Storyteller's Workshop: The Princess Bride

Our Netflix disc arrived damaged a couple of weeks ago, leaving us with a Saturday evening planned movie night and no movie. Too tired to get creative, we turned to our tried and true stash of films and decided to watch The Princess Bride.

Like many people, we’ve watched this 1987 film directed by Rob Reiner so many times that we can quote much of it by heart. If you’re a fan…well, go ahead…take a moment here to relive some of your favorite lines with relish. “Have fun storming the castle!” is one of my staples, though there are many others that pop up in our conversations (sometimes in ways that make sense and sometimes just randomly…)

Although we’ve watched it many times, it had been a while since we’d seen it, and I found myself watching it with more freshness than usual. In particular, I found myself intrigued to realize just how low-budget this endearing and enduring film looks, and how much the lack of “wow effects” of any sort doesn’t hurt its grand storytelling one bit. William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay based on his own novel of the same name, does a terrific job of getting to and sticking with the heart of the story. Yes, it’s brilliantly casted and acted with incredible panache and humor, but if the characters and plot hadn’t been drawn so well, I don’t think it would have become such a beloved classic.

Here are a few takeaways from The Princess Bride for us as storytellers.

1)      A great framing device goes a long way.

Think about how different this film would be if it had just been a straightforward narrative. If we had started with Buttercup and her Farm Boy, we would have entered right away into a fairy-tale world. Instead we start in the “here and now” of 1987, in a small boy’s room when the boy is home from school sick. His grandfather arrives to read him a story, one his father used to read to him and one he also read to the boy’s father when he was little. We can tell this story is golden gem for the grandfather, but the boy at first is resistant. We enter the story via his youthful skepticism and enjoy the chuckles that come from his initial resistance to the romantic elements in the tale. (The grandfather has promised him adventure, so why is there all this kissing?)

The film doesn’t just use this storytelling device at the beginning and end. Periodically, throughout the tale, we’re interrupted by the boy’s questions or exclamations. The action essentially freezes (or sometimes jumps ahead…a very useful transition tool!) while the grandfather responds to the boy’s reactions. So we’re never allowed to forget for a moment that we’re traversing the realm of story. We traverse it with the storyteller and story listener, falling as deeply and magically into the story as they do. I think this is as close as a movie has ever come to replicating the magic of falling into a book.

2)      It can be important to know what your characters want.

This is one of the first rules of good storytelling, and one that teachers tell their writing students over and over. I can still hear variations of it in the voice of one of my literature professors in college! But we really see it in action here. Buttercup and Westley want nothing more than to be together (and believe that nothing can stop true love!) but there are plenty of obstacles, often caused by things that the antagonists want, like starting a war with Guilder.

My favorite instance of knowing just what a character wants, however, comes via Inigo Montoya. Inigo never lets us forget his quest: a six-fingered man killed his father when he was eleven, and he has spent his life training as a swordsman so that when he eventually catches up with this villain, he will be able to defeat him. After first declaring, of course: “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” With a set-up like that, we know we’re bound to see a six-fingered man before long, bound to get the scene where the two of them finally fight, and bound to hear Inigo utter that line he’s spent his life rehearsing. Our anticipation builds because of the set-up. And the pay-off, when we finally get it, is terrific.

3)      Sometimes it’s smart to play against type.

Sometimes a character seems utterly predictable because of what he or she looks like or appears to represent. On second glance, we learn that there is much more to the character than meets the eye – and that, in fact, a part of his or her personality seems to be directly opposite of our expectations. The supporting character Fezzik is a perfect example here. An enormous giant, he’s originally hired by Vizzini (actually working for Prince Humperdinck) to help kidnap the princess. He’s clearly valued by Vizzini for his giant size and brute strength, and we initially expect him to be thuggish.

It turns out that Fezzik is gentle and kind. He hates hurting anyone and doesn’t think it’s “sportsman-like” to take unfair advantage in a fight. He also has a love for rhyming games, a game we see Inigo, his good friend, encourage him in (one of the many reasons we come to love Inigo). All of these elements make Fezzik endearing, but especially so because they seem to play against our initial impression and the expectations of other characters.

Creative Prompts and Exercises

·        Take a story you know well, either one you’ve written or an old tale you could easily re-tell, and create a framing device for it. Is the story being shared with a child? Could the story be an important memory passed on from one generation to the next? Is someone telling the story at an important occasion (a wedding, a funeral, a reunion) a setting that will have more meaning for us at the end when we understand its significance more fully because of the story?

·        Create a story with at least three characters who know exactly what they want. Make one character on a quest of some sort. Make one character want something that will potentially block the first character from getting what he or she wants. Create another character whose goal is to help the first character achieve their goal (thinking through carefully why it’s so important for that character to help the first one).

·        Create a character profile for a “stock” character who looks predictable. This could be a hero, jock, beautiful princess, giant, bookish poet, or frail and elderly woman. The idea is to give the character certain traits that we expect that kind of person to have. Make them look predictable, and then have them do, say, or be a certain way that plays completely against that stock type.

·        Just for fun…if you’re a fan of The Princess Bride, try writing a “missing scene.” What was going through Westley’s head on the day the Dread Pirate Roberts first threatened to kill him? How did Humperdinck choose Buttercup to wed? What was life like for Inigo the day after he saw his father die? How did Vizzini meet up with Fezzik and Inigo? The possibilities are endless. Remember, it’s okay to play in someone else’s fictional universe, and it can give you good practice in writing dialogue and actions for characters whose quirks and motivations you already understand.

Another New Feature: Storyteller's Workshop

Last week I launched a new feature here on the blog. Marmee's Library will be my semi-regular reviews of children's literature, tailored to be especially helpful for teachers and parents.

This coming week I'm launching another new feature. I'll be calling these posts Storyteller's Workshop. Each post will celebrate good storytelling, and will feature a discussion of a story (book, film, or otherwise). We'll look at some elements in the story that help make it come alive for readers or viewers. I love talking about what makes a story work well! In addition to reflections, each post will include creative prompts or exercises which I hope will be helpful for writers of all ages.

Stay tuned for the first Storyteller's Workshop post tomorrow! 

From Marmee's Library: Seesaw Girl by Linda Sue Park

In recent years, Linda Sue Park has become one of my favorite writers. I was going to say “writers for children,” because she does indeed write for children, but in point of fact, I think she has become one of my favorite writers period.

I first encountered her 2002 Newbery award winning A Single Shard. Set in 12^th century Korea, it tells the story of Tree-ear, an orphan who longs to become a potter. As I wrote in my review of the book back in 2010: “This kind of work is story-telling at its finest, lean and gentle, filled with adventure but also with grace.” It’s about as pitch-perfect as a novel can be.

I’ve gone on to read a number of Park’s other novels and picture books, and my daughter, now eleven, has read a few I haven’t yet, but recently we discovered and read together Park’s very first novel, Seesaw Girl, published in 1999.

