A Power Made Perfect in Weakness

The Song at the Scaffold and Little Souls

Recent Reads

Aug 29, 2025

Sometimes, everything I happen to read—novels, essays, and spiritual books—seems to coalesce around a particular theme. In a matter of weeks, I encountered the Carmelites of Compiègne, who were martyred during the Reign of Terror, in three different places.

In his do-it-yourself retreat entitled Consoling the Heart of Jesus, Father Michael E. Gaitley tells the story of certain “super-nuns” of the Carmelite order who asked God to lay on them the punishment due to poor sinners as an offering to His Divine Justice. “Amazingly,” Father Gaitley writes, “the Lord accepted such deals.” These “big souls” would then fall ill and/or suffer greatly, offering their pains to God for the sinners’ conversion. Gaitley goes on to quote St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s mic-drop response more than a century later:

This offering seemed great and very generous to me, but I was far from feeling attracted to making it.

Wow. If a great Carmelite saint like Thérèse could feel this way, perhaps there is hope for a lover of comfort like me! St. Thérèse suffered much from her illness during her short life. But instead of making this offering to Divine Justice, she chose the soaringly beautiful Offering to Merciful Love, which is found in The Story of a Soul and quoted by Father Gaitley:

If Your Justice loves to release itself, this Justice which extends only over the earth, how much more does Your Merciful Love desire to set souls on fire since Your Mercy reaches to the heavens? O my Jesus, let me be this happy victim; consume Your holocaust with the fire of Your Divine Love! (emphasis in original).

I find this very consoling. As I have written before, certain offerings naturally fit our charisms better than others. To me, the Offering to Merciful Love feels like a much easier yoke to carry.

The Song at the Scaffold by Gertrud von Le Fort made me reflect on what it means to be a “little soul” after the example of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In this short novel, Blanche de la Force is born early after her pregnant mother is dragged from her carriage when her panicked horse plunges into a crowd. This omen casts a long shadow over Blanche: “the great fear in her childish gaze penetrated the firm exterior of a sheltered life to a core of terrible frailty.” Blanche seeks constant reassurance that the very stairs of her home will not collapse under her feet. And while Blanche finds protectors and guides in the Carmelite order, she will never be entirely free of her fear. Her novice mistress, Sister Marie, will eventually say,

“Must fear and horror always be evil? Is it not possible that they may be deeper than courage, something that corresponds far more to the reality of things, to the terrors of the world, and to our own weakness?”

Sister Marie is herself a “great soul,” the natural daughter of a prince who longs to die as a martyr for the salvation of France. But while Sister Marie fears that her offering has been rejected by God, Blanche’s name in religion, “Jésus au Jardin de l’Agonie,” unites her to Christ’s mortal dread in the garden of Gethsemane. Blanche’s story calls to mind St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, where he begs the Lord to remove a thorn from his side: “And He has said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.’” In her weakness and littleness, Blanche epitomizes the “little way” of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux.

In the end, even the “great souls” of the Carmelite order must abandon themselves to whatever use God will choose to make of their sacrifice. In his recent essay marking the feast of the newly canonized Carmelites of Compiègne, Donald Jacob Uitvlegt offers this interpretation:

Ten days after the martyrdom, the Reign of Terror came to an end with the execution of Robespierre on July 28, 1794. Though the struggle of the Church in France was by no means over, one wonders if the blood of the martyrs again was the seed of the Church, for in the nineteenth century, one finds such glories in French Catholicism as St Jean Vianney, St Bernadette Soubirous, St Théophane Vénard, and St Thérèse of Lisieux.

Mic drop, indeed. Holy Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, pray for us!

For Book Clubs

Discussion Questions for The Bicycle Messenger

Recent Reads

Aug 15, 2025

Please pray for all those who have been impacted by flash flooding in southeastern Wisconsin and for everyone involved in the recovery effort.

We had a wonderful time launching The Bicycle Messenger at the Village Cheese Shop here in Wauwatosa on August 3. If you’ve found time to open the book in these last days of summer, THANK YOU! If you are considering reading The Bicycle Messenger with your book club, I’ve compiled a few questions that might help guide your discussion.

Reading Group Discussion Questions for The Bicycle Messenger

1. The story is narrated by three people: Steven’s adoptive mother Mary Ellen, his girlfriend Megan, and his sister Margaret. Which of these characters did you identify with the most? Did any of them frustrate you with her actions or her omissions?

2. At the beginning of the story, Mary Ellen keeps her bank account secret from her husband. Later, Megan keeps her own plans secret from Steven. Is it ever appropriate to keep secrets? How does a lack of candor distort the relationships between the characters?

