowers and glimpsing the beauty of creation in both its birth and its completion. To download the liturgy as a PDF, visit EveryMomentHoly.com/liturgies. Prepare the bed for planting. Once the soil is prepared, each participant cradles in their palm one of the unplanted flowers, bulbs, or flower seeds. Leader: In a world shadowed by cruelty, violence and loss, is there good reason for the planting of flowers? People: Ah, yes! For these bursts of color and beautiful blooms are bright dabs of grace, and witnesses to a promise, reminders of a spreading beauty more eternal, and therefore stronger, than any evil, than any grief, than any injustice or violence. What is the source of their beauty? From whence does it spring? The forms of these flowers are the intentional designs of a Creator who has not abandoned his broken and rebellious creation, but has instead wholly given himself to the work of redeeming it. He has scattered the evidences of creation’s former glories across the entire scape of heaven and earth, and these evidences are also foretastes of the coming redemption of all things, that those who live in this hard time between glories might see and remember, might see and take heart, might see and take delight in the extravagant beauty of bud and bloom, knowing that these living witnesses are rumors and reminders of a joy that will soon swallow all sorrow. In the planting of these flowers, do we join the Creator in his work of heralding this impending joy? Yes. In this and in all labors of beauty and harmony, praise and conciliation, we become God’s co-workers and faithful citizens of his kingdom, by acts both small and great, bearing witness to the perfect beauty that was, to the ragged splendor that yet is, and to the hope of the greater glory that is to come, which is the immeasurable glory of God revealed to us, in the redeemed natures of all things. Participants here kneel and plant the seed, bulb, or flower they have been holding. What then is the eternal weight of these flowers? Though our eyes yet strain to see it so, these tiny seeds, bulbs, or velvet buds we have planted are more substantial than all the collected evils of this groaning world. Their color and beauty speak a truer word than all greed and cruelty and suffering and harm. What is the truer word spoken by these flowers? Though our eyes yet strain to see it so, these tiny seeds, bulbs, or velvet buds we have planted are more substantial than all the collected evils of this groaning world. Doug McKelvey They are like a banner planted on a hilltop, proclaiming God’s right ownership of these lands long unjustly claimed by tyrants and usurpers. They are a warrant and a witness, each blossom shouting from the earth that death is a lie, that beauty and immortality are what we were made for. They are heralds of a restoration that will forever mend all sorrow and comfort all grief. They declare a kingdom of peace, of righteousness, of joy, of love, and of the great joining of justice and mercy into a splendored perfection in the person of a king whose amaranthine wonders eternally upwell, beautiful beyond the grasp of human imagination. How will these brief blooms accomplish such mighty labors? What grace will sustain them? Because their work is so great, we pray, O Father, your blessing on these small flowers. May their roots work deep, finding rich soil. May their leaves and buds be wakened by gentle sun and watered by ample rain. May the strength of their fragile beauty in bloom give pause to passers-by, who will meet in their sweet scent and radiant forms whisperings of grace, stirrings of the spirit, and the awakenings of eternal hungers, that can be met and satisfied only in you. Let these flowers, O Lord, bear witness in their deepest natures to eternal things. Let our lives also, O Lord, do the same. Amen. Click here to view Every Moment Holy in the Rabbit Room Bookstore. And click here to view all liturgies available for free download at the Every Moment Holy website.

