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.

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.

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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.

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.”

A Look Back at Summer

Child of my Heart by Alice McDermott (2002, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr (1980, reissued by New York Review of Books in 2000)

Word on Fire’s Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know is the gift that keeps on giving. When I reviewed it here in July, I was only familiar with half of the novelists featured, leaving me with an excellent list of good things to read. Since June, my husband and I have visited six used bookstores in four different states, where I’ve been cruising for titles by Muriel Spark and Alice McDermott.

Set in what might be the nineteen-seventies, McDermott’s Child of my Heart is the story of fifteen-year-old Theresa, an only child growing up in Long Island among the summer homes of the rich. Theresa is beautiful and on the cusp of adulthood— “I believe my parents had grown a little wary of me by then” –and she works tirelessly all summer, caring for children and pets while her mother and father commute to the city. In addition to her paying clients, Theresa keeps an eye on Petey Moran, one of a large and neglected brood of children living next door. Petey spends enough nights sleeping in the yard outside Theresa’s bedroom window that her parents have considered calling Child Protective Services. But in the morning, they just give him breakfast, pretending he’s only dropped over. Daisy, an eight-year-old cousin, arrives from Queens Village to stay with Theresa for a few weeks, bringing a suitcase full of brand-new and ill-fitting outfits and one very special pair of impractical shoes. Theresa takes Daisy up to the attic, where her own parents have preserved all of her childhood clothes. As they pick out a few things for Daisy to wear, Theresa lays claim to the memory of a prior existence. “’You don’t remember God?’” Theresa asks. “’Or heaven? Or the angels? Or the other children waiting to be born?’” When Daisy demurs, Theresa goes on to insist that she has always remembered the name of a brother of hers who had died before she was born. “Clearly, I said, my brother and I had met, and exchanged names, sometime between his birth and mine.”

Theresa takes Daisy on her rounds, walking dogs and picking up Flora, the toddler daughter of an elderly artist and his beautiful, vulgar wife. Early in the novel, Flora’s mother takes off for the city, leaving Flora in the hands of a jealous French maid who sets her out on the porch every morning strapped in a stroller, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch hanging out of her mouth. Theresa cares tenderly for Flora, but she also attracts the attention of Flora’s father, who spends most of his days in his art studio drinking. Other men leer at Theresa as she minds their children on the beach or by the pool.

There were things in this book that had never occurred to me, and things in which I immediately saw myself. In the mornings, Theresa eats peaches on the front porch while she finishes her book, rinsing her hands and mouth with dew. A lover of Shakespeare, she nicknames a pair of twins Cobweb and Peaseblossom, and she invites Daisy to do fanciful things that are not done at home. Eat the center out of your English muffin with jelly, she tells her, and then wear it like a ring so you can nibble it later. When a dog takes it from her in one bite, the day is sealed in her memory, along with its heat and freedom and promise. Theresa knows in her heart that something is desperately wrong with Daisy. But if she tells anyone, Daisy will have to go home.

The elderly artist, meanwhile, wonders whether he has made anything that will last. Most of his work is ugly and abstract, but three beautiful mother-and-child drawings hang above Flora’s crib—drawings that belie the neglect of the mother, the cupidity of the father.

I glanced at the three sketches in their gold frames and considered what their worth might be, when they had been claimed by the future and all that was pretty and charming about them was transformed by all that had intervened—the infant grown into a troubled woman, the mother never returned, the father and all his efforts turned to dust. But then, I supposed, with more time, all that would be forgotten as well, and they would once again be charming and pretty portraits of a mother and child—not a biography, as Macduff might have said, but a novel.

I found I preferred modern art, pictures of nothing, after all.                

This may sound a bit jaded, but perhaps it is only the speech of a prescient young woman who has seen through a weak older man. Near the end of Daisy’s visit, Theresa sees Daisy “carrying [a] gaudy kite on her back to keep the wind from bending it. A modern-art version, it seemed to me, of angel wings.” She is not the only one who comes to love Daisy on her short visit; long after the cataclysm at the end of the book, Petey Moran brings a box full of baby rabbits over to Theresa’s house.