3. The Holocaust represents an extreme case of xenophobia, or the hatred of strangers. Fear of mental illness in others could also be considered xenophobia. Do you see this fear playing out in Steven’s relationships? Did your view of Beatrycze, Steven’s birth mother, change over the course of your reading?

4. How are we called to accompany people dealing with mental illness and/or past trauma? Which characters best exemplify a compassionate response?

5. Three different characters are faced with unexpected pregnancy in the story, and each one makes, or at least contemplates, a different decision. How do the other characters support or hinder them in choosing life for their children? Can you imagine ways to more effectively empower women to choose life, whatever their circumstances?

6. Near the end of her life, Mary Ellen tells Margaret that “The only trouble [with adoption] is, in order for you to receive a child, some other poor woman has to let one go.” What are your experiences surrounding adoption? How have our attitudes and practices regarding adoption changed over the years?

7. Have you ever experienced estrangement from family or friends? If you were able to resolve it, how did it happen?

8. As a child, Steven is fascinated with the family’s grandfather clock. Later, Mary Ellen refers to the cycles of Steven’s mental illness as the “seven-year dread.” How is time addressed in the novel? What portents or healings do you see playing out? Have you ever had the opportunity to right a past wrong or console an old hurt?

9. Margaret rescues Steven’s mementoes when he suffers a manic episode. “In Margaret’s mind, keeping the book and the shoebox herself was an act of conservation, even a bulwark against his delusions.” Most families have one person who organizes events, memorabilia, and family stories. Who is that person in your family, and how did they get this role? Does it weigh lightly or heavily on them?

10. The story’s dénouement turns on an act of reading. Are there any books, letters, or newspaper articles that have brought healing or understanding into your life?

If other questions occur to you as you are reading, please share them in the comments! I’d love to hear what resonates and what sparks the liveliest discussions. Most of all, thank you for reading and sharing the book. It means the world to me.

On Baptism and Cultural Memory

One more sneak peek at The Bicycle Messenger

Recent Reads

Aug 01, 2025

It’s almost here! The Bicycle Messenger releases in just a few days! I can’t wait to share it with you. In the meantime, here are three takes on baptism in the story.

  1. Seven-year-old Steven Hawley is conditionally baptized because no one can locate his baptismal record. For the rest of his life, Steven wonders whether his baptism really “counts.”
  2. Steven’s mother agonizes in her uncertainty as to whether her grandson, who died in infancy, was ever baptized. Will she meet him in heaven, or will he spend eternity in limbo? Where is God’s mercy in this?
  3. In 1942, a Catholic priest proposes to rescue a Jewish child from the Kraków ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. Speaking to the child’s devout Jewish grandfather, the priest says, “if we do not baptize them, they will never survive. They must believe themselves to be Christians if they are ever to pass outside these walls.”

A few words on the Catholic Church in the Nazi Era

In her hauntingly beautiful novel of a young Catholic girl who perished in Auschwitz, author Lily Tuck cites Ronald Modras on the state of Catholicism in Nazi-occupied Poland:

During the German occupation, the Polish Catholic Church was in disorder. The Germans killed several thousand priests. In Rome, Pope Pius XII offered little support, instead advocating compromise with Germany. The Polish primate, Cardinal Hlond, had left Poland and had taken refuge in a Benedictine abbey in Savoy, France, and did not offer spiritual aid to his parishioners. Instead, in a 1936 pastoral letter, Cardinal Hlond wrote condemning the Jews: “It is a fact that Jews are waging war against the Catholic Church, that they are steeped in free-thinking, and constitute the vanguard of atheism, the Bolshevik movement, and revolutionary activity. It is a fact that Jews have a corruptive influence on morals and that their publishing houses are spreading pornography. It is true that Jews are perpetrating fraud, practicing usury, and dealing in prostitution.” (56-57)

These are painful words to read. They do not anticipate that a future great saint and Polish pope will undergo his priestly formation in secret under Nazi occupation; they do not anticipate that St. Maximilian Kolbe, arrested shortly after receiving his brilliant insight into Mary’s announcement at Lourdes—I am the Immaculate Conception—will serve the prisoners of Auschwitz faithfully and in secret as priest and confessor, ultimately offering his own life in exchange for that of a man condemned to the starvation bunker.

But while individual members of the church are prone to sin, the truth of the Catholic faith springs from the person of Jesus Christ. As Thomas Merton writes in New Seeds of Contemplation,

the living Tradition of Catholicism is like the breath of a physical body. It renews life by repelling stagnation. It is a constant, quiet, peaceful revolution against death. … only a gift of God can teach us the difference between the dry outer crust of formality which the Church sometimes acquires from the human natures that compose it, and the living inner current of Divine Life which is the only real Catholic tradition.

