Rachel Starr Thomson

My apologies for the recent silence around here. I had a performance of His Faithfulness midweek, a visit to Toronto, and Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend, and I’ve got a dual performance coming up: I’ll be doing poetic narration for Street Lullaby, a twenty-minute dance production Carolyn and I put together, and in between performances of that, I’ll be reading from Burning Light in a jewelry store. Both performances are part of the James Street Night of Art in St. Catharines, which we’re really excited about participating in.

So between spending roughly 26 hours in the car getting to all these places and all the prep work and catch-up it takes to make up for those 26 hours, I’ve been kinda busy :). In fact, I am currently typing this in a hurry between designing posters for the reading and leaving for Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s house.

About that reading — if you’d told me ten years ago that eventually I’d be memorizing my own narrations and delivering them to congregations and crowds of school children, or that I’d voluntarily stand up and read out of my own books to complete strangers, I would have laughed. I am a writer (read: introvert). But as it turns out, sometimes life surprises you, and sometimes you surprise yourself. I really enjoy taking words I’ve written and proactively getting them out there.

So you tell me. What surprises have come along in your writing (or other) life recently? And how are you surprising yourselves?

In John Bunyan’s classic allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, a major subplot features the character of Ignorance. Throughout the story, he follows Christian, doing things his own way, refusing counsel, deliberately turning a deaf ear to any truth that makes him uncomfortable. When he reaches the Celestial City, he fully expects to be allowed in — but he is turned away. Ignorance is pathetic, but we can’t excuse him on the grounds that he didn’t know. He chooses his own doom.

My latest Boundless article, “What We Don’t Know”–on the importance of becoming biblically literate, and practical ways we can all do so–is up here.

Laura Fabiani of the Library of Clean Reads posted her review of Worlds Unseen yesterday. Here’s my favourite paragraph:

From the onset, the author easily transported me to a medieval-like world, where I could feel the dampness of the fog at night, smell the earthiness of the underground tunnels, and hear the flapping wings and the eerie cawing of the black ravens enough to conjure images of Hitchcock’s The Birds. The imagery is captivating, and I was plunged into the scenes, walking with them through the dense, thick forest or running through musty, dark tunnels. The action is well paced and vivid as Maggie and Nicolas live through heart-stopping and heart-warming experiences together.

Laura had other good things to say, as well as some critiques.  Check out the review, and be sure to leave her a comment to let her know you’ve come by :). She’s a terrific reviewer — I’d encourage you to take a look at some of her other reviews as well.

Writing a first draft is a lot like living life. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, you probably won’t do them to perfection, but you have to push yourself and do it anyway or at the end of the day you’ll end up with nothing.

I’ve been writing The Advent before bed, five to six pages most nights. Sometimes I’m in the zone (aided by the music of Enigma or Amethystium; thank you, YouTube playlists!), but usually I’ m really tired because it’s 9:30 and I’ve been editing, coaching, writing, and marketing all day.  As a result, I have a few passages I think are gold and a lot of passages I’m mentally marking as “come back and rewrite later.” But it struck me last night that even though I KNOW I’m not writing as well as I can, even though I’m tired and not able to immerse myself in the scenes as fully as I want to, it’s still really really important that I push through and just get the words on paper.

If I don’t, I won’t have a book to release next year.

First drafting is an active battle against perfectionism. It feels like my spiritual life in microcosm. I KNOW I don’t have enough faith. I KNOW I don’t apply scripture to its fullest. I KNOW I’m too proud and too lazy and too a-lot-of-other-things. But I can’t change all those things with a snap of my fingers, so the best I can do is soldier on in my weakness and learn how sufficient grace is. And at the end of the day? Well, just like this sloppy first drafting is actually writing a book, so my imperfect walk with God is actually living a life of faith.

Think about that.

As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible — or at least visible, at least discussible — those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts, and of all ideas to forms.

- Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction