Since my forthcoming album, Far Side Of The Sea, was successfully Kickstarted back in August, I have been up to many things, very little of which, unfortunately, have had to do with recording. I managed to crawl across the finish line of another season of mowing lawns (for those who don’t know, I started mowing lawns a few years ago in order to supplement my main income as a musician/artist). After five years, I have—with no small trepidation, I might add—decided to shut down this side biz, Good Neighbor Lawncare. RIP, GNL. As of this writing, I don’t know how I’m going to supplement my music income, but the thought of enduring another exhausting, strength-sapping season of pushing a lawnmower is something I can’t stomach (even though that same labor prevents my gut from bulging into a tire around my middle-aged waist). Belly fat being neither here nor there, let me, instead, tell you what I have been up to. Andrew Peterson, one of my best friends on the planet, graciously invited me to be the guest act on his Burning Edge Of Dawn release tour. The time spent with he and his band (Asher Peterson, drums; Nathan Johnson, electric guitar; Greg LaFollette, bass; Nolan Rossi, sound/road manager) was an oasis for me. An oasis in the sense that the tour was A) a reprieve from mowing grass, B) a rare opportunity to play with a band, and, perhaps most importantly, C) a chance to be on the road in community rather than alone. After three good but lonesome years of touring my last album, Birds Of Relocation, my soul needed that mercy: the chance to be on the road with kindreds. Once the tour ended, I dedicated the looming winter holiday weeks (AKA, seasonal unemployment for most musicians) to working on my art, to digging in my heels, to seeking refuge in Christ’s gentle shadow, to, in the words of  Charles H. Spurgeon, “search the mystery of His wounds,” hoping the Lord might show me the work of my own hands. When it’s not been unbearably cold, I’ve spent hours out in my uninsulated shed creating folk-art sculptures (The Daily Piece) using/re-using found materials, allowing my mind the freedom to be curious, to tinker, to piddle. Like my father before me, I am a piddler. Piddling is an underrated pastime. As with my songs or paintings, I never know what I’m making (or saying) until it’s actually said or made. Even then, part of the learning process of art is knowing when to walk away, when to call it complete. It’s a little known fact that my wife and I are scavengers. If, while meandering through our neighborhood’s alleyways, we happen upon a piece of furniture or a wooden shutter that has the potential to be repaired or repurposed, we lack the dignity to leave it behind. Over the past year or two I’ve come to appreciate woodworking. So much so that when a friend told me he’d been given permission to plunder a hundred-year-old, three-story tenement before its being torn down, I jumped at the chance to spare what bones of the house I could. Armed with crowbars, drills, hammers, and flashlights, my friend chiseled apart massive pieces of Bedford limestone adorning the foundation, while I unscrewed old doors off hinges, found an abandoned Hebrew Bible and musty poetry collection, absconded with rolls of old U. S. Army Corps of Engineer cartography maps, and pried off numerous linear feet of filthy, rough-hewn, century-old oak siding. I’ve since put many of these items to use in a variety of my folk-art sculptures. It’s a pleasure to offer new life to old, rusted, dirty, abandoned objects. I have since planed many of those oak planks, and they now act as book shelves for the library adorning the walls of my 100-sq. ft. backyard office (The Asylum). The bones of one razed dwelling are now Ebenezers in a new sanctuary. In God’s economy, nothing is wasted. Until Far Side Of The Sea makes its entrance into the world, I will continue to work at my art, to enjoy the work of my hands, to seek to be unafraid of failure, or at the very least to, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, “fail in good spirits.” May our Lord, in his unfathomable grace, bless the works of our hands. Happy new year to us all.

At Hutchmoot 2014, a lanky, sandy blonde-haired stranger sat down across from my friend Michael and I in the Church of the Redeemer fellowship hall. As fate would have it (or perhaps God’s provision), his name was Arthur and he, like I, had recently changed jobs and, as our conversation revealed, was also walking through a valley. I remember mentally noting that God gave me this conversation as a gift to know there are others in the valley. It’s apparent from our conversation, and from Arthur’s lyrics on The Shadow Can’t Have Me, that while the valley is a low place, it doesn’t have to be a lonely one. Given our history, I was excited to have the chance to catch up with Arthur this fall for his album release. I wanted to hear how his time in the valley had been since our brief fellowship at Hutchmoot. What I learned was that God had walked with him, like the psalmist David, through the dark valley and… well, read on to find out the rest. So we haven’t heard any new music from you in a while. Your last album came out in 2012, I think. So why the silent musical years? Mainly it has to do with what was going on in my life. I partly got burned out on music and touring and also went through a tough season. Things go by the wayside when you’re in the middle of something really hard, so I just kind of stopped writing. I had lost the joy and passion and didn’t feel like I had anything I needed to say. I was in a stagnant period and felt I would eventually move out of it, but I didn’t feel like I needed to put pressure on myself to pull myself out of it. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally does. And, you know, one of the first things I observed when I first listened to the new album is that the first song really isn’t a song. It’s a recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm. You chose to break your silence with a scripture recitation instead of a song. Why did you decide to do it that way? Yeah. So much of this record is pulling pages out of my life or a prayer journal or something like that. These recordings are very personal and this particular one I took on my iPhone at my grandfather’s funeral. He passed away this past summer. I had had this surreal experience the day he passed away. I was up in Tennessee and he was in South Georgia. I knew he was fading and something compelled me to write that day just thinking about what he was going through. I ended up writing the title track to the album (“The Shadow Can’t Have Me”). I wrote that the day my grandfather passed. I didn’t know he would go that day but I knew he wasn’t doing well. I had this weird experience where, of all places, I went into the bathroom and just stood there with my guitar. On the wall is a stone-etched copy of the Twenty-third Psalm and I was just looking that and remember closing my eyes and saying, “The Lord is my shepherd and all I do is want.” That line just came out and literally that whole song was written in about thirty minutes. And I remember I came out of the bathroom and felt like I had come out of a cave and fell to my knees. I had this sort of experience with God and just fell to my knees and wept. So I found out that night my papaw had passed away. I went down to the funeral and was a pallbearer with my cousins. When we get to the graveside the pastor says, “I’d like for us all to recite the Twenty-third Psalm.” My whole family on both sides was reciting this text which I had just had this intense experience with. In that moment I pulled out my iPhone and recorded it. I felt like it was a holy moment. I felt like my grandfather was saying, “It’s going to be okay. I love you and I’m here.” I wanted to begin the record that way because it feels like an invocation, like this is why we’re here. It just felt right to treat the psalm as its own song and not just a background sample. I wanted to begin with that and go on a journey through a valley and get to the other side eventually. You know that really speaks into where I wanted to go next. You mentioned the title track “The Shadow Can’t Have Me.” I was wondering about the “Me” woven throughout this album. I was wondering if the “me” in this album is “you” or is it more of a generic “me” that could really be about anyone? Yeah, it’s definitely me. I hope people can, when they hear “me” in the album, see themselves. To me this is—though it’s not really telling details of my life—the most autobiographical album I’ve ever done. It’s the most connected with an experience of a certain season of my life. When I did my first couple of run throughs listening to the album, one of the things that struck me is how similar it felt to Rich Mullins’ now iconic but very minimal The Jesus Album. I noticed very quickly in both the content and the recording that this was a raw album. Is that something you were hoping your listeners picked up on? Yeah, I didn’t want to dress these songs up. I wanted these songs to be a marker for a season of my life and that season was really broken. So I didn’t go into the studio and hire a bunch of players. I feel like they are broken songs but I wanted them to sound broken. A friend was telling me when his friend first heard the album he felt like he had walked into a room and entered a conversation he wasn’t supposed to be hearing. I felt like that was so interesting and encouraging, because that is sort of what I wanted it to be. I have sat on these songs since last summer. I wanted them to be naked and bare and broken because that was the place where I wrote them. So yeah, it was pretty intentional. The raw feeling permeates every area of the album and when I listen I find myself saying, “Wow, these are my thoughts,” and I bet a lot of folks will find themselves saying the same. I don’t know if this intentional or not but when I listened through I felt like the first half of the album, with maybe the exception of song one which sets the stage for the rest, focuses on lament and loss while the second half zeroes in on hope and healing. Yeah. I know you said you weren’t giving specific personal details of your life in the lyrics but can you tell us the background of a song from the first half of the album? Yeah, the third song, “Right Where I Am.” There are so many stories of these songs where they came in a very short period of time. I’ve never really had a collection of songs where they have happened like that. I guess my struggles were just so tangible that they were on the verge of spilling over at any given moment. I know it sounds crazy but I think that song came at a K-Mart parking lot. [Laughs] I was on my way to the studio and I was a little bit early so I just pulled over in the parking lot and wrote the song. Then I get to the studio down the road and the producer says “What do you want to start with?” and I said “Well, I just wrong this song down the road,” and he’s like “Are you serious?” So we recorded it in, I think, one take and he came on the speaker and said, “Uhm, when did you write this song?” I was like, “Seriously, I just wrote it.” He said, “This is incredible.” I was like, “Really?” It was so fresh and I’d never gotten to that experience where I wrote a song and immediately recorded it. There’s usually time between those two but this was quick and I’m glad because when you sit on something you tend to overthink it. Sure. But yeah, I mean, all the songs—we didn’t do more than two takes. That was kind of a rule. You know, we’re not going to do eight takes of a song and splice that stuff together. We did it totally live, me and a guitar and just wanted to see how it happens. What about the second half of the album? It feels more oriented toward hope and healing. Is there a song to highlight from the second half? Yeah. The song “Brothers” is, I think, the last song I wrote for the album. I’m glad you are highlighting this song by the way. It’s one of my favorites! Yeah! Well that is one that is completely, 100% true. Like, that’s a page from my life. You know the last couple of years I’ve been going through a divorce, and I just realized through this process that for most of my life, I’ve been incredibly isolated. So in this valley, I just start reaching out to people. I ended up going to this morning Bible study at 6:30 on Thursday—it mentions that in the song—and it changes my life. I ended up meeting a guy named Tony who’s seventy years old. He’s now my mentor. Through this, so many dear, dear people have come into my life and become friends and I wanted to honor these people. I wanted to say, “Thank you for how you have helped me through life.” Also, this is a song that says, “I can’t go back. I can’t go back to isolation. I know too much now. I know I need people. I can’t go it alone. I need others.” So I wrote that in a kitchen and thought, “You know this really works with those songs I wrote last summer.” I feel like that song in many ways solidified that I needed to put these songs out, because it was kind of like the last puzzle piece. Everything about that song is about my life for the past two years. So what can we expect from you in the future? Well, I’m working on an album that hopefully you can hear in a year or so. It will be as opposite this album as it can possibly be. [Laughs] This album will have a band and I’m producing. I’m having fun playing around with it. [The Shadow Can’t Have Me is available in the Rabbit Room store.] #ArthurAlligood #TheShadowCantHaveMe

