S.D. Smith's Blog, page 37

I Can Be Mature and Bookish, So There: The Best Review, Like, Ever

I’m grateful to say that The Green Ember has accumulated a number of positive reviews from magazines, blogs,  on Amazon, and from my Mom. I’m sort of astonished at how many five-star reviews there are on Amazon. As grateful as I am for those, none can compare with the following review from Amazon UK. Yes, the United Kingdom, home to such scribes as William Shakespeare, C. S Lewis, and a few others of note. Those lands have somehow now produced the following juggernaut of literary criticism.

 

 

This is real. And it’s wonderful, Elsa Willows.

King Arthur’s Broken Heart

I love Arthur Alligood. He’s a good guy and his songs are amazing.

This is a newish song, not on any record. But his most recent record One Silver Needle, is excellent. Esp. “Darkness to Light.” One of my favorite songs. In the world.

Give your ears the royal treatment, get them some of King Arthur’s magical music.

Like wounded Arthur of old, there’s a tragic nobility in this music. It is haunted, with hope.

The Award-Losing Author Strikes (Out) Again

I have cemented my position as the Award-Losing Author by failing to win World Magazine’s Children’s Book of the Year. The Green Ember finished as a runner-up.

As you may or may not know, I was a finalist for the West Virginia Fiction Award several years ago…and lost. I’ve included, “award-losing author” in most of my bios ever since. Now I have more reason to. The streak goes on.

All (or most) joking aside, it’s an honor to be mentioned at all and to be a runner-up is very flattering. Don’t run-down a runner-up. That’s what I always never say.

I am totally joking–I hope you know!–about the “woe is me” stuff. My publisher and personal Canadian (everyone should have one), Andrew Mackay, reminds me all the time that we are spoiled, that the incredible response to The Green Ember is rare. There is certainly some truth to that, but I’m not so spoiled that I take this for granted. I am genuinely honored and grateful for the very kind mention.

The Penderwicks in Spring took home the hardware this year, but I plan to train really hard and win in a KO in our next bout.

(Note: I self-identify as a intellectually sophisticated and emotionally mature man.)

For realsies, here’s the very kind write up from World. And here’s the part where they mention Ember. I have read and admired Janie B. Cheaney for years, so I was honored to see this.

How can you not love the World and the things that are in the World?

Seriously, this is very nice. And I’m grateful.

Let me be clear. I do not feel like this…

I feel like this…

Or possibly this…

Yes, that’s “me” as international footballing legend Steven Gerrard. Just in my orange bib and not-bald head, reacting to World Magazine’s generous accolade with a sincere and sporting thumbs up.

If I ever do win an award, then there will be no reason to joke around. The joke will then be obvious.

Thank you, World!

 

Isn’t ‘The Green Ember’ Like ‘Watership Down’?

They’re both rabbit books, after all…

I get asked this fairly often, so I want to go on record with my response. Here I stand, on the record. I can do no other.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer:

I am in no way embarrassed about having written The Green Ember. It’s my first book, and I hope I will improve as a writer. But I love the story, the characters, and I’m grateful for the tremendous response it’s received from readers. I’m proud to have my name on it.

I had heard of Watership Down for years, but never read it. My friend, Eric Peters, gave me a copy when I was in the process of writing The Green Ember. (Or it may have been just before I began, but after I had decided to turn the stories I had been telling my kids for years into a novel.)

So I waited. And waited. I had heard it was great and I didn’t want to read anything that would influence (or discourage) me. I avoided Redwall for a similar reason (and I still haven’t read any of those.)  I wrote my book.

Sometime after I was done writing Ember, I read Watership Down.

Goodness. My goodness! Incredible. Amazing. Brilliant. Beautiful.

It is the prince of rabbit tales. In fact, there are very few novels containing characters of any kind that can compare with this book. It is magnificent and I love it immensely.

I’m glad I never read it until after I was done writing Ember. Very glad. Had I read it before starting, I wonder if I would have been able to write a rabbit story at all. Because here’s what I tell people when they ask if The Green Ember is like Watership Down.

When I finally read Watership Down, I discovered I had built a lego hut in the shadow of the Taj Mahal.

Now, I like my hut. It’s a good hut, and I like legos. But for Frith’s sake, the Taj Mahal is another thing altogether.

I love Watership Down. No one will ever write a better rabbit story than Richard Adams has. Do your family a favor and read this marvelous novel together. We Smiths did and cannot recommend it highly enough.

“…He Had Rather Not Be Cured…”

“When Constantine the Emperor was told there was no means to cure his leprosy but by bathing his body in the blood of infants, he immediately answered, he had rather not be cured than use such a remedy.”

Thomas Brooks

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« Le Massacre des Innocents », huile sur bois (Hauteur. 142 cm ; largeur. 182 cm) d’après Pierre Paul Rubens vers 1610-1612, appartenant aux musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique de Bruxelles. – Inv. 3639, photographiée lors de l’exposition temporaire « Rubens et son Temps » au musée du Louvre-Lens.