This is another gentle but moving tale told in Park’s clean, clear prose. Its 17 chapters cover only 90 pages, which include some beautiful black and white illustrations by Jean and Mou-Sien Tseng as well as an author’s note to further detail some of the Korean customs and settings. The book is set during the 17^th century, about midway through the Choson period (which lasted from 1300-1880) in Korea. It tells the story of a young, aristocratic girl named Jade Blossom whose father is an advisor to the king.

As a reader, I was immediately pulled into the details of the place and time. Jade Blossom is a likable protagonist, the kind of young girl that many young girls will likely relate to. She plays pranks on her older brother and enjoys giggling with her young aunt and best friend Graceful Willow. She enjoys art, especially (at story’s beginning) the careful, decorative embroidery she is learning to do, but she’s not overly fond of chores, especially the complex processes involved in laundry day.

Beyond the universal likability of the character, however, there are the specific details of her circumstances. Jade Blossom lives the kind of protected life that most contemporary girls in the West will have a hard time fathoming. She is not allowed to leave the “Inner Court” of her family’s home. Since they are well-to-do, the home complex is fairly large, which means the Inner Court includes some outdoor spaces, such as the garden. So “she’s not like Rapunzel,” as my eleven year old put it.

Not quite locked in a tower, no, but still she must live within some very strict traditional constraints. These become more challenging for her as the narrative moves on, especially after Willow gets married. She essentially loses all opportunity to see Willow, since a new bride belongs almost exclusively to her husband’s family. The attempt to break tradition and go to Willow’s new home results in Jade Blossom’s first experience of the wider world outside her inner court. That experience inspires her to some complex feelings and questions.

As a writer, I appreciate, as always, the tidiness of Park’s prose. Tidy is the word I tend to think of when I read such tight, well-crafted writing.

I also appreciate the complexity of Jade Blossom’s characterization. Park must have walked a delicate line between the specific and the universal, wanting to be true to the time and place and those restraints that a character in Jade’s position would have really lived under, and yet wanting to craft a character who would resonate with readers now. I think she succeeds admirably, without falling into the mistake of making her too contemporary, but pulling on traits that somehow do feel believably universal.

It’s hard not to imagine that at least some of the girls of Jade’s status and time did not feel some level of curiosity, discontent, frustration, and anger. This must have been true even when they understood that this was just “how things were done,” and that they were done because their families wanted to cherish and protect their daughters. I like the way Park uses the distant mountains to symbolize Jade’s longings for a wider world. (It reminds me a little of the way I’m using the ocean in my work-in-progress, where my character lives in a small, land-locked country hemmed in by warring peoples on either side. In fact, Park’s delicate use of the mountains is helping me think through how I want to work the ocean more into my own story.)

With all that said, there is something about Seesaw Girl that feels like a first novel. It’s beautifully written on every level, and yet there is less lyricism in the prose and perhaps a little less development of the secondary characters than in Park’s later work, especially A Single Shard. I always think writers must feel frustrated when people compare an early book to a later masterpiece though, and I don’t mean anything denigrating by the comparison. It just somehow encourages me, as a writer, to know that Linda Sue Park had things to learn as a storyteller too.

As a teacher and parent, I am delighted by all the good takeaways from this novel. There is richness to be found here in history studies, literary studies, and character qualities.

History: this novel can enrich your young learner’s understanding of Korea in late-medieval-edging-into-early-modern times. So often, students don’t learn much about the Eastern world in the early history years. Even if you’re using a world history curriculum like Story of the World, information about Korea is pretty thin.

Seesaw Girl would fit right in with the information Susan Wise Bauer shares about Chinese influence in Korea in chapter 9 of SOTW Volume 2: The Middle Ages. In fact, it might be interesting to point out why Linda Sue Park intentionally chose the name Jade Blossom. As she says in this great interview: “At that time, Korea was a satellite state of China, and among the aristocracy or the nobility, the idea was to create a culture and a lifestyle within your home that was as Chinese as possible. I named the main character "Jade Blossom," which is a much more Chinese-sounding name than a Korean name because that's what wealthy families (like hers) at the time were doing.”

My daughter found it so unfair that Jade Blossom had not even been taught to read, when her brother Tiger Heart had so many academic opportunities. That point may be a great opening for discussion of illiteracy and educational opportunities for girls and women around the world, not to mention a cause for gratitude for the learning opportunities many of us take for granted.

The Peabody Essex Museum has provided this interesting social studies and art unit inspired by Seesaw Girl. 

Literature: The conflict in the novel is worth discussing. Jade Blossom is clearly the protagonist, but who or what is the antagonist? Although the rules of the household are strict and Jade Blossom is supposed to adhere to them, Park’s sensitive portrayal of Jade’s parents means that they are not precisely antagonists. (Get your students to think through how and in what ways Jade’s mother and father support and help her.)

It’s really cultural expectations that block Jade Blossom from what she most wants, and those are not easy to overcome. In fact, the narrative subtly raises the idea that perhaps sometimes there are things in life (like family honor and obedience) that may be as or more important than getting exactly what we want, even if what we long for is good. That leads us right into the next learning reservoir….

Character Qualities: There are really two virtues or qualities that stand out to me in this novel: contentment and creativity-within-limits. Jade wants many things that her limitations seem to block her from having: time with her Aunt Willow, freedom of movement, understanding of the wider world (both natural and cultural/political), and more complex artistic expression (she wants to learn how to paint, typically a male pursuit, and not just embroider, a woman’s more usual art).

By the end of the novel, she has not achieved all of these things, but she has taken small but creative steps, still working within the confines of her situation, toward more freedom. We see that in the way her father satisfies her curiosity about the political situation in the palace, in the way her brother Tiger encourages her painting skills, in her poignant conversation with her mother about a woman’s place in the household, and in her own ingenuity as she invents the seesaw game that allows her fleeting but real glimpses of the faraway mountains. Jade has not flouted her parents’ authority or eschewed cultural traditions to get her way, but she has found a respectful way forward that honors authority and tradition and yet enables her to grow and learn. It may not feel like enough for readers accustomed the bold and empowered characters of modern fiction, but it feels authentic to the story, and I think it has a lot to teach our contemporary, restless sensibilities.

First of Some New Features: Marmee's Library (Literature Reviews for Parents and Teachers)

It's been a busy month, and I've been writing "in the cracks and crevices." I've been missing my weekly review writing for Epinions.

One of the things I've realized, with the closing of that platform, is that review writing is in my blood. The other thing I'm realizing is that I can look at this season as a fresh new start and begin to craft some reviews, especially of children's literature, that are tailored more specifically for parents and teachers.

At some point I may collect these elsewhere. I've been considering launching a new blog, not to replace my journal space here entirely, but to provide a more specific resource space. But for now, I will be posting these reviews here under the heading of "Marmee's Library." If you find them helpful, I hope you will pass the word on to other readers, writers, teachers, parents, and homeschoolers!

I'll launch the first Marmee's Library review here tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Monet Sunset, 1880 (An Original Poem)

One hundred and thirty-four years ago,
A man named Claude chose colors just so.
On canvas he captured his dream of the sky –
A misty cloud river, the sun’s golden eye.

He noticed each streak and shadow and hue
And wrung every drop from the beauty that’s blue,
He added some rose and a touch of fuzzed peach,
And showed slender limbs in their sinuous reach.