In Season Two of The Artist’s Creed, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit, asking what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice. This second discussion, “The Breath Between Us,” touches on the significance of breath in the murder of George Floyd, the phenomenon of Zoom fatigue and the exhaustion of words without breath, the shifting ways in which we experience music, and much more. Tune in every Wednesday wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 2: “The Breath Between Us.” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 2: The Breath Between Us,” which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Sho Baraka, author of He Saw That It Was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair A Broken World. Sho Baraka is a hip-hop artist, an activist, a co-founder of the AND Campaign, and an author. His new book is He Saw That It Was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair a Broken World. In this episode, Sho and Jonathan Rogers discuss memory and imagination, constructing a new normal through storytelling, and the perils of accepting a smaller identity than the one God gives us. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 21 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Well, it’s not technically the season of summer until June 20th according to the experts at Google dot com. However, for me at least, the tradition of summer begins on June 1st. The greenery of thriving things already abounds; the whole air is perfumed with honeysuckle and white clover; and humidity sticks like a wet dog kiss to my cheeks the second I leave the house. It may not be 90 degrees quite yet, but summer is alive and well where I’m sitting in Middle Tennessee. It’s time to get a playlist together. We’ve done playlists in the past for Songs That Make Us Smile and a Rabbit Room Road Trip, both of which are well-suited to the summer season. But there’s plenty of music out there to soundtrack the season, and I thought, “Let’s get together a seven-hour super-jam filled with music that celebrates the joy, freedom, and fullness of life we experience this season because of the resurrection.” I’m thinking sunny oceanside scenes with the Beach Boys picking up “Good Vibrations.” I’m thinking Mariah Carey, Carly Rae Jepsen, or Taylor Swift celebrating romance with the most danceable bops you’ve ever heard. But what I love about curating these playlists is the collaboration and the different genres, styles, and themes other music lovers think of when I send a prompt like this. Now in addition to my summer beach party jams, we’re having elegant nights drinking wine and overlooking the sea with Frank Sinatra or Astrud Gilberto; we’re “Feeling Good” with Nina Simone; we’re “Coming In Hot” with Lecrae and Andy Mineo; we’re Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything… Anyways, you get the picture. There’s a lot to be thankful for in the summer, and music reminds us of this. I hope these songs encourage you as they’ve encouraged me to join in the party—to embrace joy and freedom and life everlasting and thank the one who offers them anew to us every morning. Click here to listen to the Summer playlist on Spotify. And here to listen on Apple Music. Thanks to all who contributed to this playlist: Elly Anderson, Janna Barber, John Barber, Ron Block, Shigé Clark, Matt Conner, Randall Goodgame, Ella Horn, Lanier Ivester, Santosh & Shiny John, J Lind, Mark Meynell, Drew Miller, Andrew Osenga, Eric Peters, Andrew Peterson, Jill Phillips, Chris Slaten, Helena Sorensen, Joe Sutphin, Annaleigh Thiessen, Chris Wheeler, Adam Whipple, Chris Yokel

In Season Two of The Artist’s Creed, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit, asking what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice. This third episode, “God in Motion,” includes discussion of the unlikely outworkings of Tolstoy’s theory of art in consumer culture, tensions between individualism and the social dimension of art, what the word “media” really means, the Holy Spirit as both gift and Giver, and plenty more. Tune in every Wednesday at RabbitRoom.com/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 3: “God in Motion.” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 3: God in Motion,” which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with novelist and Inklings scholar Matthew Dickerson. Songs from the Silent Passage explores the literary career of Walt Wangerin, Jr. through a collection of essays by Wangerin’s friends and colleagues—including Eugene Peterson, Luci Shaw, Philip Yancey, and John Wilson—edited into its final form by Matthew Dickerson. In this episode, Matthew and Jonathan discuss the relationship between pain and beauty in storytelling and the idea that art “won’t hug a pulpit.” Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 22 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Today, Propaganda has released his debut collection of essays and poetry, Terraform, and we highly recommend it to you. For one thing, what a cool concept to guide a collection like this—terraform is a verb, often used in the context of science fiction, which refers to the process of transforming a planet to make it habitable and hospitable to human life. In his book, Propaganda essentially asks, If we already speculate in our fiction about “terraforming” Mars, what’s stopping us from terraforming Earth itself, a place whose habitability is threatened every day? A worthy question indeed, and one which yields endlessly witty and fascinating musings for the length of Terraform. To celebrate release day, we’re featuring an excerpt from Terraform, taken from a section entitled “Better Stories Make Better People.” Enjoy, and click here to view Terraform in the Rabbit Room Bookstore. Better Stories Make Better People Deep sighs. Breathe, Prop. “What is you cryin for?”! Lord, why did you give me daughters?! This is my self-talk. Being a girl dad has its privileges. I find myself in conversations, saying sentences, and being made privy to information that never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought I’d be a part of. Some of what I’ve learned I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, others have undoubtedly made me a better man, better person. I don’t always see these moments as gifts though. So buckle up, my daughter is about to show me how better stories make better people. I need you to feel what I felt tho, so I gotta set the scene. It’s summertime in Los Angeles in the Almaganda home. Where bedtimes and screen time are just a suggestion, and we never really change out of our beach clothes. Tomorrow, however, we have a trip planned. I can’t remember what the destination was but I knew bedtime must be enforced. You might think that once you leave the toddler stage that getting your child to go to bed would become easier. I’m here to report that that is not the case. Alma and I have gone to great lengths to figure out how to get our teen to finally go to sleep. One rule is the phone charging station: we don’t have phone chargers in our room, they are in the living room, and we except to see all phones plugged in at a certain time in the living room. On this particular night, it’s about 11:30 p.m. and it’s time to go enforce this rule. In full dad regalia, shirtless, shoeless, holding the leftover ice from a cocktail, I approach my daughter’s room. In full teen girl regalia and all its splendor, messy bun, short shorts, sports bra, my child responds “Okay” and walks to plug in her precious iPhone. I noticed something in the way she said “okay.” It’s that type of way that sounds like she is holding back something. I see a river of tears flowing from her eyes as she attempts to not make eye contact with me. Here’s something you need to know about me—I’ve always believed tears were the final expression of emotions, what comes when you’ve reached your capacity to handle the moment. It’s the ultimate expression of your wits’ end. I don’t know where I got that belief from. Maybe it has to do with the playground policing boys do as we figure out our masculinity. If you are crying that means something is serious. You don’t cry if it’s not that bad. I often believe that tears are used as a tool of manipulation. I’m currently unlearning that so bear with me. If my daughter or wife is crying—especially over something that, in my assessment, isn’t even that serious—I feel like they’re forcing me to stop. If we are in a discussion and I’m trying to make a point but my wife is breaking into tears, then that means I’ve gone too far and I’ve hurt her. Which gets me riled up because she is crying, which means I have to stop talking. Again, I don’t know where I got that from. Somehow I’ve convinced myself that everyone has this scale in their head of how to demonstrate their level of culpability with emotions. Watching my daughter in this moment, tears in her eyes, it might be hard to appreciate the vast conflicting emotions that come over a father. A high percentage of your mind