Cleaning House and Enjoying It: Another Midwest Musing

 
Today I cleaned my office. Since the pandemic hit, it has gotten dustier and more cluttered than I usually let it get. Books on the floor. Notebooks leaning again the baseboard. CDs strewn across the desk. Yikes!

So today was the time to bring some order to this space where I spend so much time. It is a lovely place to be -- up on the second floor of our house, looking out over the woods that overlooks the prairie. And when it's neater and cleaner, I enjoy it more because I am sort of a neat freak. 

What I enjoyed most, though, beside the lack of dust and newly restored order, was looking over the eclectic collection that fills this room.

There are the books, of course, as evidenced by the photos. And some of them are ones I didn't write. Ha. There are books of poetry, humor, history, theology, fiction, comic books (old -- and I mean old! -- Mad magazines and DC comics), and more. 

There's a whole collection of ancient Wittenburg Doors. There's a whole section of shelves containing autographed books by friends and authors I've met over the years. 

But the shelves also hold a bottles of Winomycin Elixir (looks a lot like Sutter Home Chardonnay) prescribed to me by my late friend Dr. Phil Ball and some wild Guatemalan booze sent by Donna Higgins Smith. There's my collection of "Jesus Junk" ("Jeez-It's" sticky notes, "Messiah Mints -- Save Your Breath", etc.) and Quaker Crap (Fighting Quaker Puppet, Quaker Boy Moose Mate Call, Old Quaker Wiskey, and so on), along with assorted other goofy things. And memorabilia from my misspent youth in Columbus, Ohio. Oh, and a screaming flying monkey that soars across the room. 

Sitting on the shelves are various Snoopys, models I've built of British sportscars (including a replica of the 1966 Austin-Healey Sprite I once owned), awards I've won exhibiting my 1955 MGTF 1500 at various car shows, and old cameras -- including my dad's 35mm Vivitar and its lenses. Unlikely for a Quaker, there are also old cast iron tanks, a cannon, and a grenade cigarette light -- relics of time I spent with my beloved great-uncle Johnny Clemmens. Some of his Army medals hang on a wall.

The walls are covered with all sorts of photos and certificates. The old Ohio title to the MG from when 

dad gave it to me, a leaf from an early 17th John Bill Bible (a printer relative of mine), a 1973 National Lampoon Map of the World (very unpollitically correct, framed book covers, a painting of Quaker Mary Dyer by my friend Lil Copan. 

In the corner, tucked alongside two file cabinets topped by my dad's old chart chest, is my desk. I had it made almost 20 years ago and still love its aging oak patina. It hold my large format photo printer, laser printer, scanner, stereo speakers and computer. It's where I do almost all of my writing and thinking. 

When I was a kid growing up in Columbus, I dreamt of being a writer and having a space like this. I also was intrigued by the collections various adults in my life had -- Dad and his stuff, including fake business cards that said things such as "If I give you a going away present, will you go away?", Uncle Johnny and his model tanks and record collections, Mom and her books and boxes of family photos. For the past almost 20 years, I've been lucky to have had the writing space I always dreamed of and a place to put my weird collection of stuff. It's been a haven -- a little bit of normal (or abnormal in my case) -- in this scary, dangerous time. 

And a place to further reinforce their grandfather's craziness to my grandchildren. Though they do seem to enjoy playing with the toy cars, Woodstock and Snoopy, the marshmallow shooting air gun, et al. 

"See you 'round like a donut," they say when they leave. Wonder where they got that?

A Novel by a Spiritual Non-Fiction Writer Set in Central America? Twenty Years Ago? Really?? -- A Guest Post by Writer Paula Huston

Paula Huston is the author of the newly released novel A Land Without Sin.  She is also the author of Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit, The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (both of which I highly recommend), and many other books.  I invited her to write about A Land Without Sin.

**************

I’ll admit, it does sound a little far-fetched.  But there is a back-story here.  In fact, I was a fiction writer long before I began writing books like THE HOLY WAY.  I wanted to be a novelist from the time I was about seven years old, and actually began practicing way back then by writing a 36-page thriller about King the Dog, a super-canine hero who looked and acted an awful lot like Rin Tin Tin.  I took creative writing in high school, but got really serious about short story writing in my early twenties.  Since I had opted to get married and take on a full-time job in my late teens rather than go to college, I had no formal training, but I soon figured out that the library was full of great teachers.  I checked out all the BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORY anthologies I could get my hands on and studied the techniques of my favorite writers.

