For this installment of the “Writing with…” series, we will do some light summer reading. P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves is widely considered to be the best and most representative of his Jeeves and Wooster books. Our narrator is the lovably dunderheaded, overprivileged, never-employed Bertie Wooster. His good-hearted but bumbling attempts to solve his friends’ and relatives’ problems (not to mention his own) always make matters worse, until his exceedingly capable valet Jeeves wades in and puts everything to rights. The situations are funny, the characters are funny, the plots are funny, the narrator’s voice is funny, the dialogue is funny, almost every sentence is funny. Wodehouse isn’t exactly Dostoyevsky, but he’s a genius at what he does, and he does things that all storytellers need to be able to do. In Writing with Jeeves and Wooster, we will read Right Ho, Jeeves in order to understand exactly how Wodehouse creates such a unique voice, such a tight (if formulaic) plot, such lovable characters. Then, through weekly writing exercises and mutual feedback and discussion with your colleagues, you will apply Wodehouse’s principles and techniques to your own writing. Writing with Jeeves and Wooster includes six 90-minute live lectures* via Zoom, as well as a dedicated online forum for discussion and writing exercises. It will last from June 22nd to August 3rd. Topics to be covered include (but are not limited to): Humor Writing First-Person Narration Dialogue Understatement and Overstatement Story structure Characterization Irony Tone Diction Narrative Pacing *Recordings of the lectures will also be available for learners who can’t attend the live lectures. Learn more and register at TheHabit.co/Jeeves.

From the beginning, The Resistance has felt like a bit of an oddball in the Rabbit Room Podcast Network. But to be honest, that was always part of the vision. The Rabbit Room is a beautiful community whose mission is focused on the cultivation and encouragement of artists. I’m hardly the only one whose life has been richly blessed by the resources and friendships that have come out of this community, and I also believe the Rabbit Room’s most impactful years are yet to come. However, I’ve always felt a bit like an outsider even as I’ve been graciously welcomed in. In a previous life, I worked in vocational ministry as a church planter and teaching pastor in the greater Indianapolis area. I still want to pastor, encourage, and shepherd others, but my desire to do so within traditional structures has waned over time. I’ve learned that I want whatever project I’m working on to put up as few “barriers to entry” as possible. If you’ve darkened the door of a church at any point in your life, then you might know what I mean. “Christian” as a descriptor can often build up unnecessary or unintended walls. The linking of something or someone with the term “faith-based” can be a selling point for some (literally) and a deterrent for others. Back to The Resistance and my own calling. When we first launched the podcast back in 2019, I had a single goal: to host meaningful conversations with creative people who could help encourage or challenge the listener to move toward the person they were created to be. It felt very similar to my call as a pastor. Because we wanted to build a broad range of listeners, we set an intentional goal of largely avoiding guests who might cause someone to put a label on us in any way. Yes, we are Christians running a podcast. Yes, we are Christians hosting a podcast. Yes, we are Christians promoting a podcast. No, we do not see it as an explicitly “Christian” podcast, at least not in the way the larger marketplace would define it. I’ve spoken openly about Jesus with some guests and the absence of God with others, but at the core of it all, our guests have gifted us with vulnerable perspectives in order that their shared stories might impact someone else. Matt Conner We’ve welcomed some incredible guests from a huge range of creative avenues. Jericho Brown won the Pulitzer for poetry in 2020 and spoke about carrying a painful torch with his calling. Thievery Corporation’s Eric Hilton is an electronic music legend who was honest about his battle to remain optimistic as an artist. Lynn Renee Maxcy spoke about feeling like a fake even as she’s writing for an Emmy-winning smash TV show, The Handmaid’s Tale. Knives Outcomposer Nathan Johnson told us why he’s always willing to try new things and how that keeps him creatively healthy. I’ve been profoundly challenged and spiritually changed by these conversations and others in my stint as a host. I’ve spoken openly about Jesus with some guests and the absence of God with others, but at the core of it all, our guests have gifted us with vulnerable perspectives in order that their shared stories might impact someone else. Our hope is to serve as a portal that faces out into the world, even as we remain in orbit around the same greater purpose. The Rabbit Room’s mission statement uses the term “Christ-centered” for this very reason. To that end, we’re continuing in the same direction this summer with a lot of exciting new conversations that I hope will help and hearten listeners. Recent episodes featured Tony Award-winning songwriter Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening), Oscar-nominated composer Emile Mosseri (Minari) and acclaimed author Natashia Deón (Grace). Coming up, we’ll sit down with TV screenwriter/producer Tony Tost (Longmire, Damnation, The Terror), actor/director Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother, Hunters), and recording artist Lissie, just to name a few. The Resistance might seem like an odd fit to some people, but our drive is the same as it is for everything else in the Rabbit Room—to shine the light, and to look carefully at what that light reveals. We hope that you, as a listener, are better for coming along with us on the exploration. Click here to listen to The Resistance.