HT: George Grant

 

Speaking To Kids at the Lewisburg Literary Festival Tomorrow! (I Hope You Will Come)

Tomorrow evening I’ll be speaking to children (and other humans) as a part of the Lewisburg Literary Festival!

I’ll be at the library on Friday, August 7, and will start at 5:30pm. I hope you can make it!

Here are the directions. 

I’m really thrilled to be involved and was so honored to be included.

I plan to talk about what makes a great character and to challenge the kids (and all of us) to think through our own lives as characters in a big story. In the stories we love, what do the great characters do?

They do not eat dirt, for instance? Or do they?

Nope. They don’t. I’ll also be around on Saturday at the Literary Town Square (The Greenbrier County Convention and Visitors Bureau). Please stop by and say hi and/or buy a hundred books. I will also be handing out high-fives (free).

There are lots of fascinating things happening over the two days of the festival, including my friend Eric Fritzius’ (author of A Consternation of Monsters) duo performance of his story, “To A Flame.” That’ll be at sundown. Maybe that one isn’t for the kiddies, but there’s plenty for kids to do and Lewisburg is just a great town.

I hope to see you there.

 

This Smith Has a Forge: My Writing Hut Is Ready

Say Hello To My Little…Forge

Over four years ago, I wrote about the possibility of us buying our next-door neighbor’s home and the little shed that came with it. It was a long-time dream of ours to turn that shed into a little office for me. A writer’s hut. That dream is coming true. The little building was once a well-house, but has been used as a garden shed for decades.

(I wish I could locate a true “before” picture. The porch was rotting and the roof was collapsing. The inside was a mess.)

We’re so excited that it’s finally done and I’m eager to get in there and work. 

We asked for help naming the building and our friend (the poet) Chris Yokel chimed right in with an unbeatable name. The Forge. A place where a Smith does his work. It was perfect. Thanks, Chris.

I hope the Forge is a foundry for new stories with an old soul. I hope it’s a place where tales are spun, tellings that spin out to find a place in the hearts of readers all over the world. I’m asking God to give me grace and courage to do good work in my little forge. Will you pray for me?

I’ll update you with pictures once it becomes operational, but for now it’s a blank canvas. I’m excited about what it will become, but far more so about what will come out of it.

Black Star On The Radio: Fireballs, Fables, and Allies in Imagination

World Magazine’s Emily Whitten (also of Redeemed Reader fame) interviewed Zach Franzen, Andrew Peterson, Randall Goodgame (Slugs & Bugs), and myself for a spot on World Radio’s “The World and Everything In It.” It features an intro to The Black Star of Kingston, a bit about Inkwell, and way too much credit to me as a leader. Also, I sound like I had been smoking, but I had just been (shocker) talking too much. Or maybe it was smoke inhalation from all the fireballs on the Black Star cover.

It was a pleasure having Emily (and her girls) at Inkwell and we’re grateful to her for sharing our work with the World.

(That was a play on worlds.)

A Cathedral of Words: A Small Reflection on the Circe Conference

I went to a conference and felt small. I felt poor. And I was both glad and grateful. In fact, it was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to on a number of levels. I left feeling profoundly encouraged.

It was the Circe National Conference in Charleston, SC. I was there sharing my books, and listening to sessions led by brilliant men and women. The conference was loaded with people involved in classical and Christian education. There were headmasters, teachers, and homeschoolers. We are a classical, Christian, homeschooling family. So why did I feel small and poor? And why did I feel good about feeling so?

I’ll explain. Why do we go to the Grand Canyon, or Victoria Falls, or to the World Cup Final to watch our nation play? Do we do it to feel big and rich? No, we do it to feel the deep significance of our comparative insignificance, of being united to something large and lovely. That’s invigorating. Part of my feeling came from the fact that I was relatively poor in educational attainment compared with most people there. This was good for me. It honestly made me happy. Because I knew that my own kids will have a very different experience of being 38 than I was having, due in large part to the work and wisdom of so many of the people there. I was, in many ways, just happy to be there. After all, I could have been introduced to this world at the age of 88 instead of 38. But my family is young, my wife is bright, beautiful, and diligent, and the world looks different at 38 than it would at 88. I have heaps of hope.

Would I have loved it if my own father had been at such an event 30 years ago? Yes, sure. But to my knowledge, no such event existed. So I’m grateful to have been given the chance to be here, and grateful that my family has been blessed to benefit from the labor of others in this classical and Christian education movement.

To misquote Tom Petty, It’s good to be a pauper, if just for a while. To be there in homespun, yeah to give ‘em a smile. 

So I felt small. I felt a bit poor. And I smiled. I smiled when Andrew Kern spoke of harmony and his words went down like a satisfying slurp of water on a hot walk through Charleston. I smiled when I met Matt, a mischievous and wise guy. I smile meeting Kobi and Brandon, ordinary parents like us who had kind words and easy friendship to give. I smiled meeting Greg, a winsome and bright gentleman. I smiled seeing Kevin, Laura, Emma, and Abby, a beautiful family with kindness in spades. I smiled when I met Lesli and Lee, and experienced the energetic advocacy and mentoring possible when people care to see you succeed. I smiled meeting Chris, a man who immediately had words to say that I needed to hear, and a generous tenderness that left me feeling an enchanting mix of validation and inspiration. I smiled meeting Andrew, generous and humble. I smiled meeting Chuck, Deb, Graeme and Leah, because they were funny and kind. There were many, many more, and that doesn’t even go into how the conference went for me as an author. On that score also, it was profoundly encouraging and delightful.