I sold my first story to a literary journal when I was about thirty, and by the time I actually went to college four or five years later (I’d been through a divorce by then, along with an eye-opening stint as a single mom, so I was more than convinced it was time to get a degree), I’d published quite a few of them.  A few years later, now remarried, a new step-mom, and armed with a Master’s in Literature degree, I got a job teaching at the local university and began trying to put together my first short story collection.  But one of the pieces, which was about the classical piano world at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, began to grow  uncontrollably, and pretty soon I realized I had an infant novel on my hands.  DAUGHTERS OF SONG  was published by Random House in 1995.

A year before it came out, however, my husband Mike and I made a backpacking trip to the jungles of Central America to see the Maya ruins.  We had just left southern Mexico for Guatemala when the Zapatista Uprising in Mexico began.  Like a lot of Americans, I knew very little about this part of the world, but this close brush with a revolution triggered an intense curiosity.  And that got coupled with my already-intense interest in the Mayas (my first major, before I switched to literature, had been anthropology).  I asked Random House if I could substitute a novel about all of this for the short story collection they’d planned to publish next.  They gave me the go-ahead and I spent the next three years researching and writing the book.  One of the biggest disappointments of my life came the day they informed me they’d decided not to publish it after all.  I stuck it away in a box and tried to forget about it.

Meanwhile, I met an editor-turned-agent at a writers’ conference who listened to my sad story and suggested I try writing spiritual nonfiction.  I resisted at first, but he was a great mentor, pointing me to wonderful spiritual writers I’d never read and eventually becoming my new agent.  It was his suggestion that I write a book about the simple life, the book that became THE HOLY WAY.   Much to my surprise, I found that I really liked writing nonfiction--it seemed refreshingly straightforward compared to fiction writing, which must always tell the truth but tell it “slant,” as Emily Dickinson puts it.  By the time I published my sixth book in this genre, I’d pretty well abandoned any notion of returning to fiction writing.

But one day a year or so ago I got an email from an old friend, a Christian editor who was starting a new literary imprint called, ironically enough, SLANT.  He asked if I had “any old novels lying around.”  I did!  And eighteen long years after I’d stuck it away and nearly forgotten about it, I dragged out that dusty old draft and reread it--and fell in love with it all over again.  Greg Wolfe, the Christian editor in question, liked it too.  He asked me some great editorial questions that helped me launch into a major revision, and a year or so after that initial email, A LAND WITHOUT SIN finally saw print.

How does it feel to hold this long-delayed book in my hands?  Surprisingly enough, I’m very grateful Random House did not publish it back then.  I learned so much during those many years of writing spiritual nonfiction.  First, I did not have any formal training in theology or divinity, so I had to educate myself in those areas--which made it possible, for example, for me to write much more believably about the struggles of a young priest to come to terms with the question of evil.  Second, when I wrote that first draft back in the early 90‘s, I was a very recent returnee to Christianity, still wet behind the ears, and this naive inexperience showed up as a certain kind of preachiness in that earlier version.  And finally, like a lot of people in their sixties, I’ve said goodbye to some of my youthful idealism by now--and I think this makes me a stronger, more realistic, and more truthful writer than I used to be.  Certainly a better writer for a book like this one, packed as it is with The Big Questions and their Not-So-Easy Answers.   

Words Can Kill ... And So Can Bullets, Of Course: Some More Summer Book Reviews

I'm finally learning to read on my tablet.  Sigh.  Giving in to the modern world.  I bought one of the early Kindles -- and hated it.  I never finished a book on it.  Just could not stand it.

But that was then.  This is the 21st century -- and many pre-release review copies of books (both by people I know and those who don't) are only available as e-books.  So, since my suitcase was full when I headed to Bald Head Island recently, I loaded my Kindle on iPad with new books from NetGalley.

One was good.  Two were really good -- for completely different reasons.  And one (that shall go unmentioned) was dreadful.

First the good.  That was Top Down: A Novel of the Kennedy Assassination by newsman Jim Lehrer.  Lehrer's premise is that the agent who ordered the top off the Kennedy limo (since it had quit raining) is haunted by that decision and is descending into a private mental health hell.  A newspaper man who covered the assassination and asked the agent if the top was going to stay up or down is enlisted by suffering agent's attractive and tenacious daughter to help her father.