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 Sara R. Danger to talk about Wangerin and his influence. Sara R. Danger is Associate Professor of English at Valparaiso University in Indiana and one of the contributors to Songs from the Silent Passage. She has published articles on Victorian visual culture, writing by women, and literature for children. Her work has been greatly informed by her friendship with Walt and Thanne Wangerin and the many stories Walt has shared with her and her students over the years. She lives with her husband, Paul (longtime administrative assistant to Walt), and their two daughters, Ingrid and Greta. Sara is currently at work on In Their Own Words: Child Authors and the Nineteenth-Century Press, a book project which examines published works by child authors, including gift books, poetry, newspapers, and fantasies, produced between 1830 and 1880. Matthew: Teaching at Valparaiso University, you’ve had the wonderful privilege of interacting with Walter Wangerin, Jr. at a personal level. Tell me about when you first met him. Sara: I had a chance to hear Walt give a homily at the Chapel of the Resurrection, during the interview weekend for the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship, the program which brought me to Valpo. A few months later (and two days after moving to Valpo), I stood in the hot July sun watching my daughter, Maia, on the playground at Christ Lutheran Church, when I heard a familiar voice. I turned to see Walt, calling out to his grandchildren, who were running ahead of him toward the park. A bit later, we made introductions, and he proudly introduced me to his grandchildren, describing their personalities and interests as only a storyteller who loves language could. With this same storyteller’s eye and curiosity, he described the students and community of the university, while inviting me to share the story of what brought our family to Valparaiso. I remember marveling at how he spoke with the similar care and reverence toward his grandchildren (and me, a stranger) as he had shown toward an audience of hundreds just a few months earlier. Matthew: Did your impression of him change over the years as you got to know him better? Sara: Yes and no. From our first meeting until now, I have been impressed by the integrated, holistic identity which defines Walt’s writing and his life. Whether addressing theological issues or family life in his published works or speaking to university presidents or first-year college students, Walt stays true to who he is—teacher, husband, pastor, father, and child of God. Getting to know Walt—as well as important people in his life, including his wife, Thanne, his good friends, Fred Niedner and the late Eugene and Jan Peterson, his wonderful children, and his siblings—has revealed the radiant faith, friendships, and family that profoundly shape the writer and his work. Over these past sixteen years, I have been surprised and delighted by Walt’s and Thanne’s radical generosity. For example, while I was in my first year as assistant professor, as he and Thanne were leaving a Bible study, he turned to me and announced, “By the way, I just turned in a glowing letter in support of your tenure.” Not only was this letter six years ahead of schedule, it was written without anyone’s bidding. This is just one example of the generosity Walt and Thanne shower over the communities of which they are a part. Over the years, I have also come to appreciate that his seriousness is balanced by wit and compassion; when he visits my classes, for instance, he arrives ten minutes early, looking around the classroom, with a probing, serious gaze. After a few minutes, he begins to speak, asking individuals their names, followed by seemingly random questions, such as: “Did you know that your hair is blue? You must really love that color, do you?” or “What is it that your shirt says? Could you explain that to me?” Within a few minutes, students have become far more relaxed and open as they take turns answering the writer’s observant, witty questions. His speaking style, which initially surprised me, now seems entirely consistent with the blissful reverie and reverence that infuses his writing. Matthew: I think he has been a guest at some of your college classrooms. What did he tell your students? How did they respond to him? Children are neither malleable innocents nor passive consumers, Walt argues; rather, they are meaning-makers, interpreters, and co-creators of stories. Sara R. Danger Sara: Walt has been visiting my classes for over sixteen years, and in all that time, he has never lectured. Instead, he “shows” his audiences the power of stories through oral storytelling. His message—that stories have power to shape our lives—is one that we viscerally experience in and through his marvelous stories. As one student observed about his visit, “I could have listened to him all day.” Others are amazed to observe him (seemingly) effortlessly weaving together words and details into moving stories on the fly. As another student put it, “that was more meaningful than a movie. I have never had someone tell me a story that made me lose my sense of time before.” On several occasions, Walt has mentioned that he knows a story is working when the members of the audience stop fidgeting and become rapt in, what he calls, the “story experience.” Matthew: What is your sale’s pitch on an elevator if you bumped into somebody who hadn’t read any of Wangerin’s works? What would you say to get them to pick up a piece of his writing? And what would you recommend? Sara: I recommend Swallowing the Golden Stone, a collection of short stories and essays, which explore how stories indelibly shape human identity and community. The essays offer fascinating insights on adults’ ethical and aesthetic obligations to children while also detailing how children (including Walt’s younger self and his own children) experience story worlds. As such, he offers a vital corrective to much writing about children in which adults speak about and for children, with little or no regard for children’s agency and insights. Instead, Walt presents children as part of the continuum of human experience; he insists, throughout this collection, that stories exist as “living experiences” shaped as much by children’s imaginations as by the writer’s words. Children are neither malleable innocents nor passive consumers, Walt argues; rather, they are meaning-makers, interpreters, and co-creators of stories. Click here to view Songs from the Silent Passage in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

We’ve got a public service announcement for you today, and it goes like this: Do you know about our weekly newsletter? These days, our blog and podcast network are overflowing with new content on a daily basis, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. Our weekly newsletter is a simple, quick way to find what most interests you and start reading and listening. It looks like this: And it even includes some fun extras, like an update on which artists have new songs on our Discovery Playlist and what the Rabbit Room staff has been reading and listening to over the past week. You can sign up for our newsletter by clicking here. P.S. If you’ve had issues receiving our newsletters lately, take this opportunity to sign up one more time. This will ensure that our weekly email makes it to your inbox.