Getting back to the question of baptism

As I have noted before, there were many acts of specifically Catholic witness during the Holocaust. In her 1986 book When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, Nechama Tec takes a scientific approach to such acts, collating data from numerous personal interviews in order to arrive at a realistic picture of the often-fraught relationship between rescuers and survivors. She tells of one devout Catholic Pole who struggled to reconcile his compassionate impulses with the anti-Semitic sermons he was hearing in church: “‘I am sure to lose both worlds. They will kill me for keeping Jews and then I will lose heaven for helping Jews.’” (146)

Tec makes it clear that not all rescuers intended to rescue anyone; many had their Jewish charges thrust upon them, one way or another. But for members of religious orders or the clergy who set out to rescue Jewish children, the question of baptism takes on cultural and spiritual urgency.

Were Jewish children baptized and saved because the Church wanted converts? Or were these children raised as Catholics because this gave them a better chance to stay alive?

Or both?

In other words, did we baptize them in order to save them — or did we baptize them in order to save them?

While admitting that children accepted into a Catholic institution were baptized, Dunski [a devout Catholic rescuer] said that this was done for safety. By becoming baptized[,] Jewish children saw themselves as Christian and therefore could more easily adjust to their new identity. … Young survivors I interviewed mentioned the comforting and soothing effect that the Catholic religion had upon them. … [T]here are many cases on record showing reluctance to baptize these children without the permission of their Jewish guardians. (141-142)

In writing The Bicycle Messenger, I was intensely drawn to the conflict within the soul of a man who knows that the only way to save a child in his care is to offer her into the hands of a priest whose creed he does not understand. As for the child’s mother—well, if you want her side of the story, you’ll have to read the book.

The Bicycle Messenger on Location

Dog-sitting and old haunts

Recent Reads

Jul 18, 2025

The Neptune Gate at Milwaukee’s Villa Terrace

A very dear friend asked me to dog-sit while she helped her daughter move to a new city post-graduation. Archie is an intelligent poodle/Australian shepherd mix with one blue eye and one brown, and he goes into raptures whenever we haven’t seen each other in a while—as in, when I get up in the morning, or when I return to the house after going outside for a few minutes. Archie loves to ride in the car, so after he’d snoozed at my feet while I worked at my laptop, I took him down to the shores of Lake Michigan to visit one of my favorite East Side landmarks.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

There’s an eerie moment in The Bicycle Messenger when Steven and his girlfriend Megan pause outside this magnificent wrought-iron gate to gaze up at a renaissance-style villa perched high on a bluff overlooking Milwaukee’s lakefront. It’s 1992, and the villa’s grounds are neglected; the terraced gardens won’t be restored for another few years. But Steven reports an impossible, visceral memory of having been to the place as a child.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Some great man’s house?”

“It used to be. It’s called Villa Terrace.”

Megan stared up at it. The place reminded her of an opera house, its art deco gate like the cage of an old-fashioned elevator.

“I came here for a concert once,” he said. “Inside the courtyard.”

“You did? What kind of concert?”

“A string quartet maybe? I don’t really remember. It was a long time ago.”

Megan nodded, peering in at the empty fountain. At the top of the gate, Steven said, was a figure of Neptune in bas relief, but he faced the inside, so all you could see from the back was a scalloped seashell. Megan noticed the prongs of his trident extending beyond the semicircular top of the gate, like the oversized minute hand on a cartoon clock—pointing, as it were, to a fateful hour about to strike. She put the strange thought aside.

“The garden was lovely back then—not like it is now,” Steven went on. “There was a water staircase right there in the middle—”

“A water staircase?”

“A waterfall going down those steps, yeah. And the hedges were all sculpted, and it was full of flowers.”

The water staircase in operation

It’s funny how places look different when you haven’t visited them for a long while. My imagination had rearranged this garden somewhat, bringing the fountain with its spouting bronze fish much further forward toward the gate; it quietly resumed its true spot as I paused with Archie to watch a newly married couple wander the garden near the cascading water staircase. According to the placard outside the main entrance, their names were Ulysses and Joanne. Congratulations, you two!

There’s a grand winding road leading up the bluff; and while I’m in my fifties, I’m currently in better shape than fictional nineteen-year-old Megan, who struggled to match Steven’s long-legged pace on that day. I’ll admit, I took some satisfaction in that. As Archie and I approached the top of the hill, a young couple drove past on a motorcycle. The girl on the back held her slim, tanned arms down at her sides; she wore the man’s helmet, while he was bareheaded. To my right, a young man appeared to rise out of the ground: he’d just hiked straight up the bluff on a well-worn path with a notice that said the hill was hazardous for sledding. It looked hazardous for pedestrians, too.