One hundred and thirty-four years have gone by,
But today I am blessed by his dream of the sky.

~EMP 3/10/14

March Musings and Lenten Readings

March came in like a lion and thus far has not yet decided if it wants to be a lamb. We've had some lamb-like days, and then the cold comes roaring back. Illness (my own, the sweet girl's, D's) has kept us all a little off kilter this month. Spring teaching work has also kicked in, and I've had way too many plates spinning. Hence the resounding quiet here!

In the midst of everything, the season of Lent has begun. When I'm on the ball (heh...it has been known to happen) I usually do a pre-Lenten post about my reading for the season. Although that didn't happen this year, I thought I would still post a few thoughts about my reading.

As a family, we're still moving our slow way through the Psalms. We've been reading one Psalm a night for the past few months. Actually we started in the middle -- the sweet girl was intrigued to have us read all the way through Psalm 119, the longest one, and once we did that, we just kept going straight through to the end of the Psalter. Once we got there, we decided to start back at the beginning, and we're now at Psalm 93, almost all the way back around.

We've been a Psalm-ish family for years. We tend to read through them based on the daily readings, but we're not always consistent about it. We also have favorites we've revisited, meditated on, or mostly learned by heart through the years. Psalms 8, 23, 84, and 103 all come to quickly to mind, and there have been others.

For the past couple of years, I've been feeling especially close to the Psalms -- they've lodged in my heart and prayers in new ways. I appreciate their raw, deep honesty, and the way they cover so much of life, the parts that make sense and the parts that don't. They keep me God-oriented. So I am especially happy this Lent to be reading N.T. Wright's The Case for the Psalms. It is not just a book about the Psalms, but an invitation to live them and pray them. I am finding it good, good tonic for the soul.

The End of an Era

Tuesday seemed like a fairly normal day for me. It was filled with ordinary blessings, busyness, and stress of various kinds, and not much writing time, as evidenced by the fact that when evening came, I hadn’t checked in at Epinions, one of the websites I write for regularly.

That’s not terribly unusual. I have days when I have to prioritize other things – teaching, ministry, or long-term writing projects – and don’t get to what I call my short-term writing projects at all or until late at night. What I didn’t know was that I had already written the last review I would ever write for Epinions. I got word in the evening that the site’s reviewing platform, fifteen years strong, was being shut down permanently.

To understand the shock of this for me, you have to realize a few things. I started writing for Epinions in May 2003, almost eleven years ago. When I started writing there, I was a recently turned 35 year old with a baby less than a year old. I have 1303 – yes, that’s one thousand three hundred and three – reviews and essays (mostly reviews) published at the site. That averages out to almost exactly 10 reviews a month for almost eleven years (yes, I did the math).

More importantly than the numbers, which show what a beloved habit writing for this site was, were the friendships I made there and the incredible amount I learned. What started as a mildly fun hobby – in my first several months on the site, I only wrote a handful of reviews and poked around on occasion, getting to know people and trying to figure out how things worked – picked up steam quickly. I had been looking for two things when I stumbled upon the site originally: a place where I could read good reviews of children’s books, and (once I realized I could contribute content) a place where I could keep my writing muscles exercised on a regular basis. That last felt hugely important to me when the sweet girl was a baby. My energy and time were both so limited (they still are, but in different ways) and I wanted to find a writing outlet where I could engage in real writing but have it be short-term writing, short pieces that had starts and finishes that felt manageable in the small spaces of a busy mom’s life. (I knew the novel and the longer non-fiction projects I wanted to work on would need to wait.)

The fact that the work was all self-directed and self-paced was a blessing. I could write and post as quickly or as slowly as I wanted and no one would mind. I could set my own deadlines and writing goals and try different ways of approaching reviews. The fact that I could write about what I felt most passionate about was beautiful. I liked that the posts were peer-reviewed, and quickly came to respect so many of the peers who were also writing and rating on the site. I liked knowing that my work had an actual audience. While the writing process brings me joy, a lot of it is lonely, and when you write never knowing if you what you write will see the light of day or communicate clearly to anyone, it can make the work feel that much harder. I knew I didn’t have a vast readership, but nonetheless, I had a readership.

I had taken journalism and feature article classes in college, neither of which, frankly, taught me a whole lot about how to write features. I remember struggling through a film review assignment for one of my classes (this was back in the 80s, pre-internet) and thinking how hard it was to craft a good review. I was right. A good film review is hard to write. I would have been astounded to know that one day I would write dozens (if not hundreds) of film reviews. Next to books, movies was my favorite category to write in at Eps; I was a top reviewer in the movies category for several years and was working to regain my momentum in that category when the site closed. Some of my early film reviews there weren’t very good – I labored long re-telling plot and often didn’t figure out what I wanted to say until I’d spent several hundred words – but my colleagues on the site, some of whom were dynamite writers, were encouraging with me anyway, and egged my enthusiasm on. So I wrote more of them, and I got better. When you labor at anything for a decade, you learn skills. I will always be grateful to my time at Epinions for helping me learn to craft strong leads and to hone my natural bent toward what I call “full-circle” pieces. One of my favorite methods for review writing is to bring the reader back around to an initial thought, impression, or assertion. I loved clarifying that skill over the past ten plus years.

There was also the richness of engaging in an incredibly diverse community of people who wrote about all kinds of things I’d likely have not read so much about otherwise. I learned about foreign films, musical instruments, gardening methods, adoptive families, classical music, best-selling thrillers, cozy mysteries, preschool picture books, cooking utensils, pet care, board games, business travel, and comic books. And that’s just off the top of my head!

And I made friends, at least one of whom, Erin, will be a life-long friend. We’ve emailed for years, blogged together, worked on stories together, gotten together in real life numerous times, prayed for each other, gotten to know each others' families and stories. In May, she’s getting married – to a man I’ve known for over a quarter century and had the privilege of introducing her to.

So forgive me if I wax a little nostalgic about the end of an era. In the grand scheme of the world, the sudden demise of a website looms small (and despite the struggles the site has had in recent years, the announcement was shockingly sudden as parent company eBay decided to retire the review platform effectively immediately). But this particular website has meant a lot to me. It’s been a long-term almost daily habit, a place to share passions and enthusiasms, a valued community of friends and colleagues, a place to keep my skills sharp, and if I shed a few tears when I heard the news, well…I think that’s pretty understandable. Although we weren’t given much chance to say proper farewells and do our grieving and celebrating onsite, a few hundred of us have found our way to a facebook page where those things are happening. I’m very glad they are. Epinions and the work and community it generated are worth celebrating.

Advice to Young Poets

I've been reading at Seeing the Blue Between: Advice and Inspiration for Young Poets compiled by Paul B. Janeczko. Lots of gems here, but I found myself especially loving two bits of advice to a young poet from J. Patrick Lewis.

"Book your eyes on a never-ending cruise: become a lifelong reader."

And "Nothing succeeds like failure. Revel in it. You may take a measure of pride if you can say, 'I failed three times today, and that was before lunch.'"