As someone who was alive in 1963 and remembers -- as everyone of age back then does -- where he was when he heard the awful news out of Dallas that November day, I hoped to learn something new or at least get a different look on the events of that day.  What I got was a good summer time read -- this would be a fine beach book.  But, sad to say, it doesn't come out until October 2013 -- a little late for beach reading.  It's not a bad book.  It's a tale told well enough, but not well enough to make it a must read.

Next the two really good.  One is really good for, in part, taking me into a world I know nothing about really and making me want to stay there.  That world is the one of Maine state game wardens.  Now, in the interest of integrity, it's a world I visited before after meeting Kate Braestrup at a writing conference.  Her Here if You Need Me: A True Story tells of her life as a chaplain to the Maine state game wardens.  And it tells it very well -- so much so that when I saw Paul Doiron's Massacre Pond and read the description (The beauty and magnificence of the Maine woods is the setting for a story of suspense and violence when one powerful woman’s missionary zeal comes face to face with ruthless cruelty.) I thought I'd take a chance.

I'm glad I did.  Like Dick Francis did years ago with horse racing, I found myself drawn in by a master story teller.  Mike Bowditch, the game warden, is a likable protagonist caught in a web of intrigue ... oh how cliche-ish (but true) ... between Maine state game warden politics, moose-hugging rich environmentalists with seeming no regard for the local logging industry, local logging industry big-wigs who help out with Big Brothers but may have a seamy side, a very attractive young woman, the woman he really loves, and ...    Well, it's a pretty good size web ole Mike is caught in -- which makes for a good story -- beach or otherwise.  And the good news for beach readers, is that Massacre Pond will be out in July.   And it's origins are in a true tale.

The second really good book is about the power of words.  Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can lead us to homicide.  Lexicon, by Max Barry, features a street-wise hustler (Emily Ruff) who is trained to have a persuasive way with words.  Very persuasive.  This grrrl of the streets is not always trust-worthy -- or is she?  The novel is all about the power of words and their effect on us.  It's also a cautionary tale about all the data gathering that is going on all about us.  I'd say, given the recent NSA revelations and the hunt for Edward Snowden, the publisher scored a wonderful release date (June 18, 2013).

Lexicon is a bit dystopia in the vein of Margaret Atwood's novels and also similar (in the theme of the power of words) to Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet.  You can read my review of the latter here.  Its readability puts it closer to Atwood than Marcus' ponderous book and so I really enjoyed it.  Yes, you have to suspend disbelief.  But any of us who work in words -- fiction or non -- invite readers to do that somewhat every day.  And we who work in words know their power -- and hope to use them (benignly and beneficiently, in my case!) to persuade readers.  Emily Ruff is just a bit more casual -- at least at first -- about how she uses words.  Lexicon is thoughtful thriller.  It's no War and Peace, but it's a better than usual summer time read that entertains, makes you think and is available now. 


Stay tuned for more reviews ...

Awaken Your Senses: Video Intro

This Sunday is the book release party. 3-5:30 at Ploughshares Farm. Y'all come!

It's a Book Party -- And You're Invited!

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. It's A Party -- And I Hope You'll Come! As you probably know by now, Awaken Your Senses: Exercises for Exploring the Wonder of God is now available!  To celebrate its release, I'm having a book release party at Ploughshares Farm -- and you're invited. The party will be January 15 from 3-5:30 in the afternoon at Ploughshares Farm (6960 E. Hendricks County Rd, Mooresville, IN 46158).  It's a drop-in/drop-out sort of thing -- so you don't have to stay the whole time, though you're welcome to, if you'd like. We'll have food (fixed by Nancy, who's a great cook!) and drinks.  Beth Booram (the co-author of the book) will be there and she and I will be happy to sign books.  Of course, we'll have copies of Awaken Your Senses for sale -- at the special book release party price of $12 ($3 off retail). If you buy Awaken Your Senses at the party, you'll also get a free copy of my Mind the Light: Learning to See with Spiritual Eyes. Reservations are requested -- mostly so we know how much food to fix!  Just email me at brentbil@brentbill.com if you plan on coming. If you'd like a map to Ploughshares, just drop me an email (brentbil@brentbill.com) and I'll send one to you.  Googlemaps is really accurate, though.   I hope you have a blessed holiday season -- full of the peace that this season is meant to bring. Brent PS If you live too far away to attend (or just don't feel like partying), but would still like an autographed book at the release party price, just email me at brentbil@brentbill.com and I'll get one to you! PPS January 15 is also the meeting day of Friends in Fellowship, the Quaker worship group that meets at Ploughshares.  It gathers at 6:30 and you'd be welcome to join us for worship that evening, if you'd like. Awaken Your Senses is available at fine independent stores like and Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. "A deeply pleasing book" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)   You're receiving this email because you're a friend of Brent Bill's. Unsubscribe << Test Email Address >> from this list. Our mailing address is: J. Brent Bill 6960 E. Hendricks County Rd Mooresville, IN 46158 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2012 J. Brent Bill All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend Update your profile

Awaken Your Senses -- Early Reviews

The first reviews of the new book are coming in -- and I couldn't be more pleased. Here are some excerpts!