Archie and I turned left onto Terrace Avenue, where a man with a portable grill off the back of his pickup offered to sell us Usinger’s sausage and brats. Villa Terrace was closed to visitors for a private reception, but as Archie and I walked past the caterer’s van parked at the service entrance, I imagined Steven climbing out of a similar vehicle to serve canapes at a similar wedding. He and Megan felt as real to me in that moment as the man with the grill or the couple on the motorcycle.

The Nort Point Water Tower, completed in 1874

After visiting Villa Terrace, Megan and Steven would have waited for the bus right about here. It wasn’t until I read Blue Walls Falling Down by Joshua Hren that I learned there was a winding staircase inside this water tower. I’m not sure if visitors are still allowed to climb to the top; dogs most certainly would not be. Besides, Archie was getting tired.

One great thing about dogs—especially other people’s dogs—is that they ask no questions. Thanks for lending him to me, Nancy. We’ll be on our way to the airport to pick you up soon.

Welcome The Stranger

Which of the corporal works of mercy most attracts you?

Recent Reads

Jul 05, 2025

Early in The Bicycle Messenger, Mary Ellen and Charles Hawley learn of the existence of a young relative in need of a home. Seven-year-old Steven has just lost his father to cancer; and according to the silk-stocking attorney who serves as Steven’s guardian ad litem, his birth mother is in no fit state to assume custody.

“This puts you under no obligation, of course,” Mr. Simeon went on. “You are perfectly free to release him to the state’s care.”

“And what would happen to him then?” Mary Ellen asked.

“We would of course exhaust every effort to locate other relatives,” Mr. Simeon replied. “But I can tell you, I think it’s extremely unlikely that we will be successful. If we are not, he would remain in the foster care system until he could be placed for adoption, or until he reaches the age of eighteen.”

Imagine yourself sitting across a polished desk from this man whose cufflinks alone are worth more than your car. What would you do?

I have often been called to welcome the stranger in my life; sometimes I’ve stepped up, and sometimes I’ve hung back. Talk to a new mom on the playground? Definitely a yes. Invite a neighbor who is struggling to find permanent housing to stay in my extra bedroom for a few weeks? Can’t say I ever followed through on that idea. In large ways and small, we all have to discern how to best serve the people closest to us.

According to the USCCB, the corporal works of mercy are feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and imprisoned, bury the dead, and give alms to the poor. While the directive to welcome the stranger is not listed among them, it can be found in the parable of the sheep and the goats: “I was a stranger, and you welcomed Me” (Mt 25:35). Thus, it is associated with the last judgment and our ultimate place in the kingdom of God. And in practical terms, it maps pretty closely onto the corporal works of mercy listed above.

We all have different charisms that particularly attract us to one or more of these works. Those with the gift of hospitality might excel at lovingly serving the hungry and thirsty, while others who have the gift of consolation might be particularly suited to attend the sick and the dying. In my own writing, I come back again and again to stories of strangers and exiles among us—maybe from guilt, or maybe because of my particular life experiences. Often, it is the missed opportunities or failures that teach us the most.

In The Bicycle Messenger, Mary Ellen and Charles Hawley are called to welcome the stranger into the most intimate relationship of their lives: the family. It wouldn’t be much of a novel if they said no. But as you can probably imagine, Steven’s arrival will change everything.

Which of the works of mercy most particularly speaks to you?

Lately, “Recent Reads” has featured personal essays, but I’m still writing book reviews. You can read my latest, a review of Spare Us Yet by Lucas Smith, in Catholic World Report.

Righteous Among the Nations

A real-life hero appears in The Bicycle Messenger

Recent Reads

Jun 20, 2025

Tadeusz Pankiewicz (photo: Wikipedia Commons)

The Nazis established the Kraków ghetto in Poland in the district of Podgórze in March of 1941, initially cramming some 15,000 people into an area meant to house about 3,000. The previous residents of the district were evicted and given alternate homes or businesses. But one Roman Catholic pharmacist, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, refused to leave: “I understood only too well that the Germans would lose the war, and would destroy my pharmacy, and that I would have to return property that was not mine to its rightful owner or his family when the war ended.”

Pankiewicz was no ordinary man defending his property rights. His business, the “Pod Orłem” or “Under the Eagle” pharmacy, became a locus of communication and aid for the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto until it was fully liquidated in March of 1943. Pankiewicz’s heroic witness and service to the Polish Jews in the Nazi era would prove to be of incalculable value.