I knew without asking that this was Petey’s gift, indistinguishable as it was from a burden. Petey, who always used to ask, challenging and pleading at the same time, ‘Do you like me? Do you like my family?’ Who had wept with his fists tight. Who would be plagued all his life by anger and affection, by gifts gone awry, by the irreconcilable difference between what he got and what he longed for—by the inevitable, insufferable loss buried like a dark jewel at the heart of every act of love.

Like Child of my Heart, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country captures the fleeting essence of a long-ago watershed summer. I don’t know if Carr is considered a religious writer; but in this 1980 novel, he takes up questions of faith, sectarianism, and the power of art to bring us closer to the Divine. As Michael Holroyd puts it in his introduction, “A Month in the Country is a novel of resurrection.”

Shortly after the Great War, Tom Birkin, an art restorer and veteran with a severe facial tic, sets up residence in the belfry of a church in the village of Oxgodby, in Yorkshire. He has been hired by the vicar, John Keach, to uncover a medieval mosaic of the Last Judgment. A local widow has left a bequest to the church on two conditions: 1) restore the mosaic, and 2) find the grave of an ancestor of hers who was buried outside of consecrated ground. A man named Moon, who is employed for this second purpose, is secretly mapping out the foundational remains of an ancient basilica with the intention of publishing his findings—though he will get around to locating the ancestor eventually. He lives in a tent on the property and befriends Birkin as a fellow veteran of the war.

Tom’s work attracts frequent observers, including the fourteen-year-old daughter of Mr. Ellerbeck, the stationmaster. Soon, Tom is invited to tea at the Ellerbeck home on Sunday afternoons; he finds himself recruited as an umpire for cricket and as an assistant at Sunday school. Mr. Ellerbeck doubles as a Wesleyan preacher, and once, when he is expected to visit three far-flung churches in a single day, he sends Tom Birkin himself as a substitute. This fraternization with the Wesleyans earns Tom no points with the Reverend Keach, whose beautiful wife Alice also visits Tom at his work.

Carr’s book deliberately recalls Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of life in the English countryside. Near the end of the summer, Tom joins a hay wagon ride—a “Sunday school treat” for the Wesleyans—that might have been lifted from the pages of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

And so we clattered off, calling farewell to those disqualified by infirmity or alien beliefs from joining us, conscious (as they were) that we were part of the ancient cycle of the farming year and that our passing was token that the harvest was almost in.

Tom, whose own wife has left him, falls in love with Alice Keach, prompting the vicar to pay Tom what he is owed and dismiss him from the work. Tom counters that, if he is forced to leave now, he will tell the lawyers he was prevented from finishing, voiding the widow’s bequest. But while Tom’s love for Alice necessarily entails a denial of Keach as a man, the vicar has the last word.

The English are not a deeply religious people. … They do not need me. I come in useful at baptisms, weddings, funerals. Chiefly funerals—they employ me as a removal contractor to see them safely flitted into their last house. … But I am embarrassing you, Mr. Birkin,’ he said. ‘You too have no need for me. You have come back from a place where you have seen things beyond belief, things which you cannot talk of yet can’t forget, but things which are at the heart of religion.

Tom has numerous meaningful encounters in Oxgodby, but there’s an argument to be made that the key relationship in the book is between Tom and the unknown artist who created the mural. “Who was he? I couldn’t even name him. People don’t seem to understand those far-off folk. They simply weren’t us. Our idea of personal fame was alien to them.” But here is Tom, packing to leave and mourning the end of the summer:

Last of all, I gazed beyond the scaffolding to the great painting half hidden in the shadows. Truthfully, I felt nothing much. …Then (and I can’t explain it) the numbness went and I knew that, whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the country, I had lived with a very great artist, my secret sharer of the long hours I’d labored in the half-light above the arch.