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 Heidi Johnston, Ross Wilson, and Andrew Roycroft called “Stealing Past the Watchful Dragons” from 2020’s Hutchmoot: Homebound, in both video and audio form. Writer Heidi Johnston, poet Andrew Roycroft, and painter and sculptor Ross Wilson discuss art as the light and language of the eye, asking why poetic beauty and integrity matter and exploring the role of story in shaping our understanding of the Biblical narrative. Click here to listen to this episode of The Hutchmoot Podcast.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan is joined by Ellie Holcomb for the fourth installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. Singer-songwriter Ellie Holcomb has just released a new solo album called Canyon—which, she says, is about a deeper sorrow, a higher hope, and the brokenness that is integral to our humanity. Hopefully she will come back in a later episode to talk about that project. But in this episode we talk about the times she and her husband Drew found themselves performing in community college cafeterias, the time they got kicked out of a community college cafeteria and instead had to play a study room, and other sad stories told for laughs. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 26 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 following contains spoilers for In the Heights and Hamilton. I’ve been listening to the In the Heights soundtrack for five days straight. I went to see the movie last week with no knowledge of the story or songs. I hadn’t been to a movie in seventeen months. I ordered popcorn and a milkshake and settled in to watch the movie I’d seen more than one reviewer call the perfect return to theaters. It was, and I commend it to you (on the big screen if you’re comfortable going), but this is not a movie review. This is an observation of one facet of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius. I am no Miranda scholar, nor am I an ultimate fan. I came to the Hamilton soundtrack late in the craze and have never seen it on stage. I watched the filmed stageplay on Disney+ last summer and discovered things about the story I’d never known, though I’d listened through the soundtrack many times. Though I’ve watched interviews and followed Miranda on Twitter, I don’t know a whole lot about him. But I know this: he is unique in a generation. He collaborates and invites others into what he creates. He is passionate about what he believes, and he uses art to express that passion. He appears to be full of joy. And somehow, his effervescent spirit has led to two of the most beautiful and hopeful expressions of grief I’ve ever heard. Listening to the In the Heights soundtrack, I was struck by the haunting loveliness of the song “Alabanza.” In the film, the song comes just after Abuela Claudia, the adopted grandmother to the neighborhood, has suddenly died. As it begins, Usnavi, our narrator, says, “When she was here, the path was clear / And she was just here / She was just here…” The desolation of those words echoes in the hearts of anyone who has ever lost someone. “She was just here.” There is a gaping whole left in the world when a life is snuffed out. As In the Heights started playing on the theater screen, I realized that if I had (somehow) not gone in knowing this was written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, I would have been able to tell from the very first lyric. His fingerprints are vivid in the phrasing, the music, the words, the raps. “Alabanza” echoes another of Miranda’s moments of beautiful grief, “It’s Quiet Uptown” from Hamilton. Where In the Heights says, “Alabanza / Alabanza a Doña Claudia, Señor,” Hamilton says, “The Hamiltons move uptown / And learn to live with the unimaginable.” Listening to the two side by side, even the two key words are phrased the same: a-la-BAN-za and un-i-MAG-inable. The sound of the final three syllables of the latter are blended enough to almost be one, matching the count of the Spanish word. In kindness to non-Spanish speakers (and an insightful nod to the daily experience of community he’s portraying), Miranda’s In the Heights lyrics often translate themselves. “Alabanza” is translated in the opening lyric: Abuela Claudia had simple pleasures She sang the praises of things we ignore Glass Coke bottles, bread crumbs, a sky full of stars She cherished these things She’d say “Alabanza” Alabanza means to raise this thing to God’s face and to sing Quite literally “praise to this” —”Alabanza,” Lin-Manuel Miranda The song is one of praise for Abuela Claudia—for her life, for the impact she had on those in the neighborhood, for the gift that she was—one who says, “We had to assert our dignity in small ways, little details that tell the world we are not invisible.” “It’s Quiet Uptown” focuses on the small in a similar way. The Hamiltons’ son has died in a duel, and the song tells the story of the careful rebuilding of their already-shattered marriage in the midst of their grief. The chorus of onlookers sing, “If you see him in the street / Walking by her side, talking by her side, have pity… / He is trying to do the unimaginable.” The song comes toward the close in a small act of reconciliation: “They are standing in the garden / Alexander by Eliza’s side / She takes his hand / It’s quiet uptown.” Lament engages God in the pain, but trusts God—he will renew our spirits, but that renewal is birthed out of pain. Carolyn Givens I said earlier that Lin-Manuel Miranda seems full of joy. I’ve seen so many videos where he is laughing, or praising someone’s work, or simply delighting in life. I think perhaps, it is this very joy that enables him to write grief so beautifully. A few years ago at Hutchmoot, I was part of a session titled “Good Grief.” One element of my part was a look at the work of artist Steve Prince. I was introduced to jazz funerals and their intertwining of grief with joy by Steve. I’ve never been to New Orleans, but Steve, born and bred there, talks about the dirge and the second line, key elements of the jazz funeral. The dirge, he explains, is the first portion of the funeral—where the band leads the hearse and family from the church or funeral home to the burial site playing somber hymns and songs. After their goodbyes, the parade returns, this time with the band playing swinging spirituals and popular songs. The following grows, and the people who follow for the music are called the second line. Prince uses the dirge and the second line as a metaphor in his art. He often finds his work engaging what is going on in our culture today and representing the voices of the oppressed. He creates works that are both full of lament and full of joy. His work weeps over and cries out against injustice while at the same time celebrating the beauty he sees around him. It’s a jazz funeral—grief and celebration in one. Christian lament and grief are hope-filled. Lament is directional in nature—its bent is toward God. It is honest about pain, and it is a surrendering of that pain and of the tension of who God is and what we see. Lament engages God in the pain, but trusts God—he will renew our spirits, but that renewal is birthed out of pain. Walter Bruegemann speaks on lament and notes that nearly a third of the 150 Psalms are laments, complaints, and protests. If we avoid lament, he says, we deny the church the language of disorientation. “What the psalms of disorientation do is lift up and call attention to the reality of human loss and human pain without making moral judgments about whose fault it is. It is simply a given of human life that needs to be processed theologically.” Lament is directional. And directional lament is a beautiful, hopeful thing. I don’t know anything about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s spiritual life, but I see in his joy the kind of delight I find in God’s good world around me. I don’t know exactly what direction he points his grief, but I see direction in it—direction that he words as “grace” and “Lord.” There are moments that the words don’t reach There’s a grace too powerful to name We push away what we can never understand We push away the unimaginable —”It’s Quiet Uptown,” Lin-Manuel Miranda Alabanza Alabanza a Doña Claudia, Señor Alabanza, alabanza —”Alabanza,” Lin-Manuel Miranda It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust—there may yet be hope. —Lamentations 3:26-29 Hope. Andy Gullahorn expresses it this way in “Grand Canyon”: Oh, I can’t sleep There’s too much weighing on my mind And there’s a bird out there Still singing in the dead of night Like it knows there’s a season when the sun’s gonna set But the story isn’t over yet, The story isn’t over yet. —”Grand Canyon,” Andy Gullahorn Or, as Lin-Manuel Miranda might put it: “Forgiveness, can you imagine?”