In his memoir of the years he spent among the Jewish detainees, Pankiewicz writes with quiet compassion of the many gatherings he hosted and of the underground intelligence that passed through his pharmacy. “[E]very single room was full of friends, especially in the back rooms, whence it was easy to escape through the exit. It is hard to take in the fact that people managed to do it….” When the ghetto was divided in December of 1942,

The dividing line ran right in front of my pharmacy, which ended up in ghetto B. … [T]he inhabitants of ghetto B were all unemployed, generally poor people with nothing to live on. … They occupied empty flats and deserted buildings. Most of them had never been outside the village where they were born and they had never seen a large city in their lives before. … I tried to approach them to find out more about them, but they were like bears trapped in a cage, endlessly walking the length of the barbed wire fence and begging the passers-by in ghetto A for a piece of bread. … Many of them were barefooted, but it was the middle of winter, there was frost on the ground, it was cold indoors and the water in the pipes had generally frozen.

Pankiewicz received word in January of 1943 that the Germans intended to close his pharmacy, but he did not back down.

I presented my case and was given the necessary papers for the SS und Polizeiführer. I now had it in black and white—the closure of the pharmacy would have a detrimental effect on the health of the ghetto residents, and if the Jews were denied medicine, the ghetto would become a hotbed of diseases and epidemics which not even the ghetto walls or barbed wire could contain.

Pankiewicz’s Catholic faith plays a small but crucial part in the fictional Holocaust narrative embedded in The Bicycle Messenger—a narrative that will eventually illuminate many long-standing questions for the book’s present-day characters. In this brief exchange, a desperate young woman approaches Pankiewicz for a sedative for her mother, who has received a great shock:

My eyes filled with tears. The pharmacist reached across the counter and took my hand in both of his. He looked me right in the face, and then a change came over him. I was sure he remembered me because he looked from me to the baby in my arms.

“Does she cry a lot?” he asked.

“She has terrible colic.”

He nodded again, then he turned to search in the drawer behind him. “If the Gestapo come,” he said, “give her this.”

“What is it?”

“Just a small tranquilizer. It will soothe her so you can keep her quiet until they leave.”

An excerpt from The Bicycle Messenger containing this passage was originally published in Last Syllable. You can find it here or on my website, along with some of my short fiction and book reviews. I look forward to sharing the whole book with you August 4!

It’s Almost Here!

On the long wait

Recent Reads

Jun 06, 2025

My debut novel, The Bicycle Messenger, releases at the beginning of August! You can preorder the book here to read the first chapter. In the meantime, take another look at this gorgeous cover art designed by the talented Roseanna White:

The book crosses decades and continents. In the 1970s, Charles and Mary Ellen Hawley adopt seven-year-old Steven when his mother, who suffers from schizophrenia, is unable to care for him. Years later, Steven’s quest for the truth about his family of origin plunges him into the dark history of the Nazi occupation of Poland. But first, Steven falls in love—though his own mental illness impinges upon his burgeoning relationship. In this snippet, Steven’s girlfriend Megan becomes increasingly uneasy as Steven recounts a youthful drunken escapade:

Megan was beginning to wish that Steven hadn’t told her these things. The giddy teenager who’d stepped out of the forest like a wood sprite to gloat over past mischief had withdrawn just as quickly as he’d come; but he frightened her as though she had encountered a magical creature, a shape-shifter whose true nature was something dark, wild, and raging.

Who is Steven Hawley, really? And can Megan stick around long enough to find out?

Publishing a novel has been my life-long dream—ever since my mother used to send my childhood scribblings to her brother, a Jesuit priest, for his amusement. My Jesuit uncle visited every year, and once, he brought a friend who taught English at the university level. This dear friend of his sat down with me for half an hour to analyze the opening paragraph of a Nancy Drew knockoff I’d written (“The Case of the Crystal Swan,” complete with illustrations). I was probably twelve. He’d redlined that first paragraph thoroughly. But then he told me: “you have something here. I can feel it.” Imagine that busy Jesuit, a college professor, taking the time to read and analyze the work of his friend’s twelve-year-old niece. Imagine my uncle taking the time to share it with him. All these kindnesses helped me to see myself as a writer speaking to readers when I was young.

Later, when I was in college, I gave a short story of mine to a friend to read. This friend had done a summer writing workshop somewhere—let’s say it was Harvard. I had a terrible crush on him at the time. He smoked way too much and stayed up all night writing plays that were performed on our campus. He wrote songs and played lead guitar in a band. He tried to explain to me that my story had no structure. He took a sheet of paper and drew a straight line interspersed with the occasional little clump of what looked like mashed potatoes. “This is your plot,” he told me. “There’s no rising action, no crisis.”

I wasn’t sure I entirely agreed with that tough critique; and yet I continued to drift, writing mostly in secret. It took me years to develop a voice and find something to say. Thank God for my husband Paul, who listened and read and understood the effort I was making, helping me to improve even as he crafted his own beautiful novels. (You can read more about Paul’s work here). I’ve already told this story about an agent who eagerly read a previous manuscript of mine but ended up wishing the main character would get hit by a bus. I managed to laugh about that one eventually. Still, after a lot more rejections, I started to worry. What if I never found a way to bring my books into the world? Could I be content if no one else read them but God?

