Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing

So I had been looking forward to the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing for the past two years, ever since I’d heard about it on Mark Bertrand’s blog. I marked it on my calendar… and waited. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but honestly, whatever I thought before got blown away.

Seldom have I ever had three such wonderful days! The lectures (for the most part) were great, and of course of these getting to hear Michael Chabon twice (twice!) was the highlight. Very funny guy, and a brilliant writer.

Meeting the Relief people was awesome (I had a story in Coach’s Midnight Diner last year). They’re probably the most down to earth group of editors you could ever meet. We had a great little party one night, although they told me I was going into the Witness Protection Program afterward. Hah. Also awesome was meeting the folks at Seattle Pacific University (where I’ll be attending this fall) as well as film critic and author Jeffrey Overstreet.

It is really a beautiful thing, when you’re in your place with your people, isn’t it? I just couldn’t get over feeling that all week. I stayed with a couple of other conference attendees and we had our own “private reading” the last night. I read a short story and they read poems. Good times.

And of course I bought too many books, waited in much too long a line to have one of them signed by Chabon; the titles of my purchases ranging from Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinksi, The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, Through a Screen Darkly by Jeffrey Overstreet, and I got a free copy of The Organic God by Margaret Feinburg.

Beautiful days. I’m currently in Michigan this week and Illinois next week, but I can’t wait to get home and start putting stuff on paper again.

Mining the book racks

So on my trip into town today I ended up going into Books and Such, a local used bookstore that specializes in lots and lots of trade paperbacks (with a few scattered hardbacks here and there, unless you’re Stephen King or Anne Rice, in which case there are plenty of hardbacks), and walked out with a few purchases:

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. I’ve seen a lot of his quotes, but never read him. Found a thirty-seven year-old Dell paperback.

Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara. I seem to remember reading somewhere that this was a great work of noir so I thought I might as well, for the price of a dollar. The Bantam copy I bought, pub’d in ‘66, had the price marked $.75 on the cover.

Great English Short Stories: selected and introduced by Christopher Isherwood. This Dell paperback, pub’d in ‘57, was marked $.50… I laid a buck on the table for it. It features stories by Conrad, Lawrence, Chesterton, Forster, Kipling, Mansfield, and Maugham to name a few. The greenish colored pagers are cool.

From there I went over to the PCDC – a thrift store – and found a nice tweed jacket for dirt cheap and a first edition of Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full. I’ve never read Wolfe, and judging by the size of the tome, he’s got a lot to say.  

being awake and other such things

Starting these things is always a pain. You feel like you’ve got to start with a certain amount of pomp and grandeur, and I suppose sometimes you lose sight of the fact that you’re writing a blog, not the next great work of literature. So I won’t do that, but I will introduce myself, if I may.

I’m a writer and an artist at heart. I want to be stirred, harrowed, moved, shaken. I’ve read that great art makes your world bigger, and I believe it. So this is going to be mostly blogging about books and art and sometimes music and the stuff I buy at the book store, and then perhaps what I think of them after I’m done. I’m also prone to staying up till rather ungoly hours of the night. I’m a self-imposed insomniac. Just so you know… the only thing I don’t allow is morning-people here. (That means if you’re the kind of person who knows how to smile before 10 a.m.) 

Drop me a line, have a cup of coffee, recommend me a book. This is, after all, a place for insomniacs.