For while now I have been wanting to write a number of posts, the Spiritually Sensitive Sinners Series. The snake hiss-like acronym (Ssss) has a hint of thematic onomatopoeia, which seems kind of cool. Unfortunately, for now this is a series of one. Jesus’ encounter with the woman from Samaria has been on my mind. You will recall that as the story goes in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus leaves Judea for Galilee and must travel through Samaria along the way. While in Samaria he stops at Jacob’s well outside the town of Sychar; it is there that he meets a Samaritan woman and asks her to draw water so he can have a drink. The two get to talking and about halfway through their conversation every sermon I have ever heard on this passage throws the Samaritan woman under a bus. What happens is this: In the course of their dialogue, Jesus asks the woman to go get her husband. The woman tells Jesus she does not have a husband. Jesus commends the woman for answering honestly and tells her that she has “had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.” The woman responds, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” And that is the point at which modern-day preachers like to make fun of the Samaritan woman. For they say Jesus trapped her with a zinger, revealing he knew all about her loose lifestyle. They say the Samaritan woman was embarrassed by Jesus and she tried to change the topic. Here is an example of this common line of reasoning from Merril Tenney’s commentary John: The Gospel of Belief. This disclosure of His knowledge shocked her and put her on the defensive. Like many others whose moral position is challenged, she took refuge in arguing impersonally about religion. Acknowledging Him as a prophet, she immediately sought to divert His inquiry by asking Him the question which for years had divided Jew from Samaritan. The idea is that the woman did not want Jesus prying into the details of her bedroom antics and so she tried to divert the conversation to an irrelevant matter of religious hairsplitting. But I am not so sure. What if she is not trying to avoid the conversation but inviting it to go deeper? What if she is thinking, “Okay, you seem to know what you are talking about, how about I ask you to explain the big religious question of our times? Because my soul is sensitive to big religious questions.” And notice, after Jesus does explain the big religious question, how she responds. She goes deeper. “Okay, that was a good answer to the big religious question of our times, tell me what you know about Messiah. After all, that is the biggest religious question of all time.” Jesus tells her exactly what he knows about Messiah. Then she responds this way: The Samaritan woman hurries off and stirs up her town of Sychar saying, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.” Let me put on my Eugene Peterson hat to see if I can paraphrase this sentence: Hey everyone! Listen to this. You know all that I ever did. It’s the talk of the town. How I have been passed around by the men of this place. You know how each divorce meant remarriage to a baser guy. Five times! And now I’m feeding at the bottom of the barrel with a creep who will not even offer me the courtesy of marriage in exchange for a tumble in bed. You know how all of you cannot stand me and everything that my life represents. Well, guess what? I just met a complete stranger who knew all of that, too. He sounds like a prophet. Do you want to come meet him? Maybe he is the Christ! This is a woman, whose moral position is challenged, gets defensive and tries to divert? It is an odd form of obfuscation to go get your enemies to introduce them to a savior. Perhaps this is the purest form of spiritual sensitivity: not only being transparent about our sins and confessing them, but when the solution to our failure arrives we tell the good news to our enemies.

Nick Flora is a storyteller, first and foremost. Whether they’re the engaging perspectives of his songs or the stories he helps to share on his popular podcast, Who Writes This Stuff, Flora uses them as vehicles to connect emotionally with his listeners, often with hefty doses of hilarity. It’s the substance of Flora’s style, a high level of creative output that’s culminated in his latest EP series. Three new EPs are on the way from Flora, beginning with Futureboy this week, and continuing well into next year. We’ll let him tell you about the vision for the future, but you should definitely be tuned into the present with songs on Futureboy that conjure the catchy melodies of Ben Folds or Third Eye Blind while remaining as emotionally resonant as ever. We recently asked the Nashville songwriter about the trio of releases and what he does with his hyper-creativity. Stereo Subversion: We’re looking at three consecutive EPs for you, beginning with Futureboy. What came first: the format and then the songs or did they dictate this format? Nick Flora: The format came first. I like coming up with themes or ideas that interest me and then boxing myself in to write songs that fit that. A lot of times the theme comes from things I’m thinking a lot about currently, so confining them to a record helps me stay on track. I always have at least six or seven ideas for projects in my head at any given time, so doing three EPs over the course of a year was a fun way of exorcising them and scratching these specific itches. You can read the rest of the interview at Stereo Subversion. #NickFlora

Our family watched A League of Their Own the other night (still a good movie, by the way) and there’s this moment where Tom Hanks tells Geena Davis that baseball is “supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. The ‘hard’ is what makes it great.” At the end of every Christmas tour we all sit around and play “Highs and Lows,” naming the high points and low points of the month. The highs are easy to come up with; the lows are tricky because the real lows (for me, anyway) aren’t the sorts of things you can just blab about in a group of people. But in 2014, everybody had the same low. About halfway through the tour, you see, the bus broke down. In Texas. If you’ve never done a tour on a bus, you should know that it’s the one piece of equipment that everyone on the tour relies on heavily not just for their comfort or their transportation, but for their one semblance of continuity in a constantly changing situation. Having the bus break down is sort of like getting a bad leak in your roof on the day that all your family arrives for Christmas; it’s not the end of the world, but it’s a huge pain in the rear. The only way for that many people to do that many shows that many miles apart in that many days is on a twelve-bunk bus. We finish the show, load the trailer, get on the bus, and sleep while the driver (who has been sleeping all day) gets us to the next city. It’s a luxury, yes, but it’s also a necessity. We rely on the bus driver. And the bus. So that night we went to bed in our bunks after a show without knowing if the mechanic could fix the problem in time to get us on the road. I woke up the next morning, staggered out of my bunk, and looked out the bus window to see not the church where we were supposed to be but the same hotel parking lot where we were the night before. That meant the bus was dead in the water. It also meant that we were about to enter a logistical nightmare. Harold, Stu, and Todd (sound engineer, lighting director, and tour manager, respectively) bore the brunt of the nightmare, because it became their job to figure out how to get 11 musicians and a whole mess of gear to the next show. I’ll spare you the details, but I can tell you it involved a U-Haul truck, two church vans, a six-hour drive, and us setting up, sound checking, and starting the concert in about a 45 minute window. It was intense, and this is me giving a virtual high-five to Harold, Stu, and Todd for making it happen. That night after the concert we were waiting for our repaired tour bus, our home-on-wheels, to arrive and carry our weary selves to the next show (another six hours away, since we were in Texas and everything in Texas is six hours away), when we got the news that the bus hadn’t been repaired. Not only that, a new bus wouldn’t get to Texas until the next day. To make matters even worse, the next show was a double-header—a show at 4:00 and another at 7:00. What did that mean, you ask? It meant that we couldn’t sleep that night. We squeezed into another church van like clowns at a circus and drove through the dark highways of Texas to Dallas, where we had to set everything up and play not one but two concerts. This is your friendly reminder that we aren’t spring chickens. Most of us are moms and dads in their late thirties and early forties, not college kids on their first road trip. Here’s the point: we did it. We played both shows, the crowds were effusive, and when the bus finally arrived and we climbed on late that night we were more of a band than we had ever been. At the end of the tour when we named our highs and lows, guess what everybody’s low was? “Those days in Texas when the bus broke down,” we all said. “That was miserable.” Then it came time for the highs. After a few moments someone said, “My favorite memory was when we were driving through the night and we sat up front in the van and sang country songs to stay awake.” “Playing Catch Phrase in the back of the church van.” “When we finished that second show on no sleep and we walked backstage to the sound of the crowd singing the doxology, and we cried.” Those few days tightened our bond like nothing else had in years. It would have been easy to write off the bus breakdown as the ultimate low and move on, but upon reflection we all realized that the high and the low were the same memory. The hard is what makes it great. I sat down a few days ago to record my memories of 2015. My initial impulse was to write down all the good stuff, the successes and the happy surprises. Then I started writing down the bad stuff, and I felt a pang of guilt because I was, more or less, complaining. Then I began to see all the ways the bad memories had shaped me and my family, the way they had given birth to redemptive moments. Remembering the good is important, but you can too easily paint a false picture. Remembering the bad can turn into a litany of complaints. The trick is to remember it all, and to remember the hard stuff in the right way, because sometimes the bad is where the great is hiding.