When What You Do Doesn't Feel Like Enough

So I’ve been watching the Olympics and as usual, I’m in absolute awe at the courage, determination and perseverance of the athletes. Men and women, young and old (well, “old” by athletic standards) – they are showing the world some amazing stuff.

Every once in a while I get a flash of insight as one of them speaks. I think about the grace that can be involved in either winning or losing. Sometimes it’s the ones that lose – or at least the ones who don’t finish first – that pull most on my heart. Watching them cross finish lines only to see their time has fallen short, seeing them crash to the ice but get back up and finish, I am seriously moved by the thought of all the passionate work and practice that stands behind that moment. Perhaps especially behind the moment that didn’t quite turn out the way they expected.

The other day I was watching the women’s skeleton race, that incredibly high speed head-first sledding down a treacherous, winding track. The fact that anybody can do this at all astounds me – the initial run, the graceful leap onto the sled, the careful steering as the sled careens around corners and flies at a breakneck pace sometimes hitting 80 miles per hour. If you didn’t get to see it, believe it, it was great fun watching the sheer chutzpah and skill of these women athletes!

Two American sledders were highlighted. The first was Noelle Pikus-Pace, a mom of young children making a comeback after finishing fourth in the last Olympic games, only to finish a euphoric, stand-climbing, kid-hugging silver medalist in this one. The other was Katie Uhlaender, a bright-red headed 29 year old Kansan and the daughter of the late Ted Uhlaender, a former major-league baseball player and coach. He died a few years ago and she still wears his baseball ring on a chain around her neck. She finished eleventh in the last Olympics and had trained hard for this one, only to be derailed by a concussion last year. Still battling its repercussions, she fought hard and finished fourth by a mere four one hundredths of a second.

There was something about Katie that really got to me. She made me smile for one – her hip, dyed red hair and fun attitude reminding me of Tonks in the Harry Potter stories. NBC did several spotlights on the skeleton event in which Katie helpfully explained to the viewing audience how the whole thing worked, what the sleds are like, etc. Her enthusiasm was catching.

All the harder then to see her in tears at the end of the race, reiterating the “four one hundredths” of a second and clearly devastated to not win a medal. Listening to her talk to the reporter, her eyes welling with tears, I tried to imagine what it would feel like to dedicate yourself to such rigorous training for so many years only to fall just *that* far short of your ultimate goal. Then she said something that drew me up short, not because I couldn’t resonate with it, but because of how much I did: “I’m sorry, everybody.” Or as I read more fully later, “I want to apologize that what I did wasn’t enough.”

Ah, the heartache of those words. Do they sound familiar, sister? I say sister here (though brothers may be reading this too) because although this is a deeply human trait, in my experience, it seems that women tend to fall into the apologizing trap more readily than men. Yes, apologies are important when we really need to say them, but how often we apologize, even when we do something good, loving, real, because we fear it just “isn’t enough.”

Katie didn’t win a medal. In that sense, yes, quantitatively what she did was “not enough” to achieve the goal she so much wanted to achieve. But did she need to apologize for her performance? A gritty, determined, exciting performance with so much work behind it, a performance that showed on that given day, she was fourth best in the world at what she did? How many of us have ever poured our hearts into anything that fully, or worked that hard to achieve something? No apologies needed, Katie, I felt like saying, wishing I could reach through the screen to give her a hug. What you did was terrific.

But then I think, on a small and daily basis, how often I don’t cut myself or others the same slack. I don’t offer myself or others the grace of knowing that, hey, for today, what you did was enough. Even if it wasn’t perfect, not worthy of a gold (or silver, or bronze, or fourth place…or seventeenth). That meal you cooked with love that didn’t turn out quite the way you planned because you forgot an ingredient? That time you lost your temper yet again, but the way you pulled it together so quickly the next time and exhibited real self-control? Those pages and pages of really good writing you were going to accomplish that turned into only a few hundred hard-fought words that likely won’t all make it the next draft?

There really probably are lots of times in our lives, more than we’d like to admit, when what we do isn’t enough. But there are lots of other times when what we think of as “enough” is way more than it needs to be. Maybe there are times when doing our absolute best with all the love we can muster is enough, no matter what the results are. Maybe there is even something better for us than the results we so much wanted (that’s a tough one, I know). Maybe too God will make up for whatever’s lacking in what we did. He’s good at that. He’s always enough.

Reasons I Love the Olympics

The fluid grace of flight and height.

The fall across the finish line.

The audacity of youth that forgets the spotlight

and throws down something new that’s never been tried.

The way the gold medalist fumbles for words to the national anthem.

The cheers of the crowd for the skier who comes in last.

(~EMP) 

Bernard, Francis, Anselm

"O gentle Jesus, turn Thee unto me; What I have broken do Thou bind in me, And what is crooked make Thou straight in me; What I have lost restore Thou unto me, And what is weak and sickly heal in me."  ~St. Bernard of Clairvaux

That beautiful prayer was posted this evening on the Renovare page on facebook. I was happy to see it, both because I needed its heartfelt words, and because I've been thinking a good bit about Bernard of Clairvaux.

We started our introduction to the Crusades yesterday, and as usual, I am finding Bernard a tough guy to figure out. I like to segue into church history whenever I can in the course of our usual history studies, and during this period of the Middle Ages, with the church in such a position of power and cultural influence (for good and for ill) it's easy to make that jump.

What to say about Bernard? One of the most influential preachers of his age, he seemed to overflow with a true love for Christ ("gentle Jesus") and an understanding of his own deep failures. Yet he preached the first Crusade. Granted, we can't hold him responsible for all that came after, in that war or subsequent ones, but it's still hard to reconcile that fact with some of his prayers. At least for me at the moment.

Interesting side note: out of curiosity I went looking in our library system to see if I could find anything age-appropriate about Bernard for children. One book title popped up, and it was some sort of anthology (and only available as reference, not for check-out). By contrast, a quick search on children's resources on Francis of Assisi returned 34 titles, some of them quite recent. There seems to be about one new children's book on Francis each year. It's just interesting to see which saints speak to (or "translate") to our time and culture -- or at least seem to translate according to whomever is deciding what's appropriate and edifying for kids to read about saints.

And one more note: really thankful as we discussed the Crusades to have St. Anselm's prayers and meditations close to hand. We read from his prayer for his enemies. So good to have that clear, clear, humble prayer washing in from the past and landing on our shores yesterday.

Reading Round-Up: End of January

The bitter cold for much of the month has had me staying in more. It's also made me want to curl up in a cave and read for the duration of the winter.

Lots of good books on tap this January...some I've finished, and some I'm still meandering through. Here's a peek at what I've been reading.

Having finished Alister McGrath's biography of C.S. Lewis, I've been enjoying the letters of Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis collected by Don King in Out of My Bone. I confess about half-way through, I skimmed forward to the end, but now am going back to read the final half of the book more fully. What a fascinating woman she was, and what a lively voice in her letters!

Ever since reading an essay on Elizabeth Enright (whom I've known for years as a writer of stories for children...we especially love her delightful books about the Melendy family) I've been wanting to read some of the short stories she wrote for adults. I finally got my hands on an old collection from the library system, whose thick teal cover and smudgy yellowing pages is reminding me of a high school textbook. What loveliness inside the covers of A Moment Before the Rain though. I love her way with description and how she sees so swiftly to the heart of ordinary things.