When the Song of Songs speaks of the beloved as “a fountain sealed, a garden enclosed,” I think of Mary’s hidden life in Nazareth, of her perfect surrender of her life and her will to the Lord, who is the true reader of hearts. Even if a book is never published, I thought, surely the writing of it under His tutelage would form me in some way to do His will more faithfully.

But as we all know, Mary’s hidden life produced beautiful fruit; and a book, which is also God’s gift, is meant to be read. A book without a reader is like an empty dish, a cup that will never be filled, a garden enclosed that never bears fruit. I’m so grateful to my husband for reading for me all these years. And I love to read and promote the work of contemporary Catholic novelists and poets, because good writers need faithful readers who will bear witness to the beautiful work God is doing in them. Perhaps our job after all is simply to hold out our cups, cracked and flawed though they might be, and trust God to fill them and find the right way to share them. I’m so honored that my debut novel found an award-winning Catholic publisher in Chrism Press. It was well worth the wait. And I give thanks that, with their help, I can soon share the fruits of my own little garden with you.

Is it Nostalgia?

On novel-writing and obedience.

Recent Reads

Feb 20, 2025

Over the past month, I’ve worked on the line edits for my novel, The Bicycle Messenger, which releases in August. The book’s action spans more than seventy years, and parts of it were written in different seasons of my life, so I’m especially thankful that God in His infinite goodness created editors. For me, preparing this manuscript for publication has been a useful exercise in obedience.

Like most writers, I sometimes struggle to “kill my darlings.” We can get too attached to our work, cherishing and repeating certain sentences to ourselves until we can no longer recognize problems. (Hopefully, the short-form immediacy of Substack will help me out here.) To read one’s own manuscript and find such a cherished sentence pared back or even deleted can put us through the five stages of grief—even though we know in our heart of hearts that the editor is right. But that’s really just pride, and the cure is obedience. God does not give us the last word on our own work or even our lives. We need one another—we need Him to complete this work in us. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can bear fruit.

While some scenes had to be trimmed, others required cultivation. The novel opens in the 1970s, and to help ground the reader in the historical moment, I embarked on a joyful scavenger hunt through my own childhood. I watched clips of favorite TV shows like Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett, ABC’s Afterschool Special and early episodes of Sesame Street. Kudos if you can remember an orange on Sesame Street singing an aria from Carmen! * By the way, did anyone else have that whiplash effect watching present-day Sesame Street with their own kids? The pacing has quadrupled at least!

Choosing children’s books to include was even more fun. My mother used to read us The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Like Sesame Street, that picture of a little boy in a red snowsuit leaving blue footprints in the snow evoked urban wonders in my suburban Omaha childhood. Here in Wisconsin, we’ve had a dry winter, but last week, there were three snowstorms in as many days. As the first storm approached, I was reviewing a scene in which my characters step off a slow-moving bus late at night to walk home through the accumulating drifts, and by the time one of them sank into a hot bath, my wonder returned. For the first time since I can remember, I couldn’t wait for the snow.

There was nostalgia in this, of course. But rereading my own work with the editor’s subtle improvements produced an almost trancelike effect. The text was just different enough that it could surprise me again, and I found myself inhabiting the action and empathizing with the characters in new ways. The scenes I once tapped out at my dining room table have somehow taken on life and become a whole novel; little improvements in pacing have set off miraculous new effects, like snowflakes swirling down in the cone of light from a streetlamp. God is good. Obedience leads us to freedom.

*Good catch, Karen!

I thank my God every time I remember you … being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

Philippians 1:3, 6

Recent Reads -January 2025

In which I take Holly Ordway’s Advice

Last November, at the Well-Read Mom annual conference here in Milwaukee, Tolkien scholar and Word on Fire author Holly Ordway spoke to us on “How to be Adventurous, Wise, and Charitable as a Reader.” Among Dr. Ordway’s suggestions was to sample various genres beyond the ones we usually read. This recommendation dovetails nicely with the mission of Chrism Press, which “seeks Spirit-filled fiction in all genres,” including romance, gothic horror, science fiction, and fantasy. I’m especially excited to promote Chrism Press, because in August, they will publish my debut novel, The Bicycle Messenger.  I’ll have more to say about that in an upcoming post. But in the meantime, here are three great Chrism Press titles you’re going to love.