Next week is a big week for us at the Rabbit Room. After several years of fundraising, renovating, and patiently waiting, we are finally ready to open wide the doors to our newly-restored community space, North Wind Manor! Every day next week, the Manor will serve as a venue for events centered around art, music, story, and community. But for those of us who are unable to attend in person, we have exciting plans for online content as well. The Rabbit Room’s four main themes of ongoing discussion are music, art, story, and community, and each day of Opening Week has been set aside to explore one of those themes. As fun as it will be to explore those themes together in a shared space, the discussion won’t stop there. Opening Week would not be complete without a deep dive into the Rabbit Room’s extensive archive where this discussion has been taking place for years. So get ready for a curated selection of interviews and sessions from The Hutchmoot Podcast, The Second Muse, and The Resistance. Expect to see writing from Jennifer Trafton, Andrew Peterson, Helena Sorensen, Kyra Hinton, and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson. Next week’s content will feature the backstory of why our community space is named “North Wind Manor,” extended conversations on the art of both writing and listening to music, peeks into the magic of collaboration in visual art, blueprints for a sprawling tale, and meditations on the emotional power of film. Stay tuned for all of this and more, every day next week.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan is joined by Thomas McKenzie for the fifth installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. Thomas McKenzie is an Anglican priest, the founding pastor of Church of the Redeemer in Nashville, and the author of The Anglican Way. Also, he once blew up a gas station. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 27 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

[Editor’s note: This piece is the third 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 and songs in their collections. Today, we hear from Helena Sorensen about Sandra McCracken’s song “Dynamite.”] It was 2008, and I was seated on a mercifully cushy chair in the auditorium of Christ Community Church. Jon and I had recently moved to Nashville, and I’d gone to see Sara Groves and whoever came with her on the Art*Music*Justice Tour. I was fidgeting, wondering how many bathroom breaks I’d have to take during the event, when the singers took the stage. There was Sara, lovely Sara, brilliant as always, and a couple of guys I couldn’t pick out of a lineup (bless them), and this other woman, as pregnant as me, balancing a guitar on her baby bump and singing like, well, like she knew me. You know the feeling. Her name was Sandra McCracken. I don’t remember any of the songs she sang that night, but I went out and bought Gypsy Flat Road and Red Balloon, and when an opportunity arose to see Sandra perform again, I grabbed it. In that second concert, I was introduced to “Dynamite,” and I fell in love. Friends, I fell hard. It wasn’t a “that-was-good-and-I-might-look-up-the-lyrics-later” kind of love. It was a “what-just-happened-because-I-stopped-breathing-and-passed-out” kind of love. The setting may have been a factor: it was an outdoor venue. We brought blankets and chairs and sat under the stars while Sandra and Julie Lee and Sarah Masen sang in a lit pavilion and fireflies flickered above the tall grasses. Then again, I’ve heard Sandra sing that song in a poorly lit, unremarkable room with the barest accompaniment, and it was every bit as magical. I played it on repeat while I wrote my second book, Seeker, and after thousands of repetitions, my heart still aches when I hear the opening notes. If you’re familiar with Sandra’s more recent albums, but you’ve never heard her singer/songwriter stuff, let me encourage you to venture out. Or rather, venture in. Her songs have a personal quality, an aura of secrecy that leaves you wanting to lean close and ask, “What’s this about?” Knowing Sandra a little now, I can tell you that her response wouldn’t be simple or straightforward. She’d offer some sort of glancing wisdom that raised more questions and sent you off with an eagerness to unearth new mysteries in the music. That’s Sandra’s way. She’s shy of hitting things head on. Sandra understands that if you want to engage with the question of desire, it will take a journey—and a thousand images and contradictions, and freedom, and pain, and hope, and stories, and songs—to come anywhere close to an answer. Helena Sorensen Her reticence, for me, is crucial to her appeal. In “Dynamite,” I imagine that someone has come to her and asked, “What is this desire I feel? Is it good? Is it bad?” And Sandra, knowing it to be an intimate and an impossible question, knowing that, in matters of the human heart, a hammer and chisel will get you nowhere, approaches gently, with circumspection. She approaches, in the words of John O’Donohue, “with the kindness and reverence of candlelight.” She understands that if you want to engage with the question of desire, it will take a journey—and a thousand images and contradictions, and freedom, and pain, and hope, and stories, and songs—to come anywhere close to an answer. So she takes the listener—the seeker—on a journey that begins with a dream: I had a dream that the mountains cried like a child for their mother. My throat catches when I hear it. The question of desire is huge, as big as mountains. But instead of throwing them down and making a level plain or casting them into the sea by means of a dramatic faith act, Sandra begins by grieving for them. What is more in need of comforting than a child longing for its mother? This towering, ungainly desire, she suggests, needs first to be treated with tenderness. It needs to be held. But in the next heartbeat, the image changes. Desire becomes destructive, overwhelming; familiar places are flooded, and the land is black with smoke. The image of the inconsolable child is traded for the image of a soldier, a nuclear holocaust. “Here,” Sandra says, as the melodic line descends by a dramatic octave and a half, “is desire left unchecked. Here is the absurdity of mankind, seeking to name itself by what it can own, what it can break.” The hush, the chill, the iron will of man, sweeping everything in sight with dynamite. I am silenced by grief and horror. And that’s just the first verse. The second verse, in a movement that feels like whiplash, returns the listener to a scene of childhood and unbridled freedom. I had a child, and her spirit was like wild horses running. This time the trajectory is not toward destruction and abuse of power. It’s toward something smaller and more fragile than a child: a leaf. In the purest desire, and in genuine need, the leaf bends toward the light. What else can it do? Yet somehow, even this ends in destruction. Out of nowhere, the last word of the verse lands like a dropped bomb, and I want to ask why. I want to know how the leaf survives if it doesn’t yearn for sunlight. I want to know how we grow if we don’t lean into desire. Sandra ignores my questions and hurries on to the chorus. Those who have ears