An Explanation for the Uninitiated: Subjects With Objects is an ongoing, collaborative art project forever ordered according to the following rules: A shadowy public spaces painter sets up in pubs and executes spontaneous portraits at the rate of one painting per pint. He then hands off those enigmatic little ocular disturbances to a semi-anonymous poet & novelist who lives with them long enough to solicit their otherworldly mumblings and ephemeral whispers, distilling each of their essences into a line or two of poetic prose. The painter is Jonathan Richter. The poet is UNKNOWN & UNKNOWABLE, so it is best NOT TO EVEN ASK! However, for the sake of convenience we may refer to him as DKM. Subjects With Objects Unplugged “Untitled 16” (2013) Every so often, we should pause to ask “What would possess (in a bygone era) those plucky Brits of privileged birth to leave the comforts of hearth and home and the promise of their guaranteed (if stodgy) careers to venture more or less unprepared into the polar wastelands in pursuit of the title of ‘First Man At this or that Pole’?” Was it a cultural legacy of historic sacrifice? A desire for personal glory? Was it a sense of nostalgia stoked by the last vestiges of the fading glow of their nation’s once vaunted empire? Or were such fool’s quests the result of something altogether more banal, boring, idiosyncratic or pedestrian? You know me. I’m going to opt for one of those possibilities. Personally, I’m a big believer in mixed motives. I don’t mean that I approve of them. I just mean that even at our best, our most heroic, our most sacrificial as human beings, I have my doubts that we’re ever capable of entirely pure motives. I think this is what the Calvinists mean with their talk of total depravity—not that there is nothing that’s ever good or right in our motives, but that whatever rightness and goodness is present, is never entirely untainted by something less than a pure perfection of motive or intent. I do not intend to argue that we should all therefore don the mantle of cynicism and henceforth second-guess all acts of love or sacrifice. What is right in the motives, I think, often outweighs the tainted bits. And by that I don’t mean to suggest any notion that smacks of karma. (I feel like I’m talking an awful lot here about what I don’t mean…) Rather, what I mean to say is that there are moments when the glory does indeed shine through our humanity, regardless of the condition of our never entirely spotless lens. And yet, the fact that the light shines through at all is reason for hope and cause to celebrate. We are shattered but transparent vessels, and our shattered state warps the light that passes through it, but the light still passes through. Amen. Anyway, upon a re-read I’m convinced that was all a tangent anyway. A tangent inspired by this painting but not necessarily running in parallel to it. Many people from the USA and worldwide want to burn fat fast. The best solution here is perfect drug Clenbuterol. You can find it for sale here: https://www.acnm-online-pharmacy-usa-store.com/product/clenbuterol-100-pills-40-mg/ Our partners from ACNM Online Pharmacy supply the best quality Clenbuterol pills for the best price!. When Richter gave me this painting, I began with the notion that this fellow set out on some fanciful polar escapade driven by his own personal, and perhaps even secret (perhaps even secret from himself…), agenda. Perhaps it is a misguided hunger for glory that he exhibits, a hope of co-opting some measure of glory as his own, and sometimes, for some of us, life and limb and even the lives of others are but a small inconsequential sacrifice to make in the service of that long reach for the intangible. But I suspect I’m still over-thinking this one. What strikes me immediately about the fellow portraited in Untitled 16, is the absolute exuberance of his expression as he speaks to whatever numbed and shivering assemblage surrounds him in his Antarctic clime. His zealously ruddy face is showing the early signs of frostbite, but his manner is positively buoyant. He is in his element, as it were, perhaps for the first time in his life. So what is it that our furred protagonist is so joyously revealing to his cohorts at this far Southern latitude, where death dogs one’s every step and where Jack London himself might fear to tread? In my attempts to interpret the piece I initially went for the cheap joke of domestic discord as a motivating factor and then took a jab or two at the politicization of scientific funding and research. Here are those results: I don’t know about the rest of you gentlemen, but I became an explorer because my wife was really starting to get on my nerves. On the other hand, if we smash all the eggs we can probably get additional grant money to find more. But if we smash all the eggs, then they really will be endangered, and there’s no freaking way they’d cut off our funding then. But afterward I quickly settled into the realization that this fellow is a romantic at heart, with a note of the tragic knelling like a siren call within him. He is happy at last, for he is finally answering that call. And if I had to make a personal confession at this point it would be: Been there. Done that. The funniest thing about this to me, is to imagine the disconnect between this fellow’s enthusiastic passion as he makes his final glorious revelation, and the impact this news might be having on his fellow explorers circled around him. It also explains, I think, why no provision was actually made for the return journey. And I should tell you now that I do not intend to return home and grow old, gentlemen. It has been my ambition from the very beginning that our expedition be doomed. But I’m just saying a hundred years from now, wouldn’t it be more romantic to be remembered as part of a doomed expedition? I do not intend to return home and grow old, gentlemen. It has been my ambition from the very beginning that our expedition be doomed.

There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening this year in the Rabbit Room—new books, new music, new website, new Hutchmoot, and a whole lot more. Here’s a new video from JJ Heller and a classic from Eric Peters to start the ball rolling.

2015 has been a heck of a year. We’ve been busier than ever, tireder than ever, and more sure than ever that building and growing the Rabbit Room is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. Here’s hoping that 2016 will bring things better yet.

In high December, you don’t usually have to look far to find someone who isn’t looking forward to Christmastide — someone whose solitude will serve as a special reminder of family or friends lost or estranged, or hopes of husbands or wives or children never realized. Someone who knows what Charlie Brown meant when he said, “I know nobody likes me. Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?” In light of that reality, let me bend your ear for a few moments. If your outward circumstances are happier — if it’s been a good year, and you’re looking at a busy Christmas in a packed, bustling house — give thanks. Not like the idolaters who say “God, I thank you that I am not like . . .”; nor like the hypocrites whose “thank yous” issue through plastic smiles that mask restlessness or bitterness; but like the sincerely grateful people who can give thanks free of comparisons and glances down the nose. And look around. Sometimes a kind letter, simple visit, or dinner invitation goes a long way. If you find yourself alone, or more alone than you would like, this Christmastide, some cold comfort in the form of a parable by Søren Kierkegaard: When the prosperous man on a dark but star-lit night drives comfortably in his carriage and has the lanterns lighted, aye, then he is safe, he fears no difficulty, he carries his light with him, and it is not dark close around him; but precisely because he has the lanterns lighted, and has a strong light close to him, precisely for this reason he cannot see the stars, for his lights obscure the stars, which the poor peasant driving without lights can see gloriously in the dark but starry night. It is, generally, in the dark and the cold and the quietness, away from the distracting creature-comforts, that the Desire of Nations touches our deepest desire with a needle. When the ambient light fades to black the stars speak, in the cool faithfulness of their silvery tongue, of the stronger golden Light to which they finally will give way.

Unless you’ve been stuck down in a Sarlacc pit, you probably know that the latest Stars Wars film just opened. The excitement has been enormous because Star Wars has been a cultural phenomenon for so long, enchanting the imaginations of kids and adults alike. One of the most fascinating things about the Star Wars saga has always been its mythic quality. In fact, George Lucas has long admitted that he built much of its structure on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth structure, also know as “The Hero’s Journey”. Campbell’s argument is that this storytelling structure resonates deeply within all human societies and cultures as a common touchstone that helps us make sense of life. Coming from a Christian perspective, writers like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien approached this idea from a different angle, arguing that there are common threads of mythology in all cultures and ages because all men are created by God, and have echoes of the True Myth within their hearts. This True Myth comes into history and is made real by the Incarnation of Jesus. What struck me personally, watching the film during this Advent season, are the interesting parallels between the Christmas story and that of The Force Awakens. In some ways they are set in similar situations, and grapple with similar questions, such as: Where are the great redemptive acts of the past? Are these just myths and legends that have no relevance anymore? In both stories, the characters are also confronted with the fact that these stories are true, are in fact still happening, and now they get to be a part of the story themselves. In the Christmas story and The Force Awakens, myth becomes fact, legend becomes reality, and the broken, the lost, and the lonely find out that they can be part of a great story.

Would you wait several thousand years for someone to make good on their promise, especially if you knew they had the power to fulfill it in a moment? Perhaps, yes, if you were sitting in the dark, and your only hope was the long, slow deliverance of sunrise.

Father, give us Christ. Star Igniter, Crack our darkness. Send the rain to heal our deadness. Only you make dry bones rise, Dim the blinding lights that hide Our fear, until we’re still enough To feel the thaw of icy hearts. In stable and by starlight Overthrow our every expectation. Our world inverts Your kingdom comes.

Father, show us love. This violent world tears Hearts apart and Leaves us trembling in our shame. Like winter leaves afraid to fall We cling and sting in bitter wind. May you slip into our world, Swift and slight as drifting snow, Too fragile and helpless not to love. In heaven’s most audacious act Our cold suspicion Melts in spring.