Alan Jacobs has graced the world with a terrific"biography" of the Book of Common Prayer, the very book I always wanted to read about the BCP. It's encapsulating what I know already in a beautifully written summation, and it's surprising me with fresh insights. What more can you ask? Plus who doesn't love the notion of a biography of a book? Because a book (especially one with this long and complex a history) does indeed take on a life of its own.

Taking fortifying sips from Richard J. Foster's Sanctuary of the Soul, a sustaining book on meditative prayer. A lot of these insights will sound familiar if you've read other books by Foster, but they bear repeated hearing, and it's nice to see them all in one place in a book focused specifically on this one topic.

Our continued journeys into better mental health has me trying to find new ways both to deal with my own stress and help the sweet girl cope with her anxieties. Michelle L. Bailey's book Parenting Your Stressed Child is helping me navigate a better understanding of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). There are some good breathing exercises I'm finding especially helpful.

Family read-aloud finds us plowing through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Yes, we've reached the darker part of the HP epic. It took the sweet girl a while to get used to angry, angsty adolescent Harry (didn't it take time for us all?) and her sensitivities to injustice, always high, have positively quivered with rage in response to the terrible Professor Umbridge, but it's been a good read for us so far. And oh my, how much fun to read these characters' voices. As villainous as Umbridge is, she is also hilarious (a tribute to JK Rowling's writing) and reading her "high, girlish" voice, so at odds with the tyrannous and oppressive things she's declaring, and making her high-pitched throat-clearings is a lot of fun. I love reading other voices too, from Hermione's even handed earnestness to Dumbledore's slow, careful cadences and everything in between. Plus...you know...it's just fun to read British words like "git" on a regular basis (thank you, Ron). 

The sweet girl and I enjoyed Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (another read-aloud this month) and she and I both read (independently of each other, but agreeing we loved it) Kevin Henkes' The Year of Billy Miller, which recently won a Newbery honor. Light, innocent fare with sweetly drawn characters you root for, especially Billy himself.  I've heard it described as Ramona for boys, but Billy, likable as he is, is not nearly as mischievous as Ramona (though he does worry a lot, just as she does). Something about the book put me more in mind of the old-fashioned Betsy books by Carolyn Heywood, though of course with a contemporary feel. Billy's little sister Sal is especially well drawn (and her name, perhaps, a tribute to Robert McCloskey? Hmm...that possibility just dawned on me) and their relationship feels so true to sibling-hood.

Oh, and I found Jane Langton! I read her first Homer Kelly mystery, written back in the 1960s, The Transcendental Murder, and found myself laughing aloud. She "gets" Concord so beautifully, and draws delightful characters. Turns out I actually knew her work from years ago (I'd read her children's book The Diamond in the Window) but didn't realize it was the same author until I looked her up.

ALA Awards Announced: Newbery, Caldecott & Lots of Other Goodies!

I was really excited to hear that Kate DiCamillo won her second Newbery Medal yesterday. She is one of my favorite authors writing for children today. I reviewed Flora and Ulysses, the winning novel, back in November. Both the sweet girl and I really enjoyed this unusual tale about a girl and a superhero squirrel!

I just finished reading Kevin Henkes' The Year of Billy Miller, which won a Newbery honor. A review of that is forthcoming. Henkes, if you're not familiar with him, is both a fine author and a delightful illustrator (he's won a Caldecott in addition to Newbery honors). He also plows picture book and early reader ground in addition to writing stories for middle-grade readers. One of my favorite Henkes picture books is Old Bear, which I reviewed back in 2009.

Brian Floca won the Caldecott for Locomotive. It looks like a lovely book. While I didn't know any of the Caldecott books this year (proof positive that I'm just not spending enough time in picture book land these days) I did recently review Kadir Nelson's beautifully illustrated book Nelson Mandela, which won a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor yesterday.

For a full round-up of yesterday's awards, see the article at Publisher's Weekly. You can click through to some fun interviews of DiCamillo and Floca from that page as well.

By the way, all of my review links here go to reviews I've written at Epinions. I make a (very) modest amount of income from these reviews...so modest that the amount I've earned on most of them, even those that have been up for years, might buy a cup of tea, depending on where I buy it. Basically I write book reviews for the joy of writing book reviews, and because I love recommending good books for fellow readers. If you enjoy any of these reviews and think you know someone else who might benefit from them, please pass them on. And if there's a book (especially a children's book) that you'd enjoy seeing me review, let me know, and I'll see what I can do!

Forests and Trees

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the expression “she can’t see the forest for the trees.” It’s an old expression (wonder where it came from?) and so familiar that it’s become trite, but trite expressions usually become that way because there’s truth in them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that when we get stuck in our problems, enmeshed in the exhausting business of just making it through the next round of whatever it is we need to make it through, we really do lose perspective. Fast.

Losing perspective is hard. When you’re busy just looking at the trees that loom all around you, or even the one giant tree (maybe fallen over, blocking your path) you sometimes can’t think of anything else. In true times of emergency or crisis, maybe it’s a blessing that our vision gets so narrowed, but I’m talking about other times, times when a given challenge in our lives (or a combination of challenges) just leaves us so bone weary that all we can think about is that one tree right in front of us.

It becomes huge. Why are its limbs so scratchy? Why is it so big? How are we ever going to get over it or past it or around it? Is there even a way? Why does forward feel so impossible?

We look at it and we lose ourselves in the details of that one thing to the point that we can’t even begin to look all around us. We lose the sense that there are other paths possible around the tree. We lose gratitude for anything good about the tree. We forget we’re in a forest that has other things in it too – not just other trees but grass and plants and bushes and birds and rabbits and sun filtering through branches and dancing shadows. We forget that the forest is in a larger world and that there’s sky above it and that all of it, all of it, is owned by the maker of everything. And that the maker of everything can help us.

Sometimes I think we need to learn to walk away from the tree. Not permanently, but just for a while. Whatever the tree is, we can trust it with God. We can walk into another part of the forest and breathe deep for a while, breathe slow, breathe peace and prayers. Maybe when we walk back to the tree, it won’t loom quite so huge or take up all our mental space and emotional energy. Maybe we can even begin to remember the beauty of the forest all around us.

History Lesson Planning (for Intuitive Teachers and Semi-Reluctant Learners)

History is one of my great enthusiasms. I could spend far more time than I already do reading and pondering history. Cultural history and personal history embedded in good cultural history are some of my favorite things to read. In fact, the older I get, the more likely I am to drift over to the new non-fiction shelves at the library to check out the latest biographies or history books – first, before I head to new fiction.

The sweet girl, now eleven, enjoys listening to history, but it has not become one of her great learning and reading passions. Yet. (I live in hope.) While she’s taken more ownership of almost every other major subject in her schooling – math, science, language arts – she still needs me to take her by the hand in history. She will read and write what I assign, usually good-naturedly and sometimes grudgingly, but what she most enjoys is listening to good history narratives read aloud. We also talk history a lot at mealtimes and other family times.