Tom might not describe this as a religious experience, but what else could it be? He is attracted, even transformed, by the good, the true, and the beautiful–and by the end of a marvelous watershed summer.

In Search of Community

Haley Stewart, Ed. Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know (Word on Fire, 2024)

An as-yet unpublished novel of mine once found its way into the hands of a literary agent for consideration. It’s about a young woman in a high-powered job who is unfaithful to her husband and makes quite a mess of her life. In a moment of crisis, she enters a church, where she has a transformative encounter with a Catholic priest.

I waited eagerly for the agent’s response. And while the answer was no, she kindly offered her feedback. Though she had wanted to like my book, she thought the pivotal scene with the priest was ridiculous; and by the end, she disliked the main character so much that she wished she’d get hit by a bus.

Needless to say, I went back to the drawing board. But for years after that, as I sent out my writing, I tried to keep my Catholic faith under the radar.

How wonderful, then, to discover that a vibrant culture of Catholic writers and publishers was already emerging right under my nose. My first real inkling came from a Facebook post promoting Katy Carl’s novel, As Earth Without Water (Carl’s essay on Rumer Godden is featured in Women of the Catholic Imagination). I was astonished and thrilled to read such a nuanced and beautiful story of an artist discerning a religious vocation. And as it turns out, there are many excellent works of fiction in this vein, both contemporary and classic. Some of them I knew, and some, I didn’t. For instance, did you know that Nobel-Prize winner Toni Morrison was a Catholic, and that her books can be read fruitfully in this light? How about Donna Tartt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch?

Women of the Catholic Imagination not only delineates the Catholicity of some of the writers we know; it also introduces many once well-known writers whose work still deserves to be read. According to Bonnie Lander Johnson, British novelist Alice Thomas Ellis’s “large and eccentric Gloucester Terrace household was well-known for its conflation of home life, writing, painting and publishing; in this convergence of activity, Ellis’s home has been compared to the Bloomsbury Group.” I’ve just finished the first book in Ellis’s Summerhouse Trilogy, and it’s great. Julia Meszaros has this to say about Caryll Houselander: “the artist [is] perhaps the last person left to witness to the beauty of doing something for its own sake, no matter the cost.” And I’d never heard of German writer Gertrud von le Fort, but Helena M. Tomko’s description of her accords with my own experience of writing fiction:

’Creative power can only be received,’ writes le Fort. She sees this as a feminine capacity and corrective to the masculine impulse toward ‘self-redemption’ and self-creation. Her understanding of Marian co-redemption is exemplary for men and women alike, who ‘must conceive the creative spirit in the sign of Mary, in humility and surrender, or he [and she] will not receive it at all.’

As you may have already gathered, Women of the Catholic Imagination is full of great writing. Dorian Speed introduces Scottish writer Muriel Spark like this:

Half a century before Jim Carrey walked off the set of The Truman Show or Will Farrell negotiated with the novelist pulling the strings of his life story in Stranger than Fiction, Caroline Rose (a Spark character) heard her own thoughts being typed out by an unseen author.

How cool is that? I recently attended a Catholic Literary Arts panel called “Writing While Catholic,” and Dorian Speed, who was one of the panelists, characterized good fiction as a place where wounded characters receive God’s grace through their interaction with others. This exactly describes the kind of stories I want to write and read.

In addition to the writers mentioned above, Women of the Catholic Imagination includes essays on Josephine Ward, Sigrid Undset, Flannery O’Connor, Caroline Gordon, and Alice McDermott. By my count, seven of the twelve writers featured are Catholic coverts and one is an English recusant, so there’s a wonderful diversity in their stories of faith.  And beyond that, it’s refreshing to see how many of my favorite contemporary Catholic poets and fiction-writers are also very fine essayists and critics. Some of them, including Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, Katy Carl, and Joshua Hren, contributed essays to this book. Women of the Catholic Imagination is a great place to meet these writers, too.