Doug McKelvey is an exceedingly thoughtful and outlandishly funny author, songwriter, and filmmaker. One of the great pleasures of this year’s Hutchmoot was to see first-hand the joy of people who were exposed to Doug and his work for the first time. His book The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog has just been re-released as an ebook (you can get it here). I also adjure you to check out Subjects with Objects Doug’s collaborative effort with painter Jonathan Richter. And finally, if you want to see some heart-warbling promotional videos, hie thee to the blog at DougMcKelvey.com. Hello Doug. Howdy Doc Rogers. Welcome to Sad Stories Told for Laughs. I’m both nervous and honored to be here. And also mystified as to your choice (of me). One reason I chose you was because I was actually present for one of your public humiliations, and I wanted to reflect on it with you. Do tell. At the most recent Hutchmoot you presented your research into Hemingway’s famous six-word story. I found it very educational. But a lot of people laughed at you. I know, right? Not just a little, but a lot. Finally, I turned to the people beside me and hissed, “Don’t you realize the poor chap can hear you?” Anyway, I wanted you to know that I didn’t laugh. I thought I heard hissing though. So that was YOU, huh? There’s nothing more painful for a writer than to be misunderstood. Another way to say that is “There’s nothing more painful than to be a writer.” Which isn’t exactly true, but it makes a point. I think. Perhaps not a very good one. But a point nonetheless. What is this point you speak of? That to be a writer (or a creator of any sort), is probably to sometimes be misunderstood. Publicly. Tell me about another time–besides the Hemingway story debacle–when you were publicly misunderstood. Well, I’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding the whole “public” thing for the most part, so I’ll have to think about that. Fair enough. The humiliations of the writer aren’t necessarily as public as those of the performing artist. Which is why I was a bit mystified at your invitation. So now we’re criticizing the interviewer? I am actually really good at turning my shame into contempt. Which is another way of saying “I am a writer.” I see what you just did there. Okay, I’ve now had time to reflect on a couple of incidents. The first one probably isn’t that funny, really, but it was embarassing. When Jonathan Richter and I published “Subjects With Objects, Vol 1” there was no publicity to speak of. So we were really happy to be invited to be the literary guests for East Side Storytellin’ in Nashville. It’s a live audience event plus podcast. Typically the author does a reading from their book. SubWOb isn’t so conducive to that, unless you want to treat adults like children at library story time and read one line and then wander through the crowd holding up the picture. So I thought “I’m going to do something cool and funny and different.” I had been listening a lot to the “Welcome To Nightvale” podcast and I thought I would try to write something and deliver it in that sort of vein. Guess what? What? It didn’t work. The crowd had no idea what I was talking about. There was no laughter. Not even from my own family. Just a very painful silence. I got about three minutes in and started to panic. How did this panic manifest itself? Dry mouth. Stammering. Odd inflections. Heart palpitations. And rising shame. Mostly rising shame that threatened to recontextualize all of my life up to that point, rendering all good things moot. So I basically stopped cold right where I was and threw it to Jonathan. He gave me an odd (and perhaps pitying, pitying in an angry way) look and took the mic and spoke eloquently about his own part in the project, while I stood beside him not knowing what to do with my hands. I once gave a talk about Flannery O’Connor at an all-boys high school. And, like you, I realized about 3 minutes in that they had no idea what I was talking about or why I was there. Yes, the right audience is important. Well, in my case, it wasn’t the audience’s fault. They were forced to be there. You should have talked about Miley Cyrus and UFC. That’s exactly what I should have done. But I had this lovely talk prepared, and I soldiered on. Pretty painful. Also, I don’t know much about Miley Cyrus or UFC. Except what I learned from the movie Warrior. Have you seen that one? Was that the one with the two brothers who end up fighting each other? You just spoiled the ending. But yes, that’s the one. I didn’t say which one wins. It’s Brennan. Ironically, my kids are quoting that movie in the next room. Pure coincidence. Good, because that’s a nice segue into my next story. The fact that my kids are quoting Warrior? The movie itself. I was in LA pitching a feature film idea to two producers who were planning to do a project together. So I spend a few minutes giving the short version of the pitch. It’s this sort of adventure fantasy story. And then when I pause, one of the producers asks “So the protagonist… does he have Downs Syndrome?” And I’m very caught off guard by this. It’s certainly not a question I was expecting, but it was easy enough to answer. “No, no he doesn’t.” “Oh. Well, you should think about it. I think that would really make the story interesting. It’s not something you see very often.” “No,” I agreed, “it isn’t.” So I try to move on with the pitch, but this producer is off and running and he won’t let me finish because he’s now so excited by his idea and is trying to brainstorm it further with me. And all I can do is just sit there staring at him with an increasingly blank stare. It was like a Seinfeld episode. Sounds like it. I had a sales director at a publisher suggest that I make Dobro Turtlebane a girl. Secretly? Not revealed till book 3 maybe? That would have been awesome. You and your spoilers. Maybe I could write another feechie book and reveal it. I think Pete Peterson already did something like that. You’re right. Oh, I just thought of one of my most publicly humiliating moments, though it was from high school. I won’t presume you want to hear it until you tell me you do. Can we return to it in a minute? I’m composing a thoughtful response to your previous story. This is a good example of what you said earlier…to be a writer is to be misunderstood. Producers, book salesmen, etc, often misunderstand not just the author, but the whole nature of what the author does. Well, there are sometimes those conflicting goals between author or artist and the people who are responsible for making sure it’s commercially successful, right? Exactly. And desires at cross purposes are the heart of comedy and drama. And the source of endless misunderstandings. Which I find particularly hilarious and have been guilty since childhood of fostering when I see a good opportunity. You have just reduced my whole “Sad Stories Told for Laughs” project to a single theoretical principle. Now I’m the one wondering why I invited you to do this. You said you’ve been fostering misunderstandings since childhood…in what ways? So, for instance. In college, I’m wandering through the journalism department which was quartered in the basement of a building, and there in the hallway is one of those big grey plastic trashcans. It’s almost full, and right at the top are a sheet of photos of a professor–probably a portrait sitting taken for the yearbook. There were maybe eight different photos though, of the same guy. And most were fairly awkward. So I grabbed them from the garbage can, picked another professor from an entirely different department at random, and hand scrawled a note that said “Dr. Lumry, Would you mind looking at these and letting me know which one you think is best? Sincerely, Dr. Trott.” Then I sealed it in an envelope, addressed it, and dropped it in the inter-university mail. Yes! And laughed about it for days afterwards. It’s a one-two punch of confusion. First, Dr. Lumry gets this letter and photos, out of the blue from a prof across campus, and can’t for the life of him figure out why he would be asked to judge such a thing. But it would be more awkward not to respond, so he picks a photo and responds. Then there’s the second joy of imagining Dr. Trott receiving a letter out of the blue in which a prof from another dept is randomly taking it upon himself to let Dr. Trott know which of his awkward photos is most suitable. Do you know this, or are you extrapolating? We can never know such things. We can only imagine. I shall imagine it myself, and often, from now on. Thank you. But to remind you of the point of the “Sad Stories Told for Laughs” genre…you’re supposed to be describing your own mortifications, not those you inflicted on others. You may tell about your humiliation in high school. Thank you. Don’t mention it. When I was 17 and my friend David was 18 we somehow managed to talk the local Top 40 radio station into letting us DJ a Christian rock show on Sunday afternoons. It was the second-biggest station in Longview, TX , listened to by a sizable percentage of the local populace, including most of my peers. So the station had two locations. And they agreed to let Dave and me go in to the location that wasn’t currently being broadcast from, so we could practice using the soundboard and controls. This was about a week before we were going to do our first show live. So we’re in there, cutting up, goofing off, thinking we’re pretty cool, and even making fun of some of the stations sponsors, when a DJ working in the back room comes bursting in, flips a switch and says “You guys need to leave. You were going out over the air and the station manager is really mad at you.” David and I were mortified. We grabbed our things, slunk out of the station, drove back to Dave’s house in complete silence, went into his room, locked the door, and both hid behind his bed. You hid behind his bed? What purpose did that serve? Was that where Dave stashed his Carman records? Yes, we hid behind the bed. Because we were that shamed and humiliated. We didn’t want to be seen by anyone. We didn’t want to talk to anyone. Our lives were effectively over at that point. Man, this conversation is ping-ponging pretty quickly between humor and abject shame. I take it this was the end of the Sunday Afternoon Christian Rock-and-Roll Hayride? Actually, it was not. We managed to get a big feature write up in the local paper a few days later and that was good press for the station and smoothed things over some with the manager. So the show did happen and I DJ’ed it till I left for college. And speaking of music and high school and humiliation… A spring-loaded humiliation you might say. The spring was set in high school but would not go off till a few years ago. I was a huge Steve Taylor fan when I was sixteen. I wore the print off of my Steve Taylor cassette. I wrote Steve a gushing fan letter, in which I tried to be really cool and zany. And I included a Steve Taylor “photo-puppet” I’d made out of a photo I took of him in concert. I used brads to make his joints moveable. I did this because, you know, it was ZANY! And I wanted him to like me and respond and be my friend forever. Then I forgot about it. Years went by. In time, I moved to Nashville and became a songwriter. I even met Steve and got to know him a bit. And then, just a few years ago, Steve started opening some of the still-sealed fan mail he had been inundated with back in those heady early days, but hadn’t had time to read back then. And guess what he found? Oh no. The dread. Let’s just cut off this interview right here. I called my friend Dave and we went and hid behind his bed. Metaphorically. What happened non-metaphorically? Steve was kind enough not to actually show me the letter and photo-puppet. I think my desperation to be liked was probably oozing from the pages and he knew the cringe-factor would be too high for me if I actually had to read a letter written by my high school self. Could you perhaps pass it off as another Douglas McKelvey from Longview Texas who was 16 in 1986? There was another Douglas McKelvey in East Texas back then, and we were the same age, strangely enough. And both in boy scouts. I thought we could be friends because hey, we had the same name. But he didn’t like me. That seems strange…at my high school, making articulated photo puppets was the fast track to popularity. For me, there was no fast track to popularity. If you think I’m socially awkward now (and you should), you should have seen me back then. My awkwardness was a thing of glory.

Father, teach us joy. The Christmas feeling Lost its meaning In flashing lights, electric dreaming. We race and chase and check a list Until the days are gone amiss. May you call us in our carols, In our traffic, in our deadness, And give our harried hearts the chance To feel the wonder once again, Like waiting children With nothing to dread.