As we study medieval history this year, that means we still do a lot of read-aloud time. I read from various books – good secondary sources, and sometimes also primary sources – and she draws while she listens, stopping me occasionally to ask questions or make a comment. Or I will stop midway through and review with her, asking some prompting questions, always pleasantly surprised by how much she’s heard and retained. (That’s partly due to the narration techniques we put into place during the grammar years. Good foundation!) Sometimes I give mini-lectures if it’s an area I know well, like church history. Sometimes we listen to Diana Waring lectures on CD, something she has enjoyed very much.

Although I let her draw while she listens, I do try to keep visuals open in front of her, which I refer to, and she stops and looks at while we work – maps, encyclopedia pages, books from the library. I’ve also been encouraging the pretty much every-lesson-use of her timeline. In earlier learning years, we would take a day every so often and do lots of timeline work at once; nowadays she keeps her timeline book handy and when I’m reading or sharing information, I will suddenly say – “and that’s probably an important date for your timeline.” She’ll pick it up and add it. (My secret goal is to have her begin to figure that out and do it on her own before the end of year…we’ll see how it goes.)

Lesson planning for this kind of learning has taken me a while to figure out, because I’m an intuitive kind of history teacher…I think “let’s just read that until it sparks something else interesting and then we’ll find something to read about that…” I think I’ve finally discovered how to make this work though. Here’s a rough idea of how I currently lesson plan for history. If you’re an intuitive history teacher, or have a semi-reluctant history student, maybe this will help you too.

• When I prepare my history lessons, I think through where we want to go next geographically and chronologically. Once I’ve made that decision, I think through the important people and events I will likely want to cover within the new section.
• I survey my resources and decide what books we will likely draw from. Right now I use several main resources a lot: Story of the World 2 (Medieval Times); Romans, Reformers, Revolutionaries; and the Greenleaf Guide to Famous Men of the Middle Ages. But I am also likely, on any given day, to pull from Monks and Mystics, English Literature for Boys and Girls, Blackline Maps of World History, and any number of library resources which I try to put on hold about two weeks before I may need them.
• I think through any primary sources or supplemental resources online that might help us.
• I note chapter and/or pages numbers in my resources, so I can flip right to them and not spend inordinate amounts of time hunting for things once we’re settled in for a learning session.
• I think through anything I might want her to actively do (besides listen) during the session. Probably timeline, sometimes map work, sometimes further independent reading or writing. I’ve not been having her outline much this year, probably because that’s a skill she’s still actively working on learning in our writing curriculum (and she’s doing a fair amount of it there). This may be something I have her do more of next year.

I also am discovering that it’s nice to sketch out what I think a lesson will look like and keep it handy to refer to, but that I often move in different directions, as the need or enthusiasm arises. So I keep my original lesson plan written down, but at the end of lesson time, I write down what we actually did and how that will work as a springboard for the next lesson.

Flexibility is the key here. I might discover, as I did today, that I want us to spend a whole other session on a given topic before moving on the lesson I had originally scheduled next. As long as you keep a tentative goal in mind, in terms of what you hope to cover for a semester or year, slowing down (or speeding up) really isn’t that big of an issue. I’d rather have us pursue a learning trail that really catches her interest than rush past it in an attempt to stick to some pre-written lesson plan.

As an example, here’s what I thought we were going to do today in history. My original plan read:

Wednesday, January 8 – The Vikings invade England (SOTW) and Alfred the Great. We’ll use both SOTW and Diana Waring (beginning around p. 133) for this day. We’ll also spend a little bit of time enjoying some stanzas from G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse (about Alfred the Great) which can be found here at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1719/1719-h/1719-h.htm  Time permitting, have S. read the Alfred the Great chapter from Greenleaf and do some writing in her notebook.

Here’s how I amended this lesson at the end of the day:

We DID use both SOTW and Waring on Alfred and the Vikings, but I decided to read the section from English Literature for Boys and Girls instead of having Sarah read from Greenleaf. I’ve assigned her that reading…and some of the reading from the Alfred the Great Jackdaw…in preparation for a description she’s going to write of Alfred. We didn’t get to the Chesterton, but I think I will pull some of that together Monday. With our French studies beginning then, I think I will likely only have S. work on her Alfred report that day, rather than pushing ahead to Battle of Hastings.

While I’m aware that this kind of flexible planning might not work for everyone (and would, in fact, probably drive some types of teachers/learners crazy) it works for us. And one of the beauties of homeschooling is that I know I have the freedom to change this up if it’s not working well, or when it’s time to challenge her to even more independence in history learning.

Surprised by Lack of Joy: A Review of Alister McGrath's C.S. Lewis: A Life

C.S. Lewis’ writing has fundamentally shaped the way I look at the world. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way about Lewis, whose work—as scholar, fantasy writer, theologian, and apologist— has profoundly influenced and shaped many people.

When you know the general contours of someone’s life and thought, it can be pure pleasure to rehearse those lines again, and picking up a biography about him can be an exercise in familiar delight. On the other hand, a new biography is precisely that – new – and there’s always the realization that by the time you reach the end of it, you will undoubtedly have learned things you never knew before. Even when it’s a biography of someone you know well, a guide has opened up a new doorway into their world, and it can take a while to feel at home there.

So slipping into Alister McGrath’s C.S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet was both a foray into an unknown country and an exploration of a landscape that looked hauntingly familiar. It turned out not to be the most exhilarating walk I’d ever taken in Lewis country. Nonetheless, there were signs and wayposts that I enjoyed there, and I can see why it’s been lauded as an important book.

Let me list a few of the elements that make it valuable:

• A solid, comprehensive book, it provides a fairly detailed chronology of Lewis’ life and writings. McGrath, himself an Oxford professor, is the first biographer to have taken full advantage of the complete letters of Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper) now available. He names the letters the backbone of his narrative.

•  The book is valuable for its notes and lengthy works consulted list alone, and the acknowledgments read like a “who’s who” of recent, important Lewis scholarship. He is indebted to conversations with some of my favorite recent writers on Lewis, such as Alan Jacobs and Michael Ward.

•  I think this is probably also the first Lewis biography I’ve ever seen that so carefully works through the books published in his lifetime, weaving them into the chronology of Lewis’ life. It’s eye-opening to see what was going on in Lewis’ life when he was working on certain books, and what experiences in his life and thinking helped shape his canon. McGrath also provides a synopsis of each work. This feels especially valuable with some of Lewis’ older and lesser-known works like The Pilgrim’s Regress.

•  It provides detailed evidence, mostly based on careful noting of dates in letters, that in Surprised by Joy, Lewis named the wrong year (1929) for his conversion to Christianity. McGrath argues convincingly that the date should be 1930, a point I found interesting but belabored. It’s not extraordinary that Lewis, who never much liked numbers, might have gotten the date mixed up, and while it’s interesting that previous scholars haven’t noticed or brought attention to the slip, there’s little to be said for the significance of the later dating beyond the fact that it makes a great deal of emotional and spiritual sense to realize that Lewis’ father’s death probably compelled him forward in his faith journey. Given Lewis’ complicated relationship with his father, and the remorse he felt later about his treatment of his father when he was ill, it would be hard not to speculate that his father’s death had that kind of influence, though since Lewis himself doesn’t seem to write about that anywhere, it’s hard to take the thought much further.