when the smoke clears will see things as they are. To bend the will, you first must change the heart. This is not about answers. Sandra is trying to show me something. She’s setting contradictions side by side and waiting for me to catch the glints of light that move along the cords that connect them. I think I can almost see them. While she’s singing, I think I almost understand. But before I become fixated and confused, before I lose the heart of the question, the third verse opens. I dreamed I heard the sound of the last ‘Great God-bird’ singing. There is no space for thinking here. In this forest where ax-machines are leveling the trees and the last of a species is singing its farewell song, all I can do is weep. This is a fable she doesn’t want to tell, one I don’t want to hear, but there is no avoiding it. It’s placed in my hands with a parting question, a beautiful and terrible gift: Will we choose the noise of our desire or the hope that makes no sound? In a matter of seconds, the music stops. The strings are still and Sandra turns to go. “But wait!” I want to say. “What does that mean? Is desire good or bad? Is it always noisy and hope always silent? What should I do now? I don’t understand!” She responds with an enigmatic smile and disappears. She hasn’t answered my questions, but like the Spirit, like an artist, she has “stirred the embers of (my) heart.” So I hit the Repeat button and take the journey again, weeping for the childlike mountains and the last lonely God-bird. I catch glimpses of the light that runs along the cords that connect everything. My desire is cleansed by my tears, transformed by my seeing, and I’m thankful still and yet and always for the woman who stood in a room full of strangers, propped a guitar on her belly, and sang the Mystery. Click here to listen to “Dynamite” on Spotify and here to listen on Apple Music. Click here to read the first entry in this series, where Mark Geil tells us about Andrew Peterson’s album Clear to Venus, and here to read the second entry in this series, where Jonathan Rogers shares his experience with Arthur Alligood’s One Silver Needle.

[Editor’s note: To begin Opening Week at North Wind Manor, we are delighted to share this piece from Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson on the origin and significance of the name “North Wind Manor,” the Rabbit Room’s hopes for the use and enjoyment of this space, and the legacy of George MacDonald’s extravagant hospitality.] “I will try to tell you what I think. You musn’t suppose I am able to answer all your questions, though. There are a great many things I don’t understand more than you do.” North Wind descended on a grassy hillock, in the midst of a wild furzy common. There was a rabbit-warren underneath, and some of the rabbits came out of their holes, in the moonlight, looking very sober and wise, just like patriarchs standing in their tent-doors, and looking about them before going to bed. When they saw North Wind, instead of turning round and vanishing again with a thump of their heels, they cantered slowly up to her and snuffled all about her with their long upper lips, which moved every way at once. That was their way of kissing her; and, as she talked to the Child, she would every now and then stroke down their furry backs, or lift and play with their long ears. —George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind In the same years that the old farmhouse now resurrected as North Wind Manor was being built on a grassy hillock in rural Tennessee, a Scottish author named George MacDonald was scribing this tender rabbity scene in his enigmatic, well-loved novel At the Back of the North Wind. Perhaps the Manor’s first occupants even knew the tale: it quickly found its way across the waters from Britain to America in the 1870s. Mark Twain’s children were among its earliest fans, having read their copy so ragged that he wrote to MacDonald for a replacement. As years rolled by, the tale continued to captivate young American readers, such as Madeleine L’Engle who later recalled the “strange mercy” that she found in the book’s language. And then somehow, accumulation of years and yellowing of pages notwithstanding, this story began to work Deeper Magic upon the hearts of a number of Rabbit Room dreamers—determined dreamers that have now, in faithfully embodied imagination, seen the farmhouse through to its next chapter of an ever-unfolding story. In the quotation above from At the Back of the North Wind, as the moonlit rabbits gather around the novel’s titular character, North Wind attempts to answer a young child’s query: Who is she? Consistent with the book’s poetic invitation into a transcendent realm that suggests more than can be voiced in human words, North Wind offers no simple answer: “I don’t think I am just what you fancy me to be. I have to shape myself various ways to various people. But the heart of me is true.” The child has had many adventures with North Wind at this point in the tale, adventures that have shaped and impacted not just him, but through him every person that has come into his life. And yet he still grapples with the breadth of her mysteriousness—and it is only in holding together all the novel’s poems, and stories, and songs, and images, and dances, and relationships that even we as attentive readers can but catch at intimations. North Wind tells the wondering child that he must wait, and in the meantime, “be hopeful, and content not to be quite sure.” At the Back of the North Wind is an unusual tale, for it is a tale about asking questions, and, even when not knowing the answers, choosing to choose delight, and joy, and love—choosing to choose story and song and relationship—all without denying the presence of suffering. It is a tale that invites its readers to keep asking questions (the child-protagonist never ceases doing so!), and then to keep choosing to choose that delight, joy, love, story, song, and relationship even when answers are elusive and daily existence is more-than-hard. As it often is. In this story, the child’s family struggles to put food on the table, his father loses his job, his family loses their home, and there is worry, fear, and persistently dangerous ill health. MacDonald himself knew intimately his character’s trials, as have generations of his readers. And so for those readers MacDonald crafted not a story of escapism, but rather a story of re-orienting, of re-envisioning, of continually renewed imagination—a story in which sorrow is a thread throughout, but not the whole. A story in which time-present and time-past are redolent with the resurrection goodness of time-future. A story in which childlike imagination re-envisions all of eternity. Questions are allowed, even if unanswerable; sorrow is acknowledged and shared; grief and suffering are not denied. But neither are joy nor help nor childlike playfulness, nor hope in that which will yet be made known. And it is in the hospitality of such a space—especially when that hospitality transcends boundaries—that Imagination bodies forth new goodnesses. Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson The ethos of The Rabbit Room’s North Wind Manor is one that would have delighted both the child in this novel as well as the childlike author who wrote it. MacDonald’s own home was a haven of hospitality and rest, where story and song were not only curated but also cultivated, and in which playfulness and feasting abounded. He and his family were gatherers of culturally, socio-economically, and theologically diverse people, building relationships and community in the most unexpected of places. But in all of their celebration, joy, and play, they never denied grief, suffering, and pain; questions that could not be answered were allowed. The MacDonald family knew all too well that gladness and sorrow can walk hand in hand, dreams gained and livings lost, loved ones too early parted even as new wee ones arrived. MacDonald himself and several of his children knew intimately the exhaustion of chronic and potentially mortal pain that could thread through art-making and community-shaping. And yet together they still chose to pursue Life More Abundant, choosing not to deny the suffering while yet choosing to celebrate the joy. And perhaps this is part of the key that made their hospitality so attractive to so many, the art that it evoked so true. It seems to me that this is also part of the key that makes the hospitality of The Rabbit Room attractive to so many, and the art that it invites and evokes so true. Questions are allowed, even if unanswerable; sorrow is acknowledged and shared; grief and suffering are not denied. But neither are joy nor help nor childlike playfulness, nor hope in that which will yet be made known. And it is in the hospitality of such a space—especially when that hospitality transcends boundaries—that Imagination bodies forth new goodnesses. “A wise Imagination,” writes MacDonald, “is the presence of the spirit of God” and is “the best guide” that a person can have. He goes on: It is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. . . We live by faith, and not by sight. —George MacDonald MacDonald was fully confident that even in the unknowability of divine mysteries, the Triune God was ever calling us to explore, to engage, to dare to be wisely imaginative participants in relationship—with him, and with his creations. And that to do so would reveal more clearly who we ourselves are called to be. Just as North Wind says that her identity transcends human language (perhaps in itself a “strange mercy,” to use L’Engle’s words), so too will the events and experiences of this now resurrected North Wind Manor transcend language as well. Some of it will be recorded and conveyed, but some of it will be beyond description. On that grassy hillock where nineteenth century farmers once raised a home, and where long before that a forested rise was traversed and indwelt by Cherokee and their kin, now awaits North Wind Manor—rooted in a particular place with stories of a Creator God’s “almighty help and grace” that reaches both further back and farther forward than any reader can conceive, into some of the chapters of the story that our Creator God is writing. You musn’t suppose that you will find answers to all your questions at North Wind Manor, regardless of how wise its various rabbits may look. Some will look sober, and I expect others will look goofy and playful and fun. But the rabbits here have chosen to sit with North Wind, and with those she carries, and to listen to their questions even when there aren’t any answers to be spoken or found, content sometimes not to be sure, to choose to wait in hope. Here they have chosen to make a home that speaks Friend for you, so that you may enter—”whether you like food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or, a pleasant mixture of them all.” Here they hope to introduce you to others who seek to participate with God in his gracious invitation of Imagination; both to friends present and those already gone to the “high countries” at the back of the North Wind. Here they hope that new chapters will not just be written, but will be spoken, painted, and sung, planted, played, and performed—that here hearts will be called to be true. A wise Imagination is the presence of the Spirit of God. George MacDonald North Wind Manor is not the “last homely house,” nor do those who tend it ever hope it to be so. Rather the hope is that in embodying well imaginations that are wise, others will be inspired and emboldened to steward yet more hospitable places in which the Creator God, the Incarnate Christ, and the Holy Spirit can be made known through music, story, and art in community. Places where “music speaks of both faith and uncertainties,” and “melodies announce the presence of God;” where “sorrows spoken lend courage,” and allow for wordlessness; where lions are not tame, and the turn of the tide might bring “something understood.” Where nothing is called common, “in the earth or the air,” but “every real thing is a joy for those with eyes and ears to relish it, and nose and tongue to taste it”—and thus behold and be held in the supper of the Lamb. Where childishness is transformed by childlikeness. Where “wild beings from the realm of myth” say to the wild things from the realm of here: “peace—give me your hand.” Where “souls in paraphrase” and “hearts in pilgrimage” are “wound with mercy round and round”—and thus can “rest in the grace of the world and be free.” Where “the brave things in the old tales and songs, the tales that really mattered” are told again and again, pulling listeners in to join the chorus. Where community transcends space and time and accepts the mysterious invitation to practice resurrection. May North Wind Manor, in her particular place at this particular time, not just choose this but may her stewards antiphonally invite this: holding all such things together as they wait in and for the Holy Wind of wise imaginations.

As a companion piece to Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson’s beautiful essay this morning, here’s a wonderful session from Hutchmoot 2019, given by Kirstin and Jennifer Trafton on the compelling hospitality to be found in George MacDonald’s life and work—his home as well as his books. You can listen to Parts 1 and 2 on The Hutchmoot Podcast. Romans 12 calls for us to “practice hospitality,” or (as another translation puts it) to “be inventive in hospitality.” George MacDonald—forefather of the Inklings, author of The Light Princess, The Princess & the Goblin, At Back of the North Wind, and more—was renowned amongst his peers for how he imaginatively approached this calling in his household, in his companionship, in his conversation, and even in his books. We will look at some of the ways in which, as an author, teacher, and community-builder, MacDonald intentionally manifested hospitality, and how his understanding of hospitality was shaped by both family and mentors—a compelling legacy of influence inspiring communities such as the Inklings and The Rabbit Room. Click here to listen to these episodes of the Hutchmoot Podcast. This session provides excellent context for Kirstin’s piece this morning, which connected the life and mission of George MacDonald and his family to the Rabbit Room’s vision for North Wind Manor, named after one of MacDonald’s most memorable characters. Click here to read it.