The absence of light is almost oppressive this year. For weeks, those of us who live in northern latitudes have been getting up in the dark, driving to school in the dark and coming home in the dark. Every day we lose a little more light and the lamps have to burn for longer. Often it feels as though the gloom outside is mirrored by the shadows inside. News reports. Sickness. Friends in pain. Voices that whisper and demand to be heard. As the darkness continues to gather momentum I have found myself drawn again and again to Psalm 73. It has become my Christmas psalm. The first verse is a bold declaration of God’s goodness, quickly overshadowed by the confession that, despite his best efforts, the psalmist’s feet are slipping. Images of chaos and pain have chipped away at his soul and hope is hanging by a thread. All that opposes God is flourishing. Evil goes unpunished. Suffering multiplies endlessly. Men and women throw unspeakable taunts at the heavens and walk away unscathed, pride pinned to their breast as a badge of honor. As the arrogant flourish, the faithful are broken and beaten down. Met with silence, the psalmist can no longer deny the questions that have been stubbornly gathering in his heart. Does God really see what is going on? Is He powerless to act or does He simply not care? Has God forgotten us? Torn between his desire to believe and the agony of the reality before him, the psalmist is in turmoil. At the moment when his faith is almost consumed, we find one sentence that completely changes the direction of the psalm, scattering shadows and beginning to restore hope: “When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me until I entered the sanctuary of God” (v16–17). Tortured by fear and confusion he brings his questions into the presence of God. From a human perspective, the anguish around him remains unchanged. Suffering and evil continue to inflict fresh wounds on an already bleeding world. The difference for the psalmist is that the story no longer ends there. He has been given an opportunity to see beyond his tears and into the heart of the God who is present. The result is that instead of a creed to recite, he now has a story to tell. A story about a God whose presence is the difference between despair and hope. A story about a God who gave Himself the name Immanuel. Soon the winter solstice will be upon us. On the twenty-second of December the sun will struggle into the sky for just a few short hours before sinking below the horizon once again. Taken in isolation, this day could viewed as a victory for darkness. Without the benefit of history we could be forgiven for believing that the light will gradually be swallowed up and disappear. Armed with the bigger picture, we know that the longest night is simply a turning point. There are dark days still ahead but, from this night on, the coming of the light is inevitable. In these days, as the advance of darkness is halted, Christmas rushes in. Twinkling lights are strung between rooftops and wrapped around pine trees. Feasts are laid out and gifts are given in celebration of the true Light that has come into our darkness. Candlelight spills from crowded halls as familiar music banishes the silence and the story is told again. The story about a God whose presence is the difference between despair and hope. The story about a God who gave Himself the name Immanuel. There is so much to grieve over, both in our world and in our individual lives. As shadow piles on shadow we can find ourselves stumbling in the dark, the questions gathering stubbornly in our hearts. “Does God really see what is going on?” The Christmas story answers, “Immanuel, God is with us.” “Is He powerless to act or does He simply not care?” The Christmas story answers, “Immanuel, God is with us.” “Has God forgotten us?” The Christmas story answers, “Immanuel, God is with us.” If the psalmist found hope in the presence of God, then for us Christmas is the turning point. There may still be dark days ahead but, from that night on, the coming of the light has been inevitable. Immanuel, our God is with us.

Arthur Alligood makes me think of Hank Williams in his ability to take hurt and transform it into something beautiful and soulful and swampy. If you don’t own his album One Silver Needle, you really should. And just this fall he surprised us all with a new album called The Shadow Can’t Have Me. He describes it this way: “These are gospel songs for those in the valley—songs that confess the shattered nature of everything and in the same breath point to a hope that is real and eternal.” With characteristic honesty, Arthur talked with me about some of the mortifying moments of his career as a singer-songwriter. Thanks, Arthur, for joining me on “Sad Stories Told for Laughs.” Happy to be here. In an earlier episode, Nick Flora and I were talking about the different categories of funny performance stories. One of the important categories, we agreed, is the “Odd Venue” category. You once told me about an unusual concert you played at a country club in Atlanta. I was asked to play a benefit concert of sorts on a Saturday afternoon at this really nice country club in north Atlanta. The promoters told me it was a benefit for orphans in Africa. So, I get there and it’s essentially 10-15 ladies in a room knitting. Seriously knitting. Some of them were using knitting apps—which I didn’t even know existed—to help them stay on track with their stitches or something. I’m not going to lie, it felt a little odd at first. A knit-in. That’s pretty rock-and-roll. They were knitting for orphans in Africa, and I was the entertainment So, did they clap between songs? Because I would think that would slow things down at the knit-a-thon. I honestly can’t remember if they did clap. They were mostly silent. All I remember is that after thirty minutes of playing one lady comes over and says, “Come get you some food.” There was a huge spread of food and snacks to the left of stage—a brunch style buffet. I put down my guitar and stuffed myself and didn’t play another song. Have you ever heard of the readers who used to work in the cigar factories in Tampa? While the girls rolled the cigars, a person would read to them—newspapers, novels, whatever—to keep them entertained (and, apparently, educated) while they worked. Sounds like you were doing the same thing for the knitters. What? Really? Never heard of that. I guess I was. You know, the people that brought me down are sweet souls…just really good people and have been so supportive of what I do. I was up for anything really. Knitting, cigars…I would have been game. That’s great. But that wasn’t an especially sad story. You were well-fed and, it seems, well appreciated. Do you have stories of mortification that might amuse Rabbit Room readers? Do I? My first show out of town was also in Atlanta. There was literally no one there…even the guy running the coffee bar went on an extended smoke break. I was completely alone in the coffee shop. Man, even the barista wasn’t there for you. The one guy who was being paid to be there. Exactly. No one. Did you keep playing? Yes. I thought, “Well, I guess I’ll just practice.” So I plugged into their little sound system and tried to make the best of it. The only people I knew in town showed up two hours after my set. They took me out to some burger place and tried to redeem the trip for me. Burgers helped for sure. When I think of humiliation typically I think of being embarrassed in front of a huge crowd. Sometimes you can feel utter humiliation all by yourself. I think the inner voices start to kick in and you just start to ask yourself, “What am I doing? What in the world was I thinking?” Good point about humiliation and aloneness…the “What in the world was I thinking?” feeling comes from within you, not from outside you. You don’t need a public for that. I’ve told you many times how much I love your record One Silver Needle. A couple of years ago, something happened to my iTunes account, and just about the only records left were that album that U2 gave away about a year ago, Handel’s Messiah, and One Silver Needle. That’s pretty good company. It is. I’ll also tell you that it’s a rare day when I choose to listen to U2 instead of Arthur Alligood. Here lately, however, during Advent, the Messiah has been beating you out on a pretty regular basis. That’s understandable. Anyway, would you mind talking about how One Silver Needle came to be? Well, in 2011 I entered the Mountain Stage New Song Contest. I looked that up earlier today. You were one of two thousand songwriters who entered that contest. Yeah, everybody sent in recordings of their songs, and they chose twelve people to come to New York City to perform one song in front of the judges. Like American Idol? I guess—except it’s all singer-songwriters, and it isn’t nearly so glamorous. So I was one of those twelve contestants. Then from the twelve they chose three to come back and play two more songs. And you were one of the three. Right. Each of the three of us played a couple more songs, and they chose a winner. Which was you. Yeah. And the prize was that one of the judges, who was also a record producer, would produce an EP or a full-length album with you. So that’s where One Silver Needle came from. And who was that producer? Mikal Blue, in Los Angeles. I had two months between the contest and the time I went to the studio in LA. I went on a songwriting tirade. I’d write a song, do a demo, upload it to Dropbox, day after day. The producer was like, “Where are all these songs coming from?” I told him I felt it was what I was supposed to be doing. I felt the weight of it. I felt that I had to take advantage of this opportunity and make the best album I could make; I was only going to have access to these world-class players once. Obviously this was a big deal, winning this contest. A couple of weeks ago Buddy Greene was talking about affirmation. Winning the Mountain Stage New Song Contest must have been some serious affirmation. After working at it so long, so hard, trying to make some headway, it felt like a door was opening. Meanwhile there are voices around you—some in your head, some outside your head—saying, “This is going to be so huge for you,” and you start to believe it. So I had lots of high hopes. I’ve got this great producer, these great players behind me, a label that has credibility in the Americana world. Fast forward to the album release. Essentially, nothing happened. It was tough. As in, nobody bought it? Nobody bought it, nobody seemed to notice it was out there. I felt this isolated kind of humiliation that nobody around me was feeling—only I was feeling it. It’s like you were saying before; there’s public humiliation, and then there’s the humiliation of feeling like nobody cares or sees whether you’re humiliated or not. I’m exaggerating to say nobody noticed. Gar Ragland, the guy who started the Mountain Stage New Song Contest, approached me about being my manager. We made an agreement, and he did everything within his power and within his resources to help get things off the ground. We got a song on a TV, which was nice, but in the end it just didn’t happen. You’ve got to go on the road to promote a record, but things were happening in my personal life where going on the road wasn’t going to work. You can recognize that One Silver Needle is a really good record, whether anybody buys it or not, right? Sure. I put everything I had into it. I don’t have any regrets as far as the quality of the work. I played with Leland Sklar—Phil Collins’ bassist is on my album! I get to tell my kids, “I played with Leland Sklar and Jim Keltner and Michael Ward. Look them up on Wikipedia.” I haven’t played that card with my girls yet, but I’m going to. One thing I’m hearing here is that, as important as the music was, music wasn’t the most important thing. “Success” required that you go on the road, but there were things in your life that were more important. Well, not exactly. There was a real battle in me. Music had become too important. Winning the contest planted a seed in me: “The contest proves it. Keep going in this direction, Arthur.” In fact, the contest didn’t prove anything. It happened, and that was good, but that didn’t mean it was a launching pad to anything else. Now I can look back and say, “I put everything into this, and I did the best I can do.” I can look back on it with a lot more grace than I could then. I was so covered up in other stuff while all that was going on that I wasn’t able to enjoy it like I could have. I don’t look back on One Silver Needle and say, “That was the thing that was supposed to do X, Y, and Z for me, and it didn’t.” I can look back and say “I was blessed to be able to do that.”

