by Russ Ramsey
Allow me to introduce you to this special Limited Rabbit Room Edition of Rembrandt is in the Wind. I dedicated this book to my art teachers from middle school and high school because they played a formative role in developing my love for art. The Rabbit Room played a similar role in my desire to write.
Back in 2007, I received an email from Andrew Peterson asking if I would like to be part of an online community he was hoping to build—a place, he said, “where you’ll find writings and reviews by artists and appreciators of art, conversations about creation, storytelling, songwriting, and the long journey of becoming who we’re meant to be.” The idea was that we would focus on the kind of art, books, music, film, and ideas we’d recommend to a friend over lunch—just the good stuff. I believe my first articles were about the TV series Band of Brothers and Phil Keaggy’s instrumental masterpiece Beyond Nature.
(Good grief, I just went back and reread those two essays from 15 years ago. You can see hints of the newness of the Rabbit Room in those posts, and I can see a young writer trying some things out—some of which I’ve developed over the years and kept, others of which I have moved on from. Such is the way of the writer. You can also find an old relic of a video featuring Stuart Duncan and the Captains Courageous from the recording sessions for Resurrection Letters II—circa 2007—if you follow a link in one of the essays. You’re gonna want to watch that video.)
Writing for The Rabbit Room was my first experience with crafting pieces that were intended to be read by a largely anonymous audience. One byproduct of being part of this gathering of writers was that we had the opportunity to help each other develop. We shared early drafts, experimented with style, and received honest feedback. The Rabbit Room is where I first learned about my voice as a writer. Who was I? What did I have to say? How would I go about saying it? This community is where I worked through all of that and so much more early on as I developed in this craft I love so much.
Because of this history, I cannot begin to tell you how much it pleases me that Zondervan wanted to do a limited edition of one of my books with The Rabbit Room. How is the Limited Rabbit Room Edition different from the original Zondervan Reflective edition? It is full color throughout with a larger trim size and a lovely blue bookmark ribbon. Also, the team at Zondervan took the time to completely redo the page layout so that they could place all the images I included in line with the text where they are mentioned—no flipping back and forth to the full-color insert in the middle. Finally, it truly is a limited edition. They didn’t print many, and when they’re gone, there will be no second run.
So it is with no small amount of gratitude to Andrew and the entire Rabbit Room community that we, together with the fine team at Zondervan Reflective, offer this beautiful limited edition of a book I know I would not have written had it not been for this community.
I hope you enjoy it.
Click here to order the new limited full-color hardcover edition of Rembrandt Is In The Wind from the Rabbit Room store.
Russ Ramsey is the pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church Cool Springs in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and four children. He grew up in the fields of Indiana and studied at Taylor University and Covenant Theological Seminary (MDiv, ThM). Russ is the author of the Retelling the Story Series (IVP, 2018) and Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death (IVP, 2017).