Awaken Your Senses: Exercises for Exploring the Wonder of God J. Brent Bill and Beth A. Booram. InterVarsity ... Modeling the best Sunday School teachers, Bill (Sacred Compass) and Booram (The Wide Open Spaces of God) get close to God via the five senses. The journey could so easily have been a skip instead of a sail; however, they truly manifest the book’s purpose: “to help more of you experience more of God.” The two ministers and workshop leaders accomplish this so well with natural sweetness from the inside, not with treacle glopped on top. Starting with the cover illustrations—a rose, a bird singing treble, threatening thorns, and a bitten pear, each image superimposing on another—the book divides naturally into five parts. ... Within each chapter, the authors alternate essays, their voices nearly indistinguishable except for Bill’s wittier bits; they touch on the personal, such as Booram’s sacred hospital smells. Each chapter includes spiritual exercises. The two cite the Bible’s raising up of the five senses, augmented with quotes from many sensate Christians. It adds up to a deeply pleasing book. -- Publishers Weekly.

Awaken Your Senses: Exercises for Exploring the Wonder of God J. Brent Bill & Beth Booram ... I had a very early version of this and was so taken with it I told a few folks this summer that it will be one of the books of the year. ... [Beth and Brent] walk us through an array of wonder-full meditations and experiences that combine a sensuous engagement with creational givens---taste, hearing, touch, smell, seeing---and ways these activities can help us know God. There are two things going on here, it seems---helping us be attentive to the world around us, practicing a sensuous worldview and embodied sort of discipleship, and the ways in which this sort of attentiveness can facilitate a deeper relationship with God. Beautiful! I'll bet you know somebody for whom this will be a godsend. It'll wow 'em, for sure. And that cover---you have to see it "for real." Splendid. Kudos, again, to InterVarsity Press. -- Byron Bolger of Hearts and Minds Books.

Awaken Your Senses is now available at local independent bookstores like Hearts and Minds and, of course, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells, InterVarsity Press, and more.

Order a copy online in the next five days and I'll be happy to send you a free signed bookplate!

Holiday Blessings!
Brent

Free Book!

Contest! be the 20th new follower of our twitter feed and win a free copy of Brent's "Mind the Light" http://t.co/b0Ro5Tt

http://twitter.com/#!/WakenYourSenses

See The Goodness of the Lord -- Days 18-20

I have enjoyed a calvacade of sights the past few days. From road trip scenery traversing southwestern Indiana, to a mama deer and her youngster eating off the hazelnut bush in the front yard at Ploughshares -- undisturbed by my walking out onto the front porch to watch them, to Gracie the wonder cat taking on a dog four times her size (she's graceful, but not always grace-giving), to the faces of old friends.

This latter sight was especially enjoyable. I ventured back to Friends Memorial Church in Muncie where I used to be the pastor. It was their annual simple gifts holiday bazaar and I was invited to offer some of the smple gifts in the form of selling my books. So I sat with my buddy Alan Garinger (great books for young readers) in the Library/book-sales room and we drank coffee and told lies to each other (that's what writers do) and sold a few books. In between Alan and me telling lies, though, I watched people. Mostly people who were members of FMC when I was their pastor eight years ago.

Of course, they (unlike me) had all aged. Even the kids. I knew this happened, of course, but for some reason many of these good people were frozen in my memory at the time I left in 2001. And while some looked unchanged, others -- at each of the spectrum, old and young -- had changed drastically. But, regardless, I was blessed by seeing them all and by being back in a place that not only tolerated my quirks as a pastor, but actually (for the most part) embraced them.

The highlight that day, though, was when two people from the first Friends meeting I pastored arrived. They had driven 28 miles to shop and see me. I was touched. Marcella Keys arrived thanks to the driving her of her daughter Nancy and we spent a nice time chatting and remembering my days at Jericho Friends.

I look back on those days and I see the failings -- the young, know-it-all pastor who needed way more humility, compassion, and a heart for people than he had. I remember the harsh words I spoke and the times I didn't visit enough.