has deep concern for your child’s well-being. The protector in you kicks in and you want to destroy whatever caused her suffering. There’s a smaller percentage of you that has to try to remember that you can’t just be a hammer. Sometimes you gotta be a consoler, so you think to yourself What would Mom do? And it’s not so much that Mom knows how to do this by virtue of her nature, my wife is from the streets. It’s not at all her nature to be nurturing. She has just as much “suck it up” energy in her vibe as I do in mine. But since my daughter sees my wife as the sole provider of emotional support, she has a lot of practice in just rubbing backs and self-love mantras. I’m exhausted just describing it. Then there’s the largest percentage of you that draws from a deep well of what might be a toxic masculine version of how to deal with pain. The truest feeling I have as a dad at this moment is inconvenienced. It’s terrible but it’s true. No father of the year awards for me if the criteria includes my thought life, too. I’m thinking about how this two-minute trip to her room is now about to be an hour-and-a-half process of me suppressing my irritation and becoming a better human. No part of me is excited about growing right now. I just want to go to bed. Why. is. this. girl. always. crying?! What is it now?! Some friend didn’t text you back?! Some boy made fun of your forehead?! Tuffin up! Thicken your skin! WHY do I have to have only girls?! I know, I’m terrible. Thankfully, my higher self responded. “Baby, are you good? Can I help in any way?” She says no and runs to Mom! Cool! I’m off the hook! Just kidding. I’m actually bummed that my kid doesn’t find me safe for her emotions. . . . I’ll go make another cocktail. Forty-five minutes later my daughter and wife exit the bedroom. They both explain to me what the tears were about. Y’all ready? Stranger Things season 3. Blink blink. The Netflix series. Yeah. The week before we had binged season three. I’m not going to spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but the final episode just absolutely broke my daughter. “For real, Stranger Things? The TV show? That we watched two weeks ago?” This one thing has got me trippin’—we watched it two weeks ago. Why is she crying about it tonight? “You are at your complete emotional end, over fictional characters?!” This is my inside voice, thank the Lord. “Oh, that’s it? Baby, it’s not real. It’s just a show. Stop crying, go to bed! Problem solved.” Is what I wanted to say. What she taught me is that she wasn’t crying over imaginary characters. She was crying over the truth. Here’s what I know about good storytelling—the truth it’s communicating is greater than the words it’s being carried by. Here’s another example: you can ask yourself, Is the Bible true or is it communicating truth? I don’t know which hill you want to die on but I think dying on one of those hills is missing the point. Is Genesis 1 about how the earth was made? All ’bout putting the atoms together to form the universe? I doubt it because remember, the universe was already completed at the beginning of Genesis 1. Go read it again. Or is Genesis 1 communicating something greater than the facts of the story? Is it saying that all things have purpose, beauty, identity, and function? All things have order and design? All things display a goodness far beyond our imagination? I don’t know, you tell me. My daughter is crying over the deep feelings of human connection like friendship and love, bonds that are so much greater than blood ties. That going through things together and finding the bravery to be a different person than you were in the beginning is something worth celebrating. That mourning the loss of someone who’s important to you without being able to say how you truly feel about that person is deeply devastating. I’m proud of my daughter. She saw more than a multimillion-dollar series; she saw the greater truth, the greater beauty, which is so much more beautiful, which is so much more true. A higher story than the Upside Down could ever be. She’s telling a way better story than I was. She merged the better collective story with the better individual story and that made her a better person whose empathy will help build a more livable world. Looks like I learned something new after all. I think I’ll make another cocktail. Click here to view Terraform in the Rabbit Room Bookstore. Excerpted from TERRAFORM by Propaganda, reprinted with permission by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2021.