Beyond the book’s general comprehensiveness, McGrath brought out some important insights that I hadn’t pondered much before. Here are a few of the insights I found most memorable:

• Lewis’ identity as someone who was born and raised (till the age of 10) in Belfast, and then spent the majority of his life in England. McGrath, himself an Oxford transplant from Belfast, raises interesting thoughts about why Ireland has not embraced Lewis as a native son, and about Lewis’ conscious self-identity as a British rather than (nationalist) Irish writer. “His Irish identity, inspired by Ireland’s landscape rather than its political history, would find its expression in the literary mainstream, not one of its ‘side-tracks,’” writes McGrath, adding “Lewis may have chosen to rise above the provinciality of Irish literature; he nevertheless remains one of its most luminous and famous representatives.” (pp 13-14) He leaves that intriguing thought there; other writers, like Harry Blamires, have explored the question of Lewis’ intrinsic Irishness in more depth.

•  Lewis’ brilliance as a scholar but his sometimes uneasy fit within the world of academia. McGrath’s understanding of the British school system and particularly the world of Oxford was very helpful for this American woman with a humble master’s degree. I still don’t pretend to understand all the politics of Lewis’ Oxford days, but having a deeper glimpse into that world helped me to at least begin to understand how oddly Lewis (with his very public commitment to Christianity) was perceived by some of his colleagues and why he was passed over for scholarly chairs and honors that he seemed to deserve.

•  The differing and yet overlapping seasons of Lewis’ work as apologist and writer of imaginative fiction. McGrath neatly debunks, as have some others before him, the notion that it was Lewis’ public drubbing in a debate with Elizabeth Anscombe that caused him to make an abrupt turn from apologetics to the writing of imaginative fantasy. This odd speculation by earlier Lewis biographer A.N. Wilson doesn’t hold water, and McGrath pokes satisfying holes in the theory. To do this, he relies first on his understanding of the nature of the Socratic Club, helping readers to see that this debate was in the tried and true academic vein of one colleague offering a sharp and specific scholarly critique to another. While Lewis clearly didn’t enjoy the public setting-down, he appreciated Anscombe’s critique of his particular argument enough to use it to hone his argument in a subsequent revision of the pertinent chapter in Miracles. Secondly, McGrath makes the valid point that Lewis’ supposed turn to imaginative fiction, and its ability to capture minds and hearts and to convey theological convictions, had already begun a number of years before when he wrote the Ransom trilogy.

• What he does take up quite helpfully is Lewis’ growing weariness in the role of public apologist, not for any abrupt reason (like being bested in one debate) but for a host of interwoven and very human reasons. This included Lewis’ weariness with public life in general: publicity seemed to weigh heavily on him, not only because it affected his professional, academic life, but because he took his role as apologist so seriously. He also suggests that the post-war Lewis was beginning to feel as though it was time to make room for younger voices in the field. McGrath also speculates that Lewis felt weary because, with all his success as an apologist, he felt singularly unsuccessful in his ability to convince two of the closest people in his life of the validity and importance of the Christian faith. He writes: “Mrs. Moore remained hostile to Christianity throughout her later life, and (Arthur) Greeves moved away from his somewhat austere Ulster Protestantism to an equally austere Unitarianism.” (p. 259) This is a consideration I had never pondered, but given his long-term affection and loyalty to both of these people, it rings heart-rendingly true.

• McGrath’s biography also provides an entire section, two chapters out of fifteen, to Narnia. Within these chapters, he provides a good but by necessity somewhat cursory overview of the creation of the series and its place in Lewis’ canon and overall legacy. He covers many issues of importance to Narnia readers and scholars, including the preferred reading order of the books (and what Lewis said and didn’t say about that); the recent important interpretive lens of medieval cosmology that Michael Ward has presented as a key to unlocking further meaning and depth in the series; and a brief response to critics who charge Lewis with misogyny. While I can understand his desire to acknowledge that issue, I almost wish he hadn’t taken it up at all given the lack of space and time he was able to give it, as it basically just rehashes old issues without offering substantive analysis or defense. He makes the suggestion that Lewis was ahead of his time but behind our own (an odd assertion and one that smacks a bit of chronological snobbery).

My main struggles with the biography both centered, ironically, around joy.

The first and easiest challenge to pinpoint is McGrath’s treatment of Lewis’ relationship with his wife Joy Davidman Gresham. He paints Lewis’ relationship with Davidman (as he refers to her) in an almost completely negative light. At first, I was puzzled by the tone and thought perhaps I was either mistaking it or that he would eventually, given their happiness in their final years together, move toward a more positive assessment, but it never really happened.

While it’s true that Lewis’s relationship with Joy was unusual from the first, and remained puzzling to some of Lewis’ close friends, it seemed odd to me that McGrath was so selective about what and whom he chose to quote. For a biography that seems to be attempting some critical distance from its subject (he resists the use of Jack in referring to Lewis, he doesn’t seem to overtly rely on conversations with anyone still alive who knew Lewis) the section on Lewis’ marriage seems awash with negative connotations. Davidman comes across as aggressive and predatory, and McGrath seems to see no sense in the fact that Lewis came to love her (he goes out of his way to point out that Ruth Pitter would have made a more likely soul mate for Lewis).

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the language that McGrath uses as he begins to describe Joy and her relationship with Lewis. Others “sought Lewis’ advice, Davidman “sought his soul.” Her “intention” was “to seduce Lewis.” Her poems of the period show her intention “to melt” the glacial figure of Lewis “through a heady mixture of intellectual sophistication and physical allure” (p. 323). Her “real intention” in visiting England was to befriend Lewis. She “initiated” correspondence and contact. Lewis “hurriedly” replaced one “chaperone” with another when lunching with her (though McGrath readily admits no one actually used the word chaperone in this situation). Davidman “made all the moves” and perhaps saw Lewis as a “possible vehicle” in helping her transplant from the U.S. to England (pp 324-325).

And so on. I would go on, but it continues in that vein for the remainder of the section. McGrath seems so determined to debunk the Hollywood image of Joy (the movie “Shadowlands” took liberties when depicting her and her marriage to Lewis) but ends up creating an unsympathetic portrait that, in its own way, also feels inaccurate. No one who has read much about her would deny that Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis was a bold, sometimes brash, always passionate woman, but those attributes can have positive as well as negative connotations. McGrath’s dislike of her feels subtle but pervasive, painting her as a manipulative interloper whose only contribution was that she turned out to be a good “midwife” for some of Lewis’ later and best respected works, an appellation I think she justly not grudgingly deserves.

I was happy to see that I was not alone in my response to this section of McGrath’s book. For a fuller and very helpful response, I would recommend that you read Gina Dalfonzo’s “C.S. Lewis’ Joy in Marriage,” at Christianity Today, which not only corrects McGrath’s portrait on certain points but also presents some of Lewis’ own words about his wife. One would certainly hope that Lewis’ views in this important matter should be consulted and trusted.

