Rachel Starr Thomson

I have now been home from Vancouver for three days, but balk every time I think of blogging. Reason being: there is too much to blog about!

For example, Jeffrey Overstreet’s latest book in the Auralia Thread, Raven’s Ladder, was released on February 16, and it is amazing. He was good enough to send me a (signed!) advance copy, and I have written a review which will be posted here and at BlogCritics.org shortly. Best book I have read in quite some time. I’m very sorry I missed the release date, but I was really busy in Vancouver, which brings me to

another thing I need to blog about, which is the trip itself. I will go into more detail in the next few weeks, but for now, I will say it was an amazing experience. Carolyn and I performed several times a day along with many other Christian artists in a church, on street corners, at a women’s shelter in the poverty-stricken east side, and in a huge theatre. We were able to dive into this city where the world is currently meeting and use writing and dance to celebrate the glory of God and invite people into His peace and deliverance. What an incredible privilege.

While we were doing that, I had a couple of articles published that I didn’t have time to tell you about. So here are the links:

“Seven Values of a Heavenly Life” — Store up treasures in heaven by living a heavenly life here on earth with hospitality, generosity, self-discipline, love of truth, love of purity, love for sinners, and passion for daily living. Published on Boundless.org.

“Keeping the Heart in Your Writing” — My guest post on the fabulous blog of agent Rachelle Gardner. By identifying your passion, fasting and feasting, and practicing discipline, you can keep the heart in your writing even in the busiest of lives.

Aaaand in preparation for the Olympics, I published our first book under the Soli Deo Gloria Ballet imprint, Pieces of Grace (And What They Mean). This is a little book containing poetry we use in our short pieces and a short story, along with a few theological notes. We didn’t actually get to sell it in Vancouver due to a bizarrely late delivery, but it’s good to have it out anyway! I will eventually get it up on this site; in the meantime, check it out on Amazon.

While we have been blogging about Andrew Peterson, Andrew Peterson has been blogging about us.

My favourite thing about CSFF Tours (even ones like this, which I hardly qualify as participating in because I didn’t read the book) is author involvement. Authors used to be sort of mythic. They didn’t live on the same planet as the rest of us — well, except for C.S. Lewis, who they say used to answer letters from readers. All of them. But it’s not like that anymore, because we all live in the Internet Age, and in the Internet Age, marketing is about building relationships with readers.

While I still can’t build relationships with most of my favourite authors (because most of my favourite authors are dead), this change in the business landscape is huge for me. For you, too, if you write. It’s tremendously liberating.  I used to shudder at the thought of marketing. Now I don’t, because  marketing does not equal “self-promotion.” It equals “making friends.” And for those of us who want to serve God with our writing, it means even more opportunity to share Christ, glorify God, and invest in people.

How’s that for a revolutionary thought?

In this great CSFF interview, Chawna Schroeder asked Andrew what he wanted readers to take away from his books. He said, “Most of all I hope they brush up against that holy Other who haunts the world of man and proclaims His truth in stories and art and music. I hope the story pushes them closer to belief.”

I’m with you, Andrew. May our whole lives, marketing and all, push readers close to that belief — or rather, pull them along with us!

I haven’t, as I said yesterday, read North! Or Be Eaten, nor have I read Andrew Peterson’s first book. I’ve now read a bit of his blogging at The Rabbit Room (and intend to keep visiting long after this tour is over). I’m struck by Andrew’s vision of Christian art. In “About the Rabbit Room,” he describes a visit to London:

The tour ended at the Eagle and Child, the pub where the Inklings often met for beer, friendship, and the sharing of their latest writings. I dragged my wife inside and promptly ordered fish and chips at the table where Tolkien, Lewis, his brother Warren, Charles Williams, and others once enjoyed one another’s company . . .  I’m not sure what’s so fascinating to me about these men and their works, their approach to creativity and their understanding of the source of it all. Their brilliance was remarkable; they were Christians, intellectuals, and yet childlike enough to love stories and seek fellowship in their making.

That last comment brought to mind one of the blurbs on North! Or Be Eaten, written by an author whose own series-in-the-making deals much with the power of art, stories, and childlikeness:

“In a genre overrun by the gory and the grim, Peterson’s bite-sized chapters taste more like a stew of Gorey (Edward) and Grimm (the Brothers). North! Or Be Eaten is a welcome feast of levity–and clearly a labor of love. Andrew Peterson has awakened my inner eight-year-old, and that is a very good thing.”
–Jeffrey Overstreet, author of Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight [and Raven's Ladder, due to be released next month. I'm reading it right now and it's fantastic.]

Children see stories in everything. At least, I did. And by seeking out the dynamics of story wherever we go, we’re more likely to catch glimpses of the Author. I’m excited about Christian fantasy literature that awakens inner children and makes us more aware of stories and their power.

Here’s more from Andrew’s essay. Go read it. It’s really good.

London itself was a wellspring of inspiration for me. We strolled through Kensington Gardens where Peter Pan was born, ate still more fish and chips in pubs that had welcomed travelers for four hundred years, I thought about Robin Hood, George MacDonald, Harry Potter, King Arthur, and Shakespeare. And of course, I thought about the gospel. History breathes in London, seeps through the cobbles and like mist it rises from the Thames. It’s easy to see why so many beloved stories have sprung from England’s imagination.