In Season Two of The Artist’s Creed, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit, asking what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice. In this fourth episode, Steve and Drew discuss Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” examples of antiphony in music (including Andrew Peterson’s “Is He Worthy?”), the collaborative-yet-fragmented nature of meme culture, the inescapable human characteristic of resonance, and much more. Tune in every Wednesday at RabbitRoom.com/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 4: “Sounding, Re-sounding, and the Antiphonal Shape of the World.” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 4: Sounding, Re-sounding, and the Antiphonal Shape of the World,” which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan introduces a summer series called “Sad Stories Told for Laughs.” His first guest in this series is the hilarious memoirist Harrison Scott Key. “Sad Stories Told for Laughs” is a special summer series of episodes in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. In this episode, memoirist Harrison Scott Key, author of The World’s Largest Man and Congratulations, Who Are You Again? tells about the strange places he’s done readings and the dream that wanted to eat him. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 23 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

It is no exaggeration to say that the soundtrack from 2019’s Little Women got me through 2020. For starters, Spotify told me so; its end-of-year report informed me that my favorite album was Little Women, my favorite artist was Alexandre Desplat, and my favorite song was “Christmas Breakfast.” Perhaps this is because in December 2019, it was the last movie my wife and I had seen together in our beloved Belcourt Theater before the pandemic, and we’ve remained captivated by it ever since. It reminded us of what is most true at a moment when our very next breaths seemed to take us into a tragic new world. But what I’m here to talk about today is the unique task of Alexandre Desplat’s film score—in light of director Greta Gerwig’s decisions as to how to tell the story—and why a specific song on that score unfailingly reduces me to tears with every listen. Greta Gerwig’s central decision in directing this film, the decision which informed all other decisions, was to break away from a single, linear timeline. The story of Little Women spans a great deal of time, following our sister protagonists from their childhood pastimes all the way to their adulthood anxieties. One of the book’s strengths is its narrative throughlines which manage to tie together the distinct wanderings of the four sisters into one cohesive whole: the metaphor of pilgrimage, for instance, or even Jo’s dedication to storytelling, both act as such throughlines for Alcott’s sprawling tale. Gerwig was faced with the challenge to translate the full weight of discovery, heartache, intimacy, and ambition present in Alcott’s telling of these four lives into a mere 135 minutes. She met that challenge by organizing her storytelling not by a chronology of time, but a chronology of emotion. In other words, she tugged at the threads of these throughlines and wove them together to create a succession of events whose order is determined not by linear time, but by the inner emotional logic of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The effect of this decision and its brilliant execution is that the film itself begins to feel like a kind of music, even without Desplat’s soundtrack. One distinct gift of music is that it unfolds in the medium of time itself; to encounter a song is to submit to an intentional ordering of time, imbued with the visceral meanings of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Film scores use all kinds of tools to give emotional queues to the viewer (for instance, a melody that is only heard in moments when characters die—I’m looking at you, Lost, with your “Not Penny’s Boat” scene!). One aim of these tools is to overcome the gulf imposed by chronological time between moments of deep resonance. It’s much easier to associate disparate moments with one another if they’re linked by the same song. So right off the bat, by choosing to tell the story of Little Women according to an emotional rather than linear chronology, Greta Gerwig made Alexandre Desplat’s job easier. Formative moments from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in all four sister’s lives, before there was even a whisper of music, were ordered in such a way as to bring out the depth of emotion that lurked just under the surface. Rather than carry that emotional load all by itself, the film score was freed up to play within this form. The vinyl release of this soundtrack includes letters from Desplat and Gerwig which shed some light on their collaboration. Gerwig writes about her first conversation with Desplat: After I got some gushing out of the way, I then explained what I wanted the film to feel like. How I wanted it to deal with the two time periods, childhood in technicolor and adulthood in Kansas. That I wanted to be both inside the pleasure of youth and know that it is gone forever. That I wanted it to be both classical and modern. And Alexandre listened, very attentively, politely waiting for me to finish my ramblings. Then he said this: “A film always only moves forward in time.” Suddenly, the movie and how I needed to direct it snapped into focus. I could go anywhere we wanted in the timeline, but in some essential way, the film always needed to be spiraling forward. —Greta Gerwig It is just this sense of “spiraling forward,” a kind of inevitable progression latent in the start of every scene like a tree lurking in an acorn, that most enthralls me to this film. And the fact that we experience this spiraling forward not as an inevitability of chronological events (as in a Shakespearean tragedy) but as an inevitability of emotional correlations within the hearts of its protagonists, is what makes the film truly sing. This is accomplished in no small part through the expert scoring of Desplat. In order to understand how all these pieces fit together, I’d like to focus on what I believe to be the emotional heart of the film, the two minutes and forty-five seconds from which all its crucial tensions spring. Here lie spoilers. Be warned! It’s significant from the start that these two minutes and forty five seconds comprise two scenes, the first taking place in the past and the second in the present. They are utterly parallel in form (down to the music accompanying them), their juxtaposition with one another bringing into painful focus the heart-wrenching distance between presence and absence, love and loss, childhood and adulthood, which is the cornerstone of the story. Let’s watch together. Okay, once you’ve dried your eyes and blown your nose, I’ve got a couple thoughts to share with you. Consider those two scenes through the lens of their parallel form. There are a few ways in which they are almost identical in their order of events, and one way in which they couldn’t be more different. Both scenes begin in the morning, with Jo having fallen asleep in the bedroom of her sister, Beth, after keeping watch over her in her sickness. Both scenes derive their momentum from Jo’s descent down the staircase. In the first, she hurries in desperation, repeating, “Marmee” with the vulnerable voice of a child. In the second, she walks slowly and silently, exuding a knowledge she’s reluctant to confirm. Both scenes transition from Jo’s descent down the stairs to her view of the kitchen table, and each shot of that table is identical in composition as Marmee turns around to greet Jo. Here, of course, is where the scenes differ. In the first, as Marmee turns around, we see Beth sitting beside her, and we feel Jo’s relief as she rushes to embrace Beth. In the second, as Marmee turns around, all we see is an empty chair behind her, where Beth should be but isn’t. In this instance, Jo is not the one comforted, but the one doing the comforting. This is the threshold of Jo’s passage into adulthood and it’s driven home by her posture, as she stands to console her mom, who is seated and shaking in her grief. This is, after all, how we experience life: pivotal moments, deeply linked to one another by some hidden root system under the ground, appear to us above ground as disparate events. But what about that root system? What about that inevitability we feel in life, that sense that events are connected by more than mere circumstance? Drew Miller It is as if, in some eternal sense, both scenes exist on the trajectory toward wholeness, energized by Jo’s desire for communion. In the first, that channel of love is allowed to stream from the discovery of Beth’s presence to the discovery of her father’s return, culminating in the ultimate sign of communion, even eucharist: the whole family gathered around the table in love and laughter, delighting in one another’s presence. But in the second scene, the currents of Jo’s desire for the shalom of family are dammed by the violating intrusion of death. Her journey down the stairs does not culminate at the long dining room table, where every seat is occupied, but is cut short at the kitchen table, where one crucial seat sits empty. The fullness of each of these realities is finally embellished with color choices: the first scene features warm lighting, evoking presence and togetherness. The second scene makes use of exclusively cool color choices, evoking a stark absence. All of this is poignant enough on its own, but the accompanying score literally raises the emotional pitch. Let’s listen. Notice that this entire piece is grounded in the very first melody we hear. After being briefly developed in the first minute and twenty-five seconds, that melody simply gets repeated—but not merely repeated. Here is where Desplat brilliantly follows the parallel form of the scene, heightening with music what we are already experiencing. With small changes to orchestration and key, Desplat manages to underscore the potency of both the presence we feel at the full table and the absence we feel at the empty one. To hear this contrast in full clarity, try listening first from 1:01 to 1:25, and then from 1:52 to 2:30. These segments comprise what we hear as we watch the full table and the empty table, respectively. The first difference between the two is quite obvious: there are far fewer instruments playing in the second segment than in the first. The first segment at the full table is lush with orchestration: a piano carries the melody, accompanied by a harp, all laid over a bed of strings, holding out full, rich chords. By contrast, the second segment consists only of piano and dreadfully low notes delivered by the deep growl of bowed bass. Consider also the proximity of the instruments to one another in the first segment: they are near to one another in register, giving the sensation of being “packed in,” with little space remaining in the mix. In contrast, the defining element of the second segment is the yawning gap between the bass and piano. Almost as much as we hear each of those two instruments, we hear the gaping distance between them. Add to that a change in key. In the first segment, the melody is played in the key of G major. For the second segment, the piano jumps up a fourth to the key of C major. The effect is one of holding one’s breath. The piano’s voicing changes from a warm, loose sound to a cold and taut one. And while the piano seems to suck in breath as a result of the key change, the bass conversely jumps down by a fifth to reach a very low C. If the piano weeps in the high register of a whimper, the bass sobs in the low register of a groan. N ow what do these pieces mean for the whole of each scene? And what do these scenes mean for the movie? This is where it gets mysterious. When art of any kind reaches this level of synchronicity, where all the parts work seamlessly together, it can become difficult to determine why it has the effect it does on us. And in some ways, the why isn’t even the point—the very difficulty in answering the question can be a clue for us to settle in and feel it before trying to explain it. But I would like to leave you with one small observation I’ve managed to glean from both these scenes and the entire movie, and that is the glimpse underground into a timeline truer than the one we experience on a daily, above-ground basis. If Greta Gerwig had chosen to tell this story chronologically, then the first and second of the scenes that we’ve discussed would have been separated from one another by several other scenes, by the slow passing of time. Even if they retained their parallel form, complete with the same soundtrack, they would have made their impact differently, less saliently. The peace emanating from the first scene would have been separated from the grief of the second by a stretch of “ordinary time.” This is, after all, how we experience life: pivotal moments, deeply linked to one another by some hidden root system under the ground, appear to us above ground as disparate events. But what about that root system? What about that inevitability we feel in life, that sense that events are connected by more than mere circumstance? By choosing the chronology of emotion, Gerwig helped us peer underground. And in doing so, I believe she brought us nearer to reality. Perhaps this is why, throughout 2020, this soundtrack was my emotional anchor. The resonances that the story awoke in me in December of 2019 turned out to be deeply intertwined with a sorrow and pain I would come to know all too well the following year. Together, Gerwig and Desplat gave me a language—of both story and song—that would help me to walk on the ground of my life with greater awareness of the hidden connections just under the surface.