Our theme for today at North Wind Manor’s Opening Week is music. This evening, we’ll be celebrating the gift of music with a special Local Show at the Manor, and on our blog and podcast network, we’re highlighting a few pieces and conversations that engage with some timely questions: How do we listen to music? How have our listening habits changed over time? And what does it mean to become a better listener? To help get the discussion going, we’re sharing a seven-part blog series called “The Lost Art of Listening” as well as a special episode of The Second Muse by the same name, all of which feature the perspectives and musings of the Rabbit Room staff. You can find links to each below. In addition, we’ve included another Second Muse episode that comes at these questions from the perspective of songwriting—an interview with Sara Groves and Brown Bannister. Part 1: Ubiquity and Scarcity by Andrew Peterson A few weeks ago, my seventeen-year-old daughter Skye told me she wanted to take a walk and listen to a complete album, top-to-bottom. She said she was tired of listening to singles, and, though she spins full records all the time, wanted to experience an artist’s work in an intentional way. To my great pleasure, she asked what she should listen to… Part 2: Miracles and Wonders by Chris Thiessen Friends, I believe I am falling victim to one of the classic blunders—the most famous of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia—but only slightly less known is this: never go against a Peterson when your job is on the line! I kid. And yet… Part 3: Precious Impermanence by Jennifer Trafton I was one of those present at the spirited lunch debate between Andrew Peterson and Chris Thiessen (and others) that initially sparked this “Lost Art of Listening” blog conversation, and what I remember most of that particular meal was, not only the copious amounts of cheese dip consumed… Part 4: Chew the Cud by Drew Miller Recently I was struck by the surprisingly earthy language used by 15th century Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cramner to describe the ancient—and at first glance, rather lofty—practice of lectio divina… Part 5: The Case for Nostalgia by Leslie E. Thompson Here’s my great confession: If you were to look in my musical library and scroll through the albums, artists, and playlists I’ve curated over the years, it’s likely you would think I’ve listened to really terrible music… Part 6: A Scarcity of Mind by Shigé Clark When I was twelve years old, my parents bought me the 10th Anniversary Concert recording of Les Misérables on VHS. I’d begun to demonstrate a zeal for musicals, starting with the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, which I listened to on repeat until I could sing you the entire thing through—with all its varying parts—from start to finish… Part 7: Can I Get A Witness? by Pete Peterson Several weeks ago when we began this series on the “lost art of listening,” I don’t know that any of us knew exactly where it would end up. But it’s been a delight to watch the topic develop and gather steam. Andrew, Chris, Drew, Jennifer, Shigé, and Leslie have all articulated valuable facets of why and how we listen to music and carry it with us… The Second Muse: The Lost Art of Listening (Epilogue) Andrew Peterson, Pete Peterson, Jennifer Trafton, Chris Thiessen, Leslie Thompson, and Shigé Clark discuss their personal relationships with music in the wake of the streaming era. The Second Muse: Sara Groves & Brown Bannister Drew Miller talks with Sara Groves and Brown Bannister about the first album they ever made together, Add to the Beauty, and specifically the song “Why It Matters.” P.S. Are you a songwriter looking to hone your craft? Is that, perchance, why you find yourself on this webpage, reading this very sentence? Do you happen to be a fan of Sara Groves? Well then, you really ought to know about her Songwriter Workshop, which she and Art House North host together every year. It’s a virtual workshop and this year it features some remarkable songwriters, including Madison Cunningham, Don & Lori Chaffer, Christa Wells, and more. The dates are August 13th and 14th. Click here to learn more and register.

[Editor’s note: Our theme for today at North Wind Manor’s Opening Week is art, and Kyra Hinton has contributed this meditation on a phrase that we use quite a bit at the Rabbit Room—”art nourishes community and community nourishes art.” If anyone knows what these words look like in practice, it’s Kyra, and here she reflects on two collaborative art projects she has facilitated with visual artists in Rabbit Room circles: Pass the Piece and artists &. We’ve also re-shared here the Pass the Piece video from Hutchmoot: Homebound 2020 and the first artists & video in case you’re hungry for more.] I believe art nourishes community because our creations speak to aspects of our human experience. We need art inside of community to give us a vocabulary from which to understand the things we’re learning and processing. We need art to reveal truths we didn’t know how to see. We need art to give us a middle ground or meeting point from which to connect to others who resonate with the same ache. We need art to reveal the beauty of varying views and ground us in the humanity of each of our experiences. Every artistic discipline can do this. And I believe visual art can do this in a way that bypasses our intellectual barriers. It can break past our defenses, sneak past our dragons, and begin a work beneath the surface that we couldn’t put to words or melody. So that’s why art nourishes community. But why does community nourish art? When I started my work as a visual artist, I was immensely and painfully lonely. I had some Christian community around me, but they weren’t artists. Even with their best intentions, they couldn’t understand the pain that comes from pouring your soul onto a piece of paper for the world to see. They couldn’t understand the discipline and frustration and dedication it takes to see an idea through to completion, or improve well enough to even attempt it. This kind of fellowship is best experienced with other creators, even if they aren’t in the visual arts, because they can understand the way we see and process the world around us. They can understand the strain and struggle; they can celebrate with us in the small victories that sustain us. When art is being birthed into a place of safety, where the community is dedicated to good work, and seeing you succeed in putting out into the world the work within your soul, the artist can create freely. Confidently. With whimsy and fun. More than likely, the art that’s been growing in you is just the thing someone out there needs to see. And maybe they need to see your bravery to know they can be brave too. Courage is contagious. Kyra Hinton This is the impact of community that I’ve seen in my day to day work. Whether it’s the daily planning of content and community with Jamin Still, celebrating a beautiful new pie design and experimentation with Bailey McGee, rejoicing over God’s provision with Eddy Efaw, marveling with Joe Sutphin over a new rabbit sketch he’s finished, or virtually traipsing through Gina Sutphin’s garden as we enjoy the place of earth she’s cultivating (or any myriad of conversation with other artists and collaborators), my days are filled with the voices and experiences of beautiful humans who pour beauty into the world with the work of their hands. They make me brave, they keep me going, and they make it fun. It wasn’t always this way, so I’m continually in awe and grateful for this community that enriches my life as an artist — not just my work as an artist. Because yes, while it is incredibly powerful to have an inspiring idea and do the dedicated, lonely work it takes to put it into the world, it becomes something else when you share that idea in