Jonathan Rogers is the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, one of the finest biographies of Flannery O’Connor we've ever read. His other books include the Wilderking Trilogy–The Bark of the Bog Owl, The Secret of the Swamp King, and The Way of the Wilderking–as well as The World According to Narnia and a biography of Saint Patrick. He has spent most of his adult life in Nashville, Tennessee, where he and his wife Lou Alice are raising a houseful of robustious children. Jonathan Rogers is the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, one of the finest biographies of Flannery O’Connor we've ever read. His other books include the Wilderking Trilogy–The Bark of the Bog Owl, The Secret of the Swamp King, and The Way of the Wilderking–as well as The World According to Narnia and a biography of Saint Patrick. He has spent most of his adult life in Nashville, Tennessee, where he and his wife Lou Alice are raising a houseful of robustious children. A Habit of Friendship
[Editor’s note: This post first appeared in Jonathan’s weekly Habit newsletter. To learn more and sign up, click the link at the end.]
I call this letter (and my podcast, and my membership site) The Habit because, to quote Flannery O’Connor, “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits.” To continue quoting Milledgeville’s favorite daughter…
Read More ›Release Day Review: Hidden in Shadow by Janna Barber
Every month the moon grows to fullness, wanes to nothing, then grows back toward fullness again. That’s how it looks from here, anyway. In fact, the moon is just the moon, always there and always the same size, however it appears to us.
Read More ›Cunning and Prudence: Some Thoughts on Persuasion
Through language we are able to create realities. We do it every day. Persuading, encouraging, fear-mongering, story-telling, teaching, selling, insulting, begging—these are just a small sampling of the ways we create and/or rearrange inward realities in other people.
Read More ›It’s Not Your Job to Be a Genius
The first TED talk I remember ever watching was “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” by Elizabeth Gilbert, in 2009. If you aren’t among the 19 million people (literally) who have watched this talk, or if you just want to relive the magic, here’s the link. There’s a lot of good stuff in that talk, but the thing that has most stuck with me these eleven years is Gilbert’s account of the way the word “genius” has changed through the centuries.
Read More ›Realism of Presentation, Realism of Content
In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis puts a finger on one of the things I love so much about Tolkien, though Lewis is not specifically talking about his good friend Tolkien’s stories. In the chapter “On Realisms,” Lewis distinguishes between what he calls “realism of presentation” and “realism of content.” Realism of presentation refers to those little concrete details that give the world of a story the textures that make it feel like the world God made. Realism of presentation, writes Lewis, “is the art of bringing something close to us, making it palpable and vivid, by sharply observed or sharply imagined detail.”
Read More ›Love and Assent
While reading Wendell Berry’s story collection, That Distant Land, I was struck by this description of a character named Martha Elizabeth Coulter:
She was a woman always near to smiling, sometimes to laughter. Her face, it seems, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever or whomever she looked at.
—Wendell Berry, That Distant Land
I don’t know whether Wendell Berry is a student of Thomas Aquinas, but that description of Martha Elizabeth as a person who “assented wholly to the being” of the people and things around her sounds like the kind of thing Aquinas would say.
Read More ›Release Day Review: On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness
Twelve years ago this month, Waterbrook Press released On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, Book 1 of Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga. I counted it a privilege to be allowed to write the Rabbit Room’s release day review of the book. At the time, the Rabbit Room was barely six months old. There was no Hutchmoot, no Rabbit Room Press, no Local Show, no Chinwag, no North Wind Manor. There was just the blog, with a small but very loyal readership.
Read More ›The Fondue Pot Principle
One day I needed a fondue pot. A fondue pot is not something one wants to buy. I have lived over 18,000 days now, and on exactly ONE of those days have I wished I had a fondue pot. But the day in question was that day. So I went to Facebook and put out an all-call for a fondue pot.
Read More ›The Leaf-Mould of the Mind: On Influence, Conscious and Unconscious
Speaking of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote. . .
Read More ›On the Impracticality of Beauty—and the Practicality of Showing Up
A cynic remarked that last week’s fire at Notre Dame has turned out to be an excellent excuse for social media users to post pictures of their vacations in Paris. A less cynical interpretation is that the fire at Notre Dame prompted social media users to memorialize an encounter with a work of art and beauty that reminded them that they were living in a bigger story than they typically thought.
Read More ›Field Notes for Writers
Writing is the act of sitting alone and trying to connect with other people, some of whom may not even be born yet.
By necessity, writing is a solitary enterprise. When it comes time to put words on a page you have to go somewhere and be by yourself. Nevertheless, writers need other people.
Read More ›Talk to Strangers—Everybody Has a Story
In a recent episode of the Radiolab podcast, producer Latif Nasser shares some of his techniques for finding stories to research and write about. The episode grows from this article, in which Nasser offers even more techniques, which range from setting Google alerts to rummaging around in library collections of personal papers and oral histories to repeatedly clicking the “random article” button on Wikipedia.