This piece was written for the September issue of the Lee Creek Baptist Church newsletter, Grace & Peace. If you were to take a look at my living room end table, you’d find a stack of books with coupons and slips of paper tucked in them halfway through. This is because I have an old … Continue reading Visit Many Good Books
Jared and I were talking to a dad from our church recently, and he was telling us about how he reads to his kids before bed most nights. On the way home, I told Jared about the books my dad would read to us at bedtime, and how we’d all sprawl across the living room … Continue reading Where the Green Train Goes
Books are a love language, and one of the ways Jared demonstrated his love for me early on was by lending me his pastoral library. I love books, Jared loves books (he has more than I do), and he’s always been generous with them. I’d come home from my visits to Arkansas with commentaries and … Continue reading Two Little Tributes
We read Miss Twiggley’s Tree so many times that both covers tore off, including the final page of the book, which offered the moral of the story. But the last page I had was enough. It pictured the inside of Miss Twiggley’s house, tucked deep in the boughs of a willow tree, where the entire … Continue reading A Set Table in a Safe Tree
A good writer is one who recognizes that there is always more to the story than they're capable of telling. The world is vast, and they will never come to the end of it. John wrote his gospel with this humbly in mind. He had undertaken the formidable task of writing about his Rabbi and … Continue reading All the Books in Eldredge Public Library
One of the main characters in Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, is the river itself, which moves through the story like Jayber does, picking things up as it goes, sometimes setting them down again. The river is always changing---sometimes fat and angry, “as if the mountains had melted and were flowing to the sea.” In … Continue reading Everywhere the River Goes
Here is something I didn't expect when I began coaching writers--- I never thought I'd travel so far. It's a cliche to say that reading lets you travel the world, but when you rally a group of writers around a table, you're really in for an expedition. Writers write stories, and stories need people inside … Continue reading Circumnavigators
Whenever Papa Larry tells of the lavender farm he and Nanny visited up in Maine, I stop to listen, because I can almost smell the sweetness of flowers and sea. And then he'll reminisce to when they met the Lupine Lady herself--- Mrs. Barabara Cooney, who wrote the book Miss Rumphius. This past Christmas, Joel … Continue reading Acres of Lupines
I came down the drive tonight just before the rainstorm, and the lamp was on, and the fan moving thick air through the front room, and you weren't home. You'd taken a train to the sea, then a steamship across, and were walking Berlin in 1943, and the bikes were ringing under the bombers (and … Continue reading Girl on the Train
I remember reading where C.S. Lewis and his friends (J.R.R. Tolkien among them) would sometimes walk a days’ journey across the English countryside together, stop at a pub for beer and rest, then take up their walking sticks again the next morning. “It was an idyllic way to spend three or four days. Footpaths were … Continue reading Writers On Walking
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