History swept me up when I walked beneath the portcullis of the Tower of London, when I took communion in Westminster Abbey among the tombs of long-dead kings. The blood and body of Christ, shed for you, peasants and kings, pagans and priests. The feast at the table is good and gives life, and is your only hope for meaning and peace and rest from the baying of the hounds at your heels, because Death and Sin and Hatred pursue you and would swallow you up if not for the strong voice of Jesus saying “Peace. Be still.” And at his word the dogs snap back into the darkness with a yelp as if reaching the limit of their chains. History belittles us. Its story is one of conquest and murder and vast darkness, and the noblest of men ends up as dead as the thief. I realized as I walked through the hall of kings in the Abbey that my time here is brief and my earthly crowns are worthless as chaff; the words of my epitaph will ring hollow lest they point to the fullness of Christ.

Some of you may remember Chawna Schroeder from a feature I ran on her a while back. Last week, she reviewed Worlds Unseen on her own blog, and she was also kind enough to do an interview with me. Read it here if you’re interested; it was fun .

I just read this PW interview with Mary Karr, author of Lit, was published November 3, and really enjoyed it. She’s got some great insight on literature in general, and I was surprised (and pleased) at her mention of prayer. I know nothing at all about Lit or Ms. Karr’s other work, but I recommend this interview! Read the whole thing here.

PW: The memoir category has blossomed in recent seasons. What accounts for the popularity of these personal stories?

MK: The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. My two favorite novelists today are probably DeLillo and Garcia-Marquez. But the cool, allegorical surfaces of lesser postmodern novels—their self-conscious, preening intellectualism, which is as self-indulgent to me as the most whining memoirist, by the way—these trends result in cartoonish or self-consciously grotesque and/or despicable characters. Wallace Stevens wrote, “People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.”

Becky Miller of the CSFF Blog Tour is heading up the formation of an award to recognize the best in Christian speculative fiction: the Clive Staples Award. The nominations for 2009  are listed here.

Have you read any of the books on the list? Any thoughts pertaining to them, or the existence and growth of Christian spec fic in general?

I nominated Jeffrey Overstreet’s Cyndere’s Midnight, which was profound and beautiful and a great story.

This month’s featured CSFF book is The Vanishing Sculptor by Donita K. Paul, the Dragon Lady of Christian fiction. Mrs. Paul’s books have made a definite splash, and I’ve been hearing their ripples for years, but this is the first I’ve actually read. It is fun, more than usually so, even for a children’s book . . .

. . . or is it YA? Adult fiction? The heroine is 22, and the cover declares the book a “fantastic journey of discovery for all ages” — yet to me it felt like a children’s book in all the best ways, from the humour to the outright themes of trusting in God. I would love to hear from other bloggers and readers on this. How would you classify this book? How much do age classifications matter, actually?

Enough about that for now. (Except that I hope it’s not enough about that, because I want to read your comments.) Tomorrow I hope to post an interview with Mrs. Paul, addressing important questions like “What’s it like to write about dragons as a Christian?” and “Why ‘tumanhofers’? Why not ‘dwarfs’?” On Wednesday, look for my official review.

In the meantime, check out Donita K. Paul’s Web site, read some of her Dragon Bloggin’, or check out the book on Amazon. And if you’re looking for more, read the posts of these fine CSFF Tour Bloggers:

Brandon Barr
Jim Black
Justin Boyer
Rachel Briard
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Linda Gilmore
Todd Michael Greene
Katie Hart
Ryan Heart
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Dawn King
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Mirtika
Eve Nielsen (posting later in the week)
Nissa
John W. Otte
Lyn Perry
Crista Richey
Cheryl Russell
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Dona Watson
Phyllis Wheeler
Elizabeth Williams
KM Wilsher

Of all the books I’ve edited, this year’s Wayback by Sam Batterman is one of my favourites. In my review of Wayback, I became one of many reviewers to compare Sam’s work to Michael Crichton’s, but this scientific time-travel thriller comes from a Creationist viewpoint.

I like to stop by Sam’s blog once in a while, and was pleased as punch this morning to see how well Wayback is doing. Jill Williamson (author of By Darkness Hid) gave it a four-star review, and there’s a fantastic picture of lots of Waybacks all lined up on a shelf.  (Check out Jill’s three-and-a-half-star review of my own Worlds Unseen here.) Sam also spills the beans on what he’s working on now — including a sequel! I’m so excited!

Beverly Pierce Stroebel is a Mayflower descendant with a passion for America’s history and future under God. I had the privilege of editing her book Full Sail: A 21st-Century Spiritual Cruise On Board the Mayflower, a creative journey that brings history together with the spiritual concerns of the present, just released from VMI Publishers. The artwork is beautiful, no?

Bev says the book is “Now available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and CBD. If convenient, ordering at local bookstores will raise awareness about the book. For a signed copy, contact me at beverlystroebel@sbcglobal.net. Price: $14.99 + $3.01 S & H = $18.00. Also available on the Store page at www.mayflowerfullsaillogbook.com.”

Check it out .

Ask your neighbors for an off-the-cuff reaction to the words “Christian literature” and you’re likely to hear them stumble through a list of belittling adjectives.

Christian fiction has a bad rap these days — and Christian writers may consciously or unconsciously find themselves working within some very small boxes. It’s too bad, as Richard Doster’s excellent article, “A Lost Art,” expresses:

Despite the swelling ranks of able Christian writers, the reaction demonstrates that we’re viewed as an inconsequential presence in the world of literature. This image belies reality—in fact, Christians are heirs to the tradition of Chaucer, Dante, and Donne; successors to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov; the literary descendants of G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers, and of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.

Yet we have, willingly, banished ourselves to the “inspiration” section at the back of Barnes & Noble. And by doing so, we may have abandoned our neighbors and left literature in the hands of writers who’d leave them hopeless.

Read the whole article here. It’s very worth your time, if only to remind you of the grand tradition in which we can choose to stand.