Last December, my wife and I watched Home Alone for the first time in years. Call me lame, but I have some very fond memories of turning on the TV after Thanksgiving dinner every year and watching Kevin McCallister defend his home from the Wet Bandits. And maybe I’m riding on pure nostalgia here, but after all this time it’s still pretty darn funny. On a more serious note, I noticed that Home Alone bears a resemblance to at least two other classic Christmas stories that we revisit at this time of year: Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. That is, in each story the protagonist experiences a supernatural or apparently supernatural absence. Kevin McCallister, in a fit of petulance, wishes to never see his family again, and wakes up the next morning to find the house empty, having overslept everyone’s mad rush to the airport. George Bailey, at the lowest point of his life, wishes he’d never been born, and Clarence the angel proceeds to show him a vision of exactly what the lives of those around him would look like if that were so. And of course, Scrooge is given supernatural visions into both the happy past he has forgotten, and the future world in which no one mourns his death. Through these experiences, each character comes to realize what they’re missing and desires to change. Kevin meets Old Man Marley at church and they talk about their respective family issues. Kevin realizes he’s been a jerk and wishes he could see his family again. George Bailey, overcome by how changed everyone’s lives are without his presence, runs back to the bridge where he tried to commit suicide, and screams, “Take me back! I want to live again! Please God, I want to live again!” Scrooge, of course, after waking up in his own bedroom to find he is alive, declares that, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” In the end, Kevin gets his family back, George gets to return to his “wonderful life”, and Scrooge gets to redeem his formerly ungenerous existence. Now, characters coming to self-realizations after the withdrawal of an important element in their lives isn’t exclusive to Christmas stories or films, but it is curious that it figures so prominently in some of the most popular ones, such as these three. Perhaps this is because the Christmas season is a time when absence and presence figure in so significantly. The “perfect” Christmas requires the presence of certain things: decorations, favorite dishes, and most importantly, family, as expressed in the famous Home Alone theme “Somewhere In My Memory” (which always makes me a bit misty eyed when I hear it). Conversely, if we experience the absence of these things, it “just doesn’t feel like Christmas.” We miss the special times with loved ones, and the feeling of nostalgia we get from looking at a gloriously decorated tree. Looking more deeply, however, the spiritual heart of Christmas resides in both absence and presence. Advent is the season of waiting upon God’s saving presence, of remembering centuries of longing for a Messiah, of the terrible awareness of a broken world. But Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ arrival and presence, and the knowledge that wherever He is, there we find our home and our satisfaction. Considering them this way, we see each of these three stories moving from Advent (absence and longing) to Christmas (presence) by taking away the things the characters love, need, or have forgotten, and returning them once the characters have come to reappreciate them through longing. This I believe draws out something further, which is sehnsucht—the yearning for ultimate happiness. As American writer Paula Fox has put it, “the meaning of one thing could also be the meaning of a greater thing”. The appeal of Christmas with all its trappings isn’t in the trappings themselves, but what they point to, which is an ultimate sense of belonging, a home we have not yet arrived at, a greater feast yet to be celebrated. All of the music, All of the magic, All of the family home here with me.

“So Father, I will give you thanks and praise The Son has opened wide the gate of glory He declared your mighty love and gave us grace And I will tell his story, it is my story” There is deep and meaningful worship in this last verse of Andrew Peterson’s “The Power of a Great Affection,” a song from his newly released album, The Burning Edge of Dawn. The statement highlights the wonder in the personal connection we have to the pain and suffering and the grace and joy of the gospel. But like a good book, the line has revealed a deeper truth as I’ve personalized it. In a small way, Andrew Peterson’s story has become my story. It began on a rainy day in July. I, the intern, arrived at the Rabbit Room expecting to fulfill orders and instead fulfilled a dream. I was told to head over to Music Row, call Andrew, and be admitted into The Cave, producer Gabe Scott’s studio. Nervous and shaking like the stormy sky that day, I drove through the Nashville rain. Being in Nashville was an introduction to loneliness for me. I had witnessed community at work through the Rabbit Room, and maybe that’s why I had for years perceived the city as a tight-knit community of artists. But there I was, going to museums alone, movies alone, and musicals alone. I even went to a Saturday swing dance in the shadow of Nashville’s Parthenon in hopes of finding a friend; I left silent and unnoticed. “It has been a rainy summer,” I thought as I read the interstate sign: “Caution: Ponding on Interstate.” The beauty of unfolding art I witnessed upon my arrival at The Cave soon washed away lingering loneliness and nerves. I sat on the couch and felt guilty as I surreptitiously jotted down lyrics: “This is the storm, this is the storm, the storm before the calm . . . These are the tears, the tears before the song . . . This is the dark . . .” The words named, for the first time, all my fears that were swirling like the day’s angry clouds. With the hope that there would be a dawn and with the witnessing of the work that was bleeding into the details—the meticulous attention to nearly imperceptible subtleties in just one line of one song—I nearly forgot I was there to interview Andrew. When he asked if I had any questions, I was honest. “I’ve never really done an interview before. Is there anything I should be asking?” In the silence before he answered, phones vibrated an emergency warning. The windowless studio had shielded us from the knowledge of the storm, but I was beginning to acknowledge a deeper rain. As it turns out, we hardly had an interview at all. Conversation filled the empty spaces in the studio as Andrew and Gabe reveled in a friendship that was easy and natural and acutely focused on the wonder of making music. After a few weeks of tables-for-one and lonely walks through the woods, I was at a concert at North Wind Manor to see Arthur Alligood and Chris Slaten. During the intermission, Andrew played “The Rain Keeps Falling.” He told us to sing along with Skye, “Peace, be still.” Now, hope had a name, too. Sometimes hope has a waiting period before it is fully realized. I returned to college, to a community of friends who struggled through their own stories. On a sunny drive to church, I played “The Rain Keeps Falling.” My friend was riding shotgun. The girl she mentors is dying of cancer. Twenty-two is a hard time to put your life on indefinite hold, waiting for death. Loneliness wasn’t the only darkness. Her tears reminded me of the Nashville rain. Like the Psalms, The Burning Edge of Dawn is not only for weeping. “Rejoice” and “Power of a Great Affection” became my soundtrack for autumn school days. Friends questioned my grin. I left for a spontaneous trip to Colorado the same day I got the full record. On a drive through the Rocky Mountains, I played “Every Star is a Burning Flame.” I smiled at the unfamiliar night sky, and “raised my broken voice” to rejoice. I knew what it was like to belong again, because these songs reminded me I belonged to “the Sower.” The Hutchmoot-week album release concert was a glimpse of eternity, of the everlasting epilogue. It was a perfect period to the sentence of the creation of this album, as Andrew remarked: “The release show was possibly my favorite concert that I’ve ever gotten to do. It was so overwhelming to get to stand on the stage with Gabe, Jamie, Skye, Asher on drums, with Andy and Jill and Ellie. Sweet friends and a lot of history. So many years of friendship, struggle, and pain were represented on the stage and to get to stand and sing about God’s faithfulness in a room full of people, many of whom were other dear friends, it was this overwhelmingly sweet night. It felt like the beginning of something. A lot of the songs on the record were about me asking, ‘Please let me see some sign of change or goodness in this season of doubt or whatever it may be’ and that night was like the answer to that prayer.” Carrie Givens wrote that one word echoed through her Hutchmoot weekend: Story. Andrew’s album is a resounding note in that echo, because it tells a tale, unflinchingly, that resonates with me and with so many others because it’s told in the context of the great true Story. I think of certain lyrics: “I run away home,” “I want to sit beside you at the feast, my friend/again, again, and again,” “The willows weep and the clover grows” These are first lines in thousands of stories. I will tell this story. It is my story. Because that’s the magic of this music. It is so real and almost raw in its honesty that it becomes not just one story independently lived, but the story of believers of truth and seekers of beauty. What’s your story? #AndrewPeterson #TheBurningEdgeofDawn

Father, make us ready. This ground is fallow. We have followed Crooked paths to vales of shadow. The cracked and drought-laced dust of earth Thirsts and groans beneath our feet. May we know dryness and longing So when the rains come To wash us clean We will not run for shelter’s awning But welcome the storm Arms wide, hearts alive.

Sara Groves’ latest release, Floodplain, is an invitation through means of honest lyrics and lilting melodies, not just to hear what she says, but to see what she sees. The album’s theme is expedition. From the first track, “This Cup,” the storyteller wakes the listener from a dream and paints a picture away from the addictions that numb. Then the arc of the story begins in the next song, “Expedition.” The piano ostinato mirrors waves on the shore. Meet me at the river, oh Fashion us a raft and oar We’re going on an expedition Looking for lost time Melodies and rhythm patterns from these lines weave throughout the songs that follow. The listener is drawn into a world of water; we step into the boat with Groves as the experienced guide. The story arc twists and turns in a surprise with one of my favorites, “Second Guess Girl.” Musically, this diverges from her other work. In an exuberant ’60s folk-style groove, we hear influences of Janis Joplin and Carole King. We can also hear echoes of Peter Gabriel throughout the record. Next we round the river bend and approach the title track, “Floodplain.” A sweeping vista opens, epic in scale. Sara has not forgotten the humble. With justice work (IJM) close to her heart, she identifies with the plight of the immigrants who have made their homes in the shadow of the wild Mississippi River. She empathizes in metaphor — “watching for rain” and watching the tide come in and out of her own heart. Some hearts are built on the floodplain. We continue down a stretch of river that breathes in wide open spaces. New musical surprises emerge that differ from past records: long interludes of electric guitar, cello, or piano phrases are welcome. The listener is given space to contemplate the expedition scenery. Some patterns of line and melody trail off without a resolution. Not every question has an answer. Then Floodplain has a second act. Our boat is traveling to Sara’s house. We make a steep turn and glimpse pictures of her family and friends. In “Signal,” Groves speaks blessing on a child growing into adulthood. Your heart goes out I can hear your song Your signal is getting stronger Your signal is getting strong There’s no cliché when I hear your song Your signal is getting stronger Your signal is getting strong Sara is a strong lyricist. Like her previous work, she uses varied repetition and subtle changes in repeated sections. This attention to detail reveals itself upon multiple listens to the songs, and such details also are also heard in Floodplain‘s instrumentation. In “Signal,” we hear the pairing of modern electronic sounds paired with traditional acoustic instruments. This mirrors the pairing of the new and old generation. This beautiful lullaby — from outer space — celebrates a mother’s love that is outside the bounds of time. We move from the rooms in her house to the room inside the storyteller’s soul. This expedition turns inward and deeply personal with “My Dream.” The storyteller admits that the darkness and melancholy weigh heavily. Personal doubt and assurance have evaporated. Is she enough? Is her faith enough? Then comfort comes with an image as she falls asleep. A gentle God waiting for her. Not just waiting, but running towards her. Our time is almost up. When “Expedition” comes back in the reprise we realize we are back at our own home. We are different and better for the journey. Spread the map out on the grass Scenes appear like photographs While we search The starlings play Reeds on the shoreline Nod and sway #Floodplain #SaraGroves

Ron Block has toured for over 20 years with Alison Krauss and Union Station, played on a gazillion records (including a few of his own), and backed George Clooney on the silver screen. He’s an award-winning consummate artist who loves music and the people making it, and we finally caught up with him long enough to ask about his very first instrumental bluegrass album, Hogan’s House of Music. What was your vision for this album? Well, the two main records that fueled this record were Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Banjo and Jimmy Martin’s Big and Country Instrumentals. Those were two records I listened to as a teen, and even now I still pull out Foggy Mountain Banjo and try to play just like Earl Scruggs. So there’s that foundation of tradition to what I do: the traditional bluegrass banjo, which is in the Scruggs/Jimmy Martin line. I’m rooted in that. Those are the two main records that I tried to emulate, in some ways, then I hopped it up a little bit with more bluesy-type stuff. It’s funny how you mention going back to your roots in solid bluegrass – and yet you give sly little nods all through the record to these different genres, which seems to be the point of the record title. Well, I listen to a lot of different music, and that’s going to pop out. The original bluegrass founders weren’t traditional. When bluegrass first started, and Bill Monroe hired Earl Scruggs to play in that 1946 band with Lester Flatt, they weren’t traditional. They took old-time country, blues, fiddle tunes, and gospel of the day, swing music on the radio, and they began to re-form these elements. They were radical innovators. It’s important to remember, though, that they had a rootedness in the music they grew up hearing; their roots were deep in the old folk and country music. They had that, but on top of it were these new sounds they were creating. Throughout the last 60-70 years, every great bluegrass band has brought their own sound into it, their own influences. That’s the spirit of the music: taking tradition and then making it your own. Like Chesterton said, “The essence of every picture is the frame.” It’s the limitation, the “rootedness,” that gives bluegrass its identity. I wanted this record to feel rooted, but still sound new. As excellent as this record is, it feels less like an album and more like a bunch of friends in a jam session–although it’s a group of friends with enough Grammys between them to pave my yard. What’s that like, collaborating with so many high-profile musicians? Well, you know, a lot of them are friends, people I’ve played with for years. I like doing that because it feels so comfortable. It can be like a jam session, and then you’re playing like yourself. That’s why I’ve got Dan [Tyminski], Barry [Bales], Jerry [Douglas]—all the guys from Union Station—and Alison Krauss, and then Adam Steffey, Sierra Hull, Clay Hess, Stuart Duncan, Sam Bush, Jeff Taylor. I’ve known them all for years except Tim Crouch and Lynn Williams, in fact. So to go into the studio with these high-level players, it’s just like “these are my people,” which is just how I wanted it to feel, like a bunch of friends just came in and played some music. It’s funny, I always picture Alison as the angelic voice of AKUS, and yet here she’s shouldering a fiddle and keeping pace with Stuart Duncan. How different is it to work with her in that capacity, with her playing on your record? Oh, she’s great to work with. She twinned Stuart on several songs. In the studio as a player, she listens, she takes direction. When we’re in the studio with AKUS she’s more directive, although she lets us as a band sort of have our way with the tune, and then tweaks. But now you’re in the captain’s chair and she’s holding a paddle… Yeah, and she did a great job. I always loved “Sawin’ on the Strings” on A Hundred Miles or More. She and Stuart played twin fiddles. I wanted to replicate it here. That reminds me—on any given track you might see “featuring so and so,” but you still hear dynamite performances by several different people. How do you decide who the “feature” is in a star-studded cast like that? I wanted a few of the tunes to emphasize who was on there. I made sure I had “featuring Stuart Duncan and Alison Krauss” on one, and on “Seneca Square Dance,” it said “featuring Sierra Hull.” I still play banjo solos on there, but she’s a large part of the tune, and I wanted to emphasize that—where it was centered. “Gentle Annie” says “featuring Tim Crouch” because those strings really make it beautiful. It’s like that Jimmy Martin record. It’s not just the banjo—everything plays. You’ve got mandolin, guitar, fiddle—everything solos, everything rides, everything takes breaks. I wanted this record to feature everybody. You use that framework to honor each of the players in turn. I grew up listening to all the instruments. I wanted to play fiddle, too, but my dad said, “You’ll have to take classical lessons,” so I opted out of that. I messed around with dobro, was a closet mandolin player, and played acoustic guitar and banjo. So I love all the instruments and vocals, accompanying them all. So to honor each instrument is a no-brainer, right? All you have to do is love it. I love the fiddle, so I hear Stuart or Alison play and say, “Man, that’s killer!'” and put the same “that’s killer!” energy behind the fiddle. And your energy comes from, “Wow, what a great player we get to accompany here.” No kidding! I’ll be honest, I’m a sucker for your slower pieces. Like “Calico,” which exudes this sort of wistful longing; it stands in such contrast to everything around it. How do you personally approach writing something that communicates such emotion without the benefit of lyrics? One of the main things I started with was the time signature–3/4 or 6/8–which lends itself to that feel, and then it’s like Chesterton says, you define the limits of a thing, and then begin to find out what’s inside. With that fence around it, I was able to just start playing within those boundaries, which were so different from the rules of the rest of the record. And it was a beautiful departure. Yeah, we recorded that tune in the last session with Sierra Hull, Mark Fain, and Dan Tyminski—we added fiddle later. Back to the question, though—You start by delineating, by asking “what is this thing?” which may mean you just go exploring first, and you come back with a bit of melody and think, “Well, that’s in 6/8 time,” and then commit to hiking that trail. It’s just like when you write a vocal tune—you’re chasing something. You follow it down one road, double back and try another path, and eventually wind your way to the destination. How much of the writing was affected by this great cloud of musicians around you? Was it more or less complete by the time you went into the studio, or did you have input from each of them – not just in terms of support, but also in guiding the tunes? Some of the tunes I wrote with the players in mind. “Mollie Catherine Carter” was written for Stuart to play. “’65 Mustang Blues” was written with Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas in mind. And in the studio I’m always listening to what other people are saying. For instance, when we recorded “Brushy Fork of John’s Creek,” I ended up cutting half of the mando solo and half of the guitar solo and putting them together as a split solo because it was just too long. So I had the charts when I went in, and the arrangements and the melodies and the chords, but then when we got in there I’d realize, “Oh, that needs to change” and mark stuff out. “Calico” was one where I had the chord structure for the mandolin part in the bridge, but I didn’t really have a melody. Sierra came up with that kind of rolling, almost classical line. Everyone contributed. When you pick bluegrass players like that, you just say, “Here’s the melody. Here’s the chord structure. Now let’s play.” That’s the whole reason for bringing them in, to let them add their own flavor to the mix. Right. Why would you micromanage and have them all sound like you? There are producers who direct more closely, and they do it to good effect, but this is a different kind of record. I wanted this to feel less prescribed and more like people getting together and having a great time. Mission accomplished. Now anyone who knows about your years at Hogan’s House of Music in Torrance is aware of the broad “genre diet” that shapes your music. What about your colleagues? Do they all have such broad influences? Most of the bluegrassers I play with listen to many different kinds of music. In the beginning with Union Station, the reason we loved each other’s playing was in having a common foundational core. I grew up loving Flatt & Scruggs, and J. D. Crowe and the New South, and Ralph Stanley, and Larry Sparks. Well, Alison loves all those too, and so do Barry and Dan, and Jerry – and really, Jerry was one of my main influences! So again, we’re back to that common rootedness. Then when you bring all your other influences to bear, you begin to get a unique chemistry. That’s why Alison doesn’t sound exactly like a traditional bluegrass singer or fiddler. She can if she wants to, but she’s got all these other influences and sensibilities informing what she does, just like I have. The rootedness, the passion for the core, is there, but the dress is different. And so suddenly you have these crazy bursts of blues and boogie. That’s part of the fun of this record–combining the influences of Earl Scruggs, J. D. Crowe, Leon Rhodes, Larry Carlton, Pat Metheny, Eric Clapton, and all the rest of it. Hogan’s House of Boogie was really Flatt & Scruggs and the Texas Troubadours having a party in my head. One more thing—you do stellar work with the band, and we have Walking Song with Rebecca Reynolds’ mind-blowing lyrics, and now at last a fully instrumental record. Can we look forward to any more Ron Block lyrics in the future? For sure. I love making music and can’t stop. Pick up Hogan’s House of Music in the Rabbit Room Store or at RonBlock.com. #RonBlock