One happy byproduct of my wrestling with this section is that it led me to the book Out of My Bone, the collected letters of Joy Davidman, edited by Don W. King and published by Eerdmans in 2009. I’m only 75 pages in, still deep into Joy’s pre-Christian, Communist years, and I have already laughed out loud and found myself nodding in deep appreciation for her literary insights, keen mind, and outright wit. The Davidman found there in her own words practically leaps off the pages.

In the end, that may have been my biggest overall struggle with McGrath’s biography of Lewis: no one, not even Lewis himself, leaps off the page. This portrait lacks vitality and joy. While it is easy to appreciate the neat and detailed orderliness of the account, especially the account of Lewis’ writings, the book seems to serve more as historical chronicle than interpretive biography, with the exception of a few places where some strong biases show through. Beyond chronology, there is no strong, overall lens to guide us through the narrative.

McGrath makes an interesting case, in his chapters on Narnia, for the importance of subtitles (which he sees as key to noting the proper reading order of the series). Taking a nudge from that, I tried to invest McGrath’s own subtitle “Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet” with more interpretive influence as I reflected on the book as a whole, but even that doesn’t help as much as I expected. Lewis’ genius has never been in question, and while he certainly had some eccentricities, it doesn’t seem to me that he had more than most complex people (and the older I get, the more convinced I become that almost everyone I know is complex). McGrath points out Lewis’ tendency toward secrecy in various aspects of his life, but I’m not sure how odd this tendency really is given his temperament and his life situation, including his brother’s alcoholism.

Nor am I entirely sure about the “reluctant prophet” part. Lewis once famously called himself a “reluctant convert,” but once he embraced the Christian faith, he did so with a winsome wholeheartedness. That doesn’t mean his faith didn’t have weary seasons or that his wrestling with his calling didn’t have times of raggedness, but the overall portrait one gets from Lewis’ own writings, and from those who knew him best, is that this was a man with an enormous love for God and people. While it is true that his prophetic critique of modernity did not always win him accolades or professional ease, he nonetheless chose to embrace that role, and the role of public apologist, despite the personal costs.

Some of Lewis’decisions likely brought him discomfort, but his overall embrace of his faith and calling seems to have moved him ever more deeply into joy. It’s this Lewis that I felt I caught only fleeting glimpses of in McGrath’s carefully researched narrative. God surprised Lewis by winning him to faith in the first place, and it seems likely that God continued to surprise him – with the opportunity to be a public voice for faith in wartime Britain, with the sudden vision of a faun in a wood that led him to write stories for children, with a brash, bold, and funny American woman who would become his beloved soul mate and  wife. Such surprises may not have always led to the easiest and most comfortable of lives, but they led Lewis into the places where God most  wanted him to be.

Thoughts to Ponder: Writers for Life

One of the habits I’ve cultivated over the years is collecting quotes. I used to jot them 

down in my journal, and while I still do that sometimes, these days I am more likely to past them (or type them, depending on where I find them) into a document on my computer. I add scripture verses, snippets of poetry, prayers, and inspiring quotes from all sorts of sources, and the ultimate collection can get pretty long (last year’s ran 13 pages). So each year I start a fresh document, labeled with the new year, and begin again.

I thought that from time to time, I’d post one of my daybook quotes here. I kicked off 2014 with these words I so resonated with from C.S. Lewis scholar Don W. King:

“Each of us should find a writer

we can read for the rest of our lives.”

sweetclipart.com

Lewis may be the writer that is truest of for me. But also L’Engle, Tolkien, Austen. Sayers is moving toward that list as well. And Eugene Peterson. I go through seasons where I read them more or less, but I go back to all of these particular writers a lot, never feeling like I’ve exhausted what they have to say. They are also writers I love to read about – biography, literary analysis, appreciation.

With Lewis, I always feel especially glad that I have so much more of his work to read…I don’t think I could ever exhaust it. Even if I eventually read it all, it always bears repeat readings. That’s also true of Tolkien.

I’ve probably come closest to reading everything of L’Engle’s. In my late teens and early-mid twenties, I went out of my way to collect as much of her work as I could, even the harder to find things (and for at least a handful of Christmases, my family did an amazing job of giving me hard-to-find L’Engle books). She was hugely formative in my developing spiritual life, and while there are a few books of hers that I feel I’ve somewhat outgrown (not, by the way, her children’s books) many of them I still revisit often, and a few of them have deep places of honor in my mind and heart.

I’ve purposely not ever read all of Austen’s letters, her juvenalia, or her incomplete novel, mostly because I don’t want to say I’ve read everything she’s written! I’ve read most if not all of Sayers’ novels, and also Mind of the Maker, but only some of her drama and essays, and not many of her letters. Peterson is so prolific that I don’t think I could possibly exhaust all of his work, but I like knowing so much of it is there, and that I can always drink deep when I turn to him.

One reason why Lewis has moved to the top of my list over the years, besides the obvious richness to be found in his work, is that he is the kind of writer one really can visit in different seasons and moods. Narnia was my foray into Lewis’ world, and I entered it around the age of ten. But I still revisit Narnia, and I still find more there to learn and ponder and enjoy and love thirty-five years after I first read the books. They are perhaps richer for my having visited them so often, and richer still because I’ve now read so many others books by (and about) Lewis, including books it took me a while to be ready for. Essentially, he is not a writer I ever outgrow – he’s always somewhere I feel I need and want to be, saying something I need and want to hear, challenging me, delighting me, at different seasons and times in my life.

Is there a writer, or writers, that you feel you could read for the rest of your life?

A Little Year in Review

Reflecting a bit on the year just past. Would love to hear your reflections too.

More reflections on favorite books from 2013 to come. For now...Happy 2014!

Someone/something you’re especially grateful for:  God’s love, and the sustaining prayers and caring of friends.

A special moment that stands out in your mind: Relaxing at the beach in Lake Erie with my husband and daughter.

A challenge or difficulty you faced: Helping someone I love go through something challenging and hard. Financial stress.

Something you learned as you navigated the above: To lean deeper and trust God for the strength I need.

A news moment that you recall with clarity: The death of Nelson Mandela.

Something or someone you missed: I miss my extended family (far-flung over geographic distance).

Something you feel nostalgic for: Respect for leaders and more civil conversations about issues of public concern.

A book you read and enjoyed: Listening for Madeleine by Leonard S. Marcus. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle.

A movie you enjoyed watching: Les Mis. Also Star Trek: Into Darkness.

A song you enjoyed listening to:  Speak, O Lord by Keith and Kristyn Getty.

Also Wild Child by Enya. (My eleven year old went crazy for Enya this year, and this song felt like the soundtrack to a lot of our days!)

An encouraging or inspiring quote you thought about:  "After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again." (~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

And from Galatians 5:22-23 (the Message):

"But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely."

Something you did that was new or surprising: Got past chapter 3 in the novel I’m writing. Earned more income from writing than teaching.

Something you wish you had more of in your life: Patience. And writing time.

Something you wish you had less of in your life: Worry.

A word or phrase that captures something about your year:  “My work…is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished” (Mary Oliver)