I was amazed to be at a place where so many people we met were either already readers of The Green Ember, or they had heard good things about it from others. I was blessed to meet many, many kind folks who have welcomed our little story into their family life. I heard such encouraging things from Hope, Sarah, Emily, Abigail, Dave, Candace, and so many more. It did feel special to receive such a big dose of attention and affection from people who have enjoyed these stories. It can also be a little daunting to experience. It doesn’t feel quite real, like they are talking about someone else, another author’s book. I am still learning how to process that kind of attention. (Maybe feeling “small” in the way I spoke of earlier helped.) I hope God is answering my prayer for a humble, happy heart with a Yes. It was best when we got past the Encounter of Strangers stage and I got to hear about their kids and the ways stories (including mine) have shaped them. That’s the stuff I love most, because it connects me to the meaning I’m seeking in my vocation and inspires me to carry on in a way sales numbers, reviews, and similar evaluative measures can’t.

So I felt small and special, poor and incredibly blessed.

I’m eager to get the audio of the event and listen again to what I heard, and to hear what I missed. I don’t have thoughtful reflections to share right now, and I probably won’t. But I did peck a short poem in my phone while Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus, spoke.

The man spoke about architecture. How we build things that will not last. He fired my mind to build, to make things that span the centuries. But I looked at my hands. I knew they were not the hands of a builder. But such as I have….

 

A Cathedral of Words

I cannot, I think, build a great building of any kind,

To last a thousand years. 

Not with these hands.

So I will try, in my own way,

To make something that lasts a while.

I will try, I think,

To build a cathedral of words. 

But that is too grand. 

A cottage is more likely, with washing on the line.

A little home.

Simple meals.

A warm fire.

Happy kids.

A cottage of words. 

May it last a little while and lend fire to a few tired travelers, moving through whatever darkness,

This industrious world manufactures for them.

A cathedral of words? Perhaps that’s too grand a spire. But I, bold as a mouse,

Aspire.

So I will build what I can,

And let my children, when they are grey,

Say what it was. 

 

I will stop navel-gazing for a moment and try to see the Grand Canyon in this. I think what Andrew & Kern’s Immortals are building is just that: a cathedral of words. They might say they are rediscovering an old cathedral, but I suggest that have only rediscovered old plans. And with those plans, in this age, they are making something new. I pray it lasts a thousand years. I believe the impact has been, and will be, profound. I’m grateful because of the way this cathedral’s top points to heaven, with its bottom on the earth, where heaven will come to rest in the True New World.

I have been captured by a calling in recent years. I want my life to be about kindling imagination for Kingdom anticipation. What I received at Circe’s conference was only fuel for that fire. Christ be praised.

Thank you, David. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you to everyone at Circe’s 2015 conference. I had a wonderful time with you, and can’t wait to do it again.

Deo adjuvante non timendum

New Stories With an Old Soul: And a Giveaway with Sally Clarkson

I’m so honored to be over at my friend Sally Clarkson’s blog today talking about New Stories With an Old Soul. She’s also giving away three copies of my new book, The Black Star of Kingston. Head over and enter the giveaway!

*****

 

“It is of the new things that men tire —of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. But it is the old things that startle and intoxicate; it is the old things that are really young. ”

G.K. Chesterton

This is my goal: I want to tell new stories with an old soul. I want to look forward, to hope and dream, to gaze through the fog to the certain dawn of the true New World. I also want to echo. I want my tales to resound with old words, old ways, old wisdom.

I want to make vintage adventure.

Who cares? Does it matter? I think it does. I think it does because the stories we hear shape us like nothing else. Hearing the phrase “Jesus is good,” is positive, but it is meaningless without a story. When we read to our children the story of Jesus raising the dead, healing the lame, and sacrificing himself, we get more than just the information. We get the heart, the hope, the joy, the pain, and the information. We get formation. Because we see and feel that Jesus is good. We know it in our souls.

Stories matter. Fiction shapes us in a deep way as well. Perhaps especially when we are young. But why new stories with an old soul?

My friend (and the illustrator for my books) Zach Franzen is kind of a genius. When I run out of clever things to say, I usually pull out a Zachism and run with it. (It’s about to happen again.) He has been a cheerleader for the “New Stories, Old Soul” side from the beginning. He contends that most publishers don’t want to release new books with old virtues. If people want those, it’s easier and cheaper for the publishers to just release the old books again. So the virtues featured in those books are for now, he says, trapped in amber. They are museum pieces. So Zach has been a partner in more ways than just by illustrating my books. He’s been an encouragement, believing that those old virtues can live on in new adventures—that they can be seen in the wild again.

I want to uncork some vintage adventure on a generation of thirsty young souls.

…READ on at Sally’s site!