community, and another beautiful human steps into the story. They see a different side of the equation—a different angle of the light. And suddenly that cool but small idea that I had opens and unfurls. It becomes something bigger than me because my soul, my experiences, and my perspectives are not the only pool of ingredients from which to pull. Pass the Piece did this in a microcosm. From the beginning we called it an experiment, because I genuinely wasn’t sure it would work. It did—not because it created good work on canvas, but it created good work in people. It brought us together, and brought out the best in each other. It made us conquer fears, look at the world and our work differently, and see that maybe the best glimpse of heaven is found in one another’s eyes. A lot of us continued to collaborate in one way or another after this. Either we created more works together, or we just opened our processes up to each other more. We leaned into community more than we had before the project, and I think we all saw an improvement in our process because of it. But I think a lot of the power of that session was when we opened it up to the larger community—when 90+ Hutchmoot: Homebound participants joined the experiment and did their own passing of the pieces. As this microcosm expanded to include strangers and varying disciplines, shipping art pieces across oceans, we saw the power of collaboration on a bigger stage. Challenges came up that we, in our microcosm of relatively close friends, hadn’t had to work through. And yet, they did. The brave humans of this greater Pass the Piece experiment rose to meet these hurdles. Yes, beautiful works were created. But above that, conversations were had, invitations extended, and relationships created, forged, and strengthened. It was here that we saw even more clearly just how lonely this subset of visual artists can be. Because yes, the phrase “art nourishes community and community nourishes art” applies across disciplines. But just as a writer needs the encouragement of another writer, a painter needs the encouragement and wisdom only another painter can give. We saw the benefit this experiment had on the community, and once we saw that, we couldn’t leave it there. Compassion by Mary Haasdyk and Ken Priebe Pencil & watercolor Journey’s End by Amber Tiller Schellenberger and Joe Hox Acrylic & digital painting Click here to view prints on Joe’s store Protector by Daniel Grissom and Rebekah Rosamilia Marker & collage Umbrella Girl by Mary Elizabeth McCulley and Sarah Brown Acrylic & collage For prints, contact Sarah on Instagram @sarahembee We began artists & because we had a glimpse into how much the visual artists in this community were needing a place to gather, share, encourage and be encouraged. Seemingly basic concepts about how art and faith mingle in this discipline resonated deeply, in a group that’s been on the outside of a lot of arts/faith discussions. How can you be a Christian artist if your art is not inherently Christian? What is the value visual arts can bring to the Kingdom, or to global and local communities? What is the value art-making brings to the individual artist creating it? How does it impact their families? These questions have been foundational in our discussions, even as we tackle more tangible problems. The artists in our group love sharing their works in progress, inviting each other into the process. They help each other work through blocks and celebrate victories. They act as a sounding board for one another, and cheer them on as they go. This generous and gracious community can exist even in this virtual space because of the vulnerability and bravery of each artist who brings themselves and their experiences. It’s such a gift to watch these artists be present to, receive, and engage in community. Being able to cultivate a space where this happens is a highlight in my journey, because I remember my own loneliness when I started. The fear of that isolation nearly caused me to stuff my art supplies and perspectives back into the closet. It wasn’t until I realized that my act of creation was bringing me into closer communion with the Creator that I decided collaboration with Him was worth all of the human loneliness I’d risk in accepting the mantel of an artist. But there’s a shimmering magic to this grace. In the vulnerability of flinging my art into the world, it sews invisible strings between my heart and the hearts of others. I may never know some of those connections, but in these years since I took the leap, I’ve watched that aroma attract community. Your art, in honesty and authenticity, is your greatest cultivator of community. Art begets art. Art, after completing its work in the artist, goes on to continue the work in other hearts, and they find a similar rhythm. Art attracts art. We hear the echos of these songs reverberate past the walls of our studios and out into the wide world where others sing along. More than likely, the art that’s been growing in you is just the thing someone out there needs to see. And maybe they need to see your bravery to know they can be brave too. Courage is contagious. So if I can extend any courage to you, dear artist, it’s this: You have a view of this broken and beautiful world that only you can see. You hold endless stories, heartbreaks, hopes, and longings within your frame. And from your unique perspective and singular make-up there is a wealth of light that only you can reflect. I can’t wait to see that light bouncing off of you and out into the loneliness, reminding us of the hope ready for us to take, and the home ready for us to taste. Click here to visit the artists & community on Facebook, and here to visit Kyra Hinton’s website.

Tonight at the Manor, Russ Ramsey is speaking about the life and work of painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. So, as a companion piece to Kyra’s inspiring meditation from this morning, here is a session from Hutchmoot 2017 where Russ explores the life and work of another artist—Vincent Van Gough. Russ Ramsey is a pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, an author of four fantastic books which you can find in the Rabbit Room Store, and as you’ll hear in this session, he’s a remarkable essayist and thoughtful appreciator of art—in particular, the art of Vincent Van Gogh. Click here to read Kyra Hinton’s essay from this morning about how the phrase “art nourishes community and community nourishes art” has played out in her life as a visual artist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan is joined by Doug McKelvey for the seventh installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. Doug McKelvey is best known as the author of Every Moment Holy, “new liturgies for daily life.” He has also been a songwriter and a screenwriter. In this episode, the Sad Stories Told for Laughs series continues with Doug’s stories of fan letters gone wrong, fostering misunderstanding for the sake of humor, and a finger puppet. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 29 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

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

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

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan is joined by Buddy Greene and Jeff Taylor for the eighth installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. For a decade and a half, Buddy Greene and Jeff Taylor have been making music together in a wide variety of venues and a wide variety of costumes. They are remarkable as performers, but even more remarkable is their friendship and good humor. As Jeff says, even a worst-case scenario performance is redeemed when it becomes a sad story told for laughs shared between friends. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 30 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.