[Editor’s note: This piece is the second in a series begun by Mark Geil called “Old Favorites,” where various contributors to the blog reflect on some of the most beloved, well-worn albums in their collections. Today, we hear from Jonathan Rogers about Arthur Alligood’s album, One Silver Needle.] Arthur Alligood, as I have said elsewhere on this site, makes me think of Hank Williams in his ability to take hurt and transform it into something beautiful and soulful and swampy. His 2012 album, One Silver Needle, is one of my favorite records of all time. I have always had a soft spot for sad songs. I grew up listening to country music—the twangy, lugubrious kind about cheating and leaving and drowning one’s sorrows, not the bro-country kind about going to Cabo. But, of course, I never met Hank Williams or Patsy Cline or George Jones. The hurt they sang about is abstract for me; they provide a thrill of vicarious sadness without any of the actual pain. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is three minutes of emotional tourism. When I first listened through One Silver Needle—before I had ever met Arthur Alligood—I immediately loved those sad songs the way I loved the old country songs. “Why’d You Let Me Go Cold?” sounds exactly like a question Hank Williams would ask, halfway between “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?” and “Your Cold, Cold Heart”: You caught me in that spot. I was just rolling into a boil When you turned the heat down. I can’t muster a simmer now. Why’d you go, honey? Why’d you, honey, let me go cold? I think the bridge on that song is perfect, by the way, in its plaintive wondering why the beloved won’t receive the love she needs: I could have burned for you, baby, Been that star in the night, That light to save you. I’m going to resist the temptation to go through and discuss my favorite parts of each song. You’ll have to go listen for yourself. Not long after I got introduced to One Silver Needle, I became friends with Arthur Alligood. Not long after that, Arthur’s first marriage began to fall apart. And One Silver Needle started to feel like a very different kind of album to me. These songs weren’t about abstract and imaginary pain. This was pain I had seen in a friend’s eyes and heard in his voice. This wasn’t emotional tourism, but a walk through the valley of the shadow. A song like “It Shouldn’t Be That Hard” was suddenly almost too hard to listen to: It shouldn’t be that hard— That’s what I told you when the walls came crashin’, That’s what I said when the words got lost. That’s what I told you: It shouldn’t be that hard. I’m all to pieces and can’t seem to fit, Seeing no sense in going back at all. It’s a hard confession to give “Oh, this shouldn’t be that hard” I recently asked Arthur about One Silver Needle and that time in his life, and he wrote, “Looking back I see that record as me in some mysterious, subconscious way dealing with the unraveling of my marriage before it even started to happen.” Which surprised me. I had assumed that a writer so articulate on the subject of hurt must have been already feeling the hurt. But, come to think of it, the conscious mind isn’t always (or usually?) the source of the best writing. The songs on this record aren't just about the hurt. They're also about the balm. Before Arthur even knew what hell he was heading into, a 'suprapersonal wisdom' was showing him a way through. Jonathan Rogers George Saunders writes about the novelist’s need to listen for a “wisdom of the novel” that goes deeper than the novelist’s understanding or wisdom. I suspect the same thing goes for songwriters: “Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.” Arthur’s songs seem to have understood something that Arthur didn’t yet understand. At Hutchmoot 2014, Arthur performed “Darkness to Light” from One Silver Needle. The audience was absolutely gobsmacked by the beauty and the passion of his performance. Most of the people in the room didn’t know that Arthur hadn’t performed in over a year, nor did they know how deeply he was suffering or that his marriage was ending. But everybody knew that he was telling the truth when he sang, I’m waiting for the morning, Waiting in the night When that sun comes over the mountain. She gonna turn this darkness to light Here we arrive at what, to me, is the real miracle of One Silver Needle. The songs on this record aren’t just about the hurt. They’re also about the balm. Before Arthur even knew what hell he was heading into, a “suprapersonal wisdom” was showing him a way through. Arthur has come through the valley of the shadow that he walked through in the years after One Silver Needle came out. He’s happily re-married and making music once more. And my experience of this old favorite album has changed yet again. Now I pay more attention to the hope that is woven right in there with the pain. Some of my favorite lines on the album are from the song “Bring My Heart Out.” I find myself singing them at the most unexpected moments: I shook the hand of heartache Said “I’m taking another road That you can’t follow down.” One reason I love the old country songs is because it’s nice to wallow in (imaginary) heartache every now and then. But I’ve come to see One Silver Needle as doing something better and more significant—not wallowing in heartache but shaking its hand, acknowledging it, then taking another road. Click here to view One Silver Needle on Bandcamp. Arthur Alligood is currently in the process of releasing a brand new album—follow him on Facebook and Instagram to stay updated as he continues to share new music. And click here to read the first entry in this series, where Mark Geil tells us about Andrew Peterson’s album Clear to Venus.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan is joined by author Maryrose Wood for the second installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. The “Sad Stories Told for Laughs” series continues with Maryrose Wood, author of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place and Alice’s Farm: A Rabbit’s Tale. Before Maryrose Wood was a novelist, she was an actor. In this episode, she tells the story of her Broadway debut, in one of the most spectacular flops in Broadway history. It is a story of youthful naïveté, public chagrin, a brutal review in the New York Times, and, ultimately, perseverance and triumph. (The documentary The Best Worst Thing That Could Have Happened tells the story of Merrily We Roll Along, the show that was Maryrose Wood’s Broadway debut. You can find it on Netflix.) Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 24 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.