Romance: Love in the Eternal City by Rebecca W. Martin

I was first attracted to Rebecca Martin’s writing when I heard her speak on a LegendFiction panel (you can find it here). She just sounded so likeable—and as it turns out, so are her characters. Elena, a young American journalist, has just accepted a public relations job in Rome after her former engagement to Chris goes up in flames. Elena is wounded, of course, but not bitter; she’s fresh and candid and eager to embrace all the potential of her new life—beginning with her friendly landlords, Paolo and Angela, who rent her a charming apartment above their tabaccheria.

Elena isn’t looking for love when she meets Benedikt, a handsome Swiss Guard, in the Campo Santo Teutonico. But Benedikt’s exuberant stepsister Rianna quickly befriends Elena, providing her with a good opportunity to get to know Benedikt too. And soon, they are working together on a major fundraising gala. Like Elena, Benedikt is discerning his future life; his wealthy father wants him to take over the family business, but Benedikt loves being a Swiss Guard and would like to advance. Beni and Elena are surrounded by a delightful cast of mentors-turned-matchmakers, starting with Rianna and going all the way up to the Holy Father himself.

Love in the Eternal City includes a frank and sensitive portrayal of Elena’s struggle to maintain good mental health. Thanks to Martin’s generous authorial voice and the goodness of her characters, we do not fall into depression alongside Elena; instead, we develop our empathy as we read. When Elena’s former fiancé interferes in her life once again, Elena finds herself snapping at Beni almost against her will: “the bitter voice has strangled the true one.  … My life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m letting the man who hurt me drive away the man who cares.” Elena really struggles to be loving toward Beni when she’s depressed. It’s here that her attempts are most worthy and admirable, even when she fails. I could easily imagine Christ coming nearer to her in these scenes, sending her people who care.

Meanwhile, Beni protects the pope as he goes incognito to minister to immigrant families at a local children’s hospital. But as it turns out, the one who goes to protect the Holy Father is the one who receives a grace he didn’t even know he needed. Beni is honest with the pope about his trouble with his father. In return, the pope offers a diagnosis: “The anger isn’t his problem; the anger is your problem. You’ve never forgiven him for the piecemeal abandonment after your mother died. Maybe you’ve never even forgiven him for his own grief.” The pope hears Beni’s confession, and he is so insightful that Beni wonders if he was once an intelligence officer. There’s a lively bit spy-craft to enjoy in the book’s dénouement.

Gothic: Wake of Malice by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson

Wake of Malice reminds me of a BBC police procedural featuring a setting like Oxford or a priest turned detective—in other words, someone should option this book for a miniseries, and soon. It’s 1908, and Hugh Buckley–gentle and portly, haunted by the memory of his harsh Irish mother—lives in London and writes for the Pall Mall Gazette. But when a priest is accused of embezzlement, Hugh and his thoroughly English photographer colleague Frederick Jones are sent to the village of Doolin in Hugh’s native Ireland to cover the story. “Could the mere mention of Ireland bring back the nightmares of my childhood?” Hugh wonders. “London had seemed such a safe, impersonal place.” And before they even arrive, the crime escalates to gruesome murder.

The mysterious land of the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher reawakens Hugh’s Catholic faith, which he has long tried to suppress. Some of the locals, especially the women, have been meddling with the occult, grafting superstition onto their practice in a dangerous way. “‘There are some fierce and fiendish women hereabouts,” Hugh says to Freddie. “I’d be afraid to meet Mrs. Gorman of a night, especially if you happened to have squashed her favorite illicit tradition’”—i.e., a pagan festival that is quickly canceled by Father Brendan O’Connor, a stern Jesuit priest who takes over the parish while the local pastor, Father Michael James Walsh, is being investigated.

Hugh knows all the ancient legends, but he still makes the mistake of crossing a wide field, where he is bitten by a tiny, mysterious creature. The wound troubles him for weeks until it comes to the attention of Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, a smiling, bespectacled Dominican priest who has come from England to support his beleaguered priest friend. Father Thomas Edmund has useful experience dealing with the occult. But at first, Father Brendan O’Connor refuses his help.

Wake of Malice features all sorts of colorful characters, including the haughty and beautiful Doireann O’Hara, granddaughter of the first murder victim; a good crop of local gossips in the pub where Hugh and Freddie are staying; and a group of Romanis who will lend a hand at the appropriate time. More murder victims pile up, some of them fearfully mutilated, their bodies surrounded by gold coins. The two journalists feed copy and photographs to their boss at home in an effort to extend their stay, because both Hugh and Freddie are becoming part of the local fabric. Hugh begins to dream of the farm life he once enjoyed, even delivering a calf for a cow in distress. He eventually admits to Father Thomas Edmund that he stopped going to mass after his mother’s death. “When she died…well, in London, no one woke me or beat me or fretted me anymore. On a Sunday morning, I found I slept well and deeply, and no one roused me. And…well, it seemed a much less frightening existence.” Life became “dull and safe.” But as Father Thomas Edmund assures him, “You aren’t the sum of your poor mother’s fears. God in His graciousness will supply your every need. Stop hesitating and let Him.”