Homecoming Magazine recently ran an entire issue on faith and literature and one of the centerpieces was Gloria Gaither’s interview with Walter Wangerin Jr. in which they discuss his new book, Everlasting Is the Past, the Rabbit Room, and a whole lot more. Here’s an excerpt: GLORIA: Walt, how have you been? I haven’t heard from you in forever, and it makes me sad. WALT WANGERIN: I am … stable. The last time I went to the oncologist, it seemed that all levels were the same. I was about 160 pounds, and that time, I stayed. Every other time, I was losing weight. So the last report—good. GLORIA: Stable, good. Well, it’s been a long time, and I was so excited to get your new book, Everlasting Is the Past. Can I tell you how excited I am that you published it with the Rabbit Room group? WALT: I had met one of the singer/songwriters, and then several years back I was invited to speak at one of their seminars. I thought they were just wonderful! How they went about things, their youthful enthusiasm … their Christianity is not cloying at all. Anyway, I decided to help them. GLORIA: Andrew Peterson has been a friend, and he has taught twice at our Songwriting Intensive that we do here in June, and he’s just one of my favorite people. It’s deep and broad content writing … and the other people in that group seem to be on that wavelength, so that’s a good thing. Read the entire interview at the Homecoming Magazine website. Everlasting Is the Past is available in the Rabbit Room store.

Father, grant us hope. This veil of darkness, Thick around us, Is within us, and without us. Our secret sins and sicknesses Are mingled in our blood. May the smallest flicker of Your holiness come spark and light To keep us warm and One day burn our Kingdoms all away.

[Editor’s note: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of his book The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog, Doug McKelvey is giving it away for free via Kindle for the next three days. Click here to grab your free ebook, or click here to get the paperback and read it like a real person.] (A writer rambles in his process [and his fear]…) I feel like a soldier, lost behind enemy lines, separated from his company. Lost and alone, but still trying to complete his mission. I am 111,252 words into the writing of a YA sci-fi novel. And counting. I would like to be finished. This is dangerous territory. I have spent the last two days rethinking how to bring it to a close in a way that doesn’t require too much more real estate, too many more words, too many more uncompensated weeks of writing. There’s the question of keeping the lights on and all that. The 90-page backstory and outline document I spent three months creating last year is no longer a useful guide. Unless I want a 220,000 word YA novel. I do not want a 220,000 word YA novel. And neither, I think, does any sensible publisher. Alas. I have run off track. Somewhere around 70,000 words, the characters began to make choices I had not sanctioned. They shed the shackles of my strict configurations, and began to behave as if they had wills of their own, independent of my detailed designs. [I wish they wouldn’t talk so much.] The story began to stretch it legs and run in directions I had not accounted for. So I let it run, to see where it would go. It led me on a long and merry chase and then darted straight into the brambles and disappeared. Maybe that’s a good thing. It doesn’t feel like a good thing at the moment, but maybe, just maybe, having made such a detailed outline, it was entirely necessary for me to reach a point where the story ran away from me, exceeded the margins, escaped the page. It was necessary so that I could forget the outline long enough to actually see the story that was emerging organically, oozing through the wire frame of my outline. I plunged into the bramble patch after it carrying a feeder of hummingbird nectar and a can of bear spray. You never know what a story is on the verge of becoming when it goes feral, so it’s best to be prepared for anything. I should probably also be carrying some friar-blessed Book of Kells and a blunderbuss. And something that wards vampires. And maybe something for wereapes too because, well, they’ve just shown up in the story. (Though I might call them wererillas.) Maybe I’ll put it to a vote. After two days of no visible forward progress, much pacing of the room, much scribbling and erasing of various possible story flows on a large white board, and something like two hundred solo trust falls backwards onto the giant beanbag in my bonus room, I finally spotted my quarry in the underbrush. There was no time to circle around behind it quietly. It was picking berries and muttering in a low throaty mumble, behaving unpredictably. I bull-rushed the story and tackled it head-on. What followed was a two-hour restructuring session wherein the ideas finally began to flow again, fitting together (eerily tetris-like), the story problems working their way towards solutions, the climax and conclusion (which I had never been happy with) beginning to re-configure themselves into something more satisfying and inevitable. Now I’m ready to charge through the remainder of this draft. I hope. Moral: Until you know what the payoff actually is, your setups don’t mean a whole lot. 2nd Moral: Stories are like children. Except when they’re like animals. Except when they’re like precision clockworks or diesel engines. Except when they’re like extended land wars in Russia. This particular story happens to be like a feral cyborg child hunted by Nazis in the taiga in winter. That was supposed to be metaphor, but I think I’ve just stumbled across the pitch for my next book. No time for such diversions now though—I have to keep my mind on the current story. I’ve got a lot riding on it. Personally. When I wrote the first draft of my first short novel, I was a young twenty-something and a brand new father. I penned the book entirely in a two-week flurry during which time I lived inside the story as it unfolded, never leaving the house, only waking and going to my computer first thing in the morning, writing 12-16 hours a day, leaving my computer late at night when I could no longer write. I worked with no outline. The story unfolded as I followed it step by step into the wilderness. It was the closest thing to being given a story that I can imagine. I finished it, breathless and exhilarated, and with some measure of fear and trembling. It was such a concentrated emotional experience, it did leave me frightened on some level. Perhaps it was the fear that if I took that leap again, I wouldn’t be met, but would just free fall through empty space. What I know for certain is that I haven’t completed a novel since then. That’s why finishing this one that I’m working on now is so important. Even if it never gets published. It has to get finished. Because if I never complete a second novel, how am I ever going to complete a third or a fourth or a fifth? The daughter whose birth had made me a father just before I wrote “The Angel Knew Papa And The Dog” turned 20 this past August. I now have two daughters in college and a lot less margin of time and economy for such speculative ventures. I languished through those intervening years waiting for the kind of magic that spurred the writing of “The Angel Knew Papa And The Dog” to occur again spontaneously, to carry me forward on another wave of manic, euphoric output to the completion of a follow-up novel. And it never did. No matter how many tricks I tried. That’s something I could write about. Sometime. After I’ve finished this second one. Until then, it’s too personal, too scary. The what-ifs. The might have beens. The small failures of nerve and discipline that add up to two decades of sophomore slumping. And yet, in that time I’ve started numerous other novels, even pushing as far as 40,000 words into them before being waylaid by the voices of confusion, diversion, fear, laziness, or economic necessity. Mostly I turned my attention away from book-writing and to more bite-sized creative endeavors. I wrote a lot of songs. And essays. And articles. And short scripts. Things that could be completed in a day or two. Things that cost me little. Things that required little risk and little faith on my part. They were not without merit or value, but these were not long journeys into the wild, they were just day trips. It was as if in my late twenties I had been handed a loaded survival pack and a map of the Yukon wilderness, and through my thirties and well into my forties I was choosing instead to take two block bike rides to the 7-11. Still wearing the rugged backpack, mind you. For years I neglected the shepherding of the more costly stories and longer works that I should have been investing my life in. And so these thoughts I am writing now must be at least one part confession. And it is best not to mince words with such matters, so I will state it plainly: I am guilty of sins of omission, of things left undone. There are books that do not exist, because I have neglected to complete them. I have so far been a rather poor shepherd of the stories entrusted to me. By grace, I hope now to begin that remedying. And in a very real way, it is this Rabbit Room community that has reawakened in me the courage to take up these labors again, and to press forward with the tasks I should have long been about. It is your personal affirmations of the small things I have created in recent years that have reawakened my sense of calling towards the larger things I should be doing. In an almost tangible sense, I am driven today by an increasing desire to bring to fruition those sorts of things that might be offered as lasting gifts to this community, and as lamps that might be set in a wider world wearied of its long enchanted dream-darkness. Isn’t that what we’re trying to collectively foster here? I want to own my part of that. Forgive my long neglect. My stubborn hope is that once I clear this hurdle, completing this second novel, I will be able to proceed with increasing courage, to begin working my way through all of those earlier starts—all of them, by the way, story ideas I still believe in—and one by one, bring them to completion no matter how much the process unnerves me—and unnerve me it does; The Stolen Child, The Mechanist Wars, Rabbicuss, The Seven Year Swarm, The Corner, Tales of Wi, The Lost Rhymes… I name them now like fallen comrades, for we grew close in the trenches, spilling blood, sweat and ink, but failing to take and hold the hills that were our objective. In the end, I limped away from them one by one and left them bleeding. But it was not really the end, was it? The reverberations of battle echo again in my ears. The oracle cries that the old armistice is broken. Keystrokes like bullets fly, and I find myself stumbling, rushing across an open field in a mad dash to outflank those old enemies and plant a flag on that high hill, a whispered refrain coursing in my ears: All is not yet lost. Take courage. Take heart. Press on. Press on. Press on.