But Marcella and Nancy did not see those things -- instead they saw only the good things. At least at this 30 year remove. I was grateful. For in their seeing me as I had hoped to be, I saw their love and forgiveness and charity. I saw their gratitude for the good gifts I had offered whilst there and grace for mistakes.

I saw blessing and continue to feel that blessing from them.

-- Brent

The photo is of me in my young preacher days at Jericho.

See The Goodness of the Lord -- Day Two

An amazing sight. That's what I experienced today. No, it was not the pink-tinged clouds of the superlative sunrise this morning -- though it was wonderful. It wasn't any of the things that normally capture my photographer's eye.

Instead it was a man with gift. For me.

I was sitting in my office this afternoon when my phone buzzed. "You have a guest," said Janice, one of the Center's administrative assistants. I walked out and there stood Roger.

Roger, for those of you who have not read this blog very long, is a bagger at the O'Malia's store next to our office. He's a very interesting fellow: one I would have ignored though, truth be told, until he opened my eyes with conversation one day. I often stop in that store to grab something for lunch and about five years ago Roger began speaking to me -- first by asking "How's my favorite living Quaker theologian?" (How'd he know I was a Quaker? was my first thought) and then by talking about Kierkegaard and other theologians.

But our conversations had always been confined to the check-out line at the grocery.

Until today. When I came out out into the lobby and there stood Roger, with his ever-present hat on, bundled up for his walk home, and holding a bag. "Hi," he smiled, shyly, and reached the bag out to me. "I was culling my bookshelves and came across some volumes I thought you might enjoy." And he held the bag out tentatively to me.

I took it and he began shuffling sideways toward the door. "I didn't mean to bother you," he said.
"You didn't bother me," I replied lamely. "This is a wonderful gift."

"Well, I hope you enjoy them. Goodbye,now." And he was gone.

I opened up the bag -- double bagged so the weight wouldn't rip through the sack, so like Roger. And there was a collection of Quaker related books -- including the classic Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly. It was all I could do not to weep. Here was this gift of books -- one of the most precious things in the world to me -- from an unlikely friend who is still teaching me to value that of God in everyone one, especially and including those who are not from my social set.

I saw love in action. I saw God in this kind, humble man -- for whom the most I have ever done is have the occasional fleeting conversation about God or politics or human rights or existentialism (about which he knows a great deal more than me) in the check-out line. I was blessed by sighting grace at work -- a humbling vision, clothed as I was in nice, new shoes, shirt and tie and coming as it was clothed in a ball hat and work clothes and a double-bagged set of books.

-- Brent

Sacred Compass Blogger Contest

My new book, Sacred Compass: The Way of Spiritual Discernment, (published by Paraclete Press) is just now hitting bookstores. It's premise is that a compass makes a good metaphor for our spiritual lives and the work of discerning God’s will for them. God doesn’t speak as clearly and as obviously as Mapquest or GoogleMaps or GPS. Maybe that’s because we don’t navigate the life of faith via anything remotely resembling GPS. Instead, the divine compass points us the mind and love of God. Our sacred compass operates in our souls and calls us to life with God. As we move toward Divine guidance, we joyfully behold the face of a loving God gazing back at us.

To help get the word out about the message of this book (which Richard J. Foster of Celebration of Discipline calls "one of the finest books on discernment and divine guidance that I have seen in a very long time."), I'm sponsoring a contest. It's an open call to any blogger to send me 5-10 questions about Sacred Compass. I will answer each one individually -- a sort of virtual interview. The virtual interview judged best by an independent, non-biased judge (my wife Nancy who has never read a blog until now but knows good questions when she sees them) will win a signed copy of the book and a gourmet assortment of goodies from The Best Chocolate in Town (my favorite chocolate place!).

A picture of the book jacket, blurbs by others, and photos of me are available for the asking. Questions for the virtual interview will be accepted through April 19th and the virtual interview must be posted by May 1 on the blogger's blog (is that redundant?). Entries will be judged by May 11 (my birthday!) and the winner announced to great acclaim on May 12. Send interview questions (along w/ a link to your blog) to brentbil@sbcglobal.net Visit http://www.brentbill.com/ for information about me.

Let the contest begin!

-- Brent

Family of Brent Bill, employees of Brent Bill, Brent Bill's cats and dog are ineligible to participate in the contest. Prohibited where void. Side effects include dizziness, neuralgia, and innuendo.