Wake of Malice is a rollicking read that features lots of clever dialogue and even a bit of romance, along with sinister forces that need defeating.  Eleanor Bourg Nicholson delivers it all with a good dose of humor.

Fantasy: Misshelved Magic by S. R. Crickard

In Crickard’s debut novel, Adelina is a plucky librarian who often feels overlooked, and Leon is a talented student of magic who needs a topic for his senior thesis. Adelina is assigned to the history department of the library, where she is strictly enjoined to stay away from the barrier of glowing stones that demarcates the spell section. But one little magical book keeps finding its way to her shelves, and when Adelina tries to return it, she finds herself face to face with a cervara, one of a group of magical creatures who protect and defend the spell section of the library. Adelina longs to befriend the cervara; they seem so lonely in there, and she’s a curious person.

But as we soon learn, an epic battle between good and evil is raging in this little place. Crickard has a very light touch, but she draws deeply on rich images from salvation history. Adelina’s visits to the spell section brought to mind Dante’s Inferno—or, rather, Purgatory, with the cervara as the poor souls who must atone for a particular sin they have committed during their earthly lives. The First Spell that has ruined the cervara stands under lock and key in the grove at the center of the spell section of the library, rather like the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the lost garden of Eden.

But just as original sin affects all of fallen humanity, the pull of the First Spell works its way into Leon’s mind. One of the things I love about his book is the way it enacts temptation—specifically, the temptation the serpent poses in the garden: you shall by like gods. Leon is an extremely promising student, but he is plagued all along with feelings of inadequacy, and in a moment of crisis, he is tempted to hubris. Like the cervara before him, Leon believes he can wield the First Spell without succumbing to its danger. “The spell needed him. The king and the college would see his worth. He’d be invincible, and no one would ever question him again.”

But as any good reader of fantasy knows, the solution to the word’s problems is not to be found in magic. This book has profound things to say about the importance of embracing our humanity through literature instead of trying to overcome it through technology or our own strength, represented by magic. As Leon says to Adelina, “I can write spells that alter or conjure things, but your poems bring understanding.”

Recent Reads – December 2024

Shop Local

Fire Conditions by Thomas C. Malin (WWA Press, 2024)

I love to celebrate the work of small presses. This fall, the Wisconsin Writers Association has released Fire Conditions, a coming-of-age novel by Thomas C. Malin.

One of the things I admire most about this book is its strong sense of place. Set in the nineteen-fifties in the town of Friendship in Adams County, Wisconsin, Fire Conditions is the story of Mike and his younger brother Jimmy, who travel from Chicago to spend the summer with their grandmother while their parents work out some difficulties in their marriage. Along the way, Mike joins a club called the Big Fish People, builds a fort, has his first kiss, and looks out for his little brother. But there are dangerous forces at work, even in Friendship; and soon, Mike must determine what kind of man he is going to be.   

Friendship is chock-full of colorful small-town characters. Readers who grew up on The Magic School Bus series might recognize a nod to Miss Frizzle in Grandma Flowers’ colorful dresses printed with daffodils or purple iris. When the sirens wail in the middle of the night, Grandma Flowers scrambles the children from bed to try and beat the sheriff, who is also her boyfriend, to the scene of a fire. Having ceded her entire house to her dogs and her parakeet Pookah, Grandma Flowers houses the boys over the bar she runs. This is in stark contrast to the boys’ other, wealthier grandparents, who have built a fancy compound on a nearby lake.

Grandma introduces the boys to her friend Lena, who lives in a remote place and just might be a Wiccan; and while this troubled me at first, Malin gives us a sensitive treatment of religion elsewhere in the book. He presents the town’s Lutherans and Catholics without caricature, and when the boys attend their first church funeral, Mike wrestles with questions of belief in an age-appropriate way. Similarly, Mike acknowledges the prejudices of some of his elders without sharing them. Malin brings a light touch to Mike’s friendships with Goose, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, and Will, who has lost his mobility to polio. The story beautifully evokes boyhood in the nineteen-fifties: readers will love to imagine themselves out in the woods building forts or going to club meetings without constant parental supervision.

Of course, any book that features a fire-chasing grandmother with her own pistol is bound to end up in adventure and danger, and Fire Conditions does not disappoint. There is plenty of peril and mystery to go around. But near the end, there is also an unexpectedly moving and delicate portrayal of the aftermath of childhood trauma. Fire Conditions is a delightful sojourn “in the town called Friendship, its first name being Adams, where we Big Fish People played and worked and cared deeply about each other.”