S. Kirk Pierzchala's Blog, page 4

Book Giveaway!

Hey, it's time for another book signing event AND giveaway of an autographed hardback copy of Harshest Dawn, Book Four in the Beyond Cascadia series! If you can't show up in person, but you still want a shot at the free book, please leave a comment on this post and I will put your name in the hat (or whatever we end up using)!

When: Saturday, June 10, 1 --3 pm (drawing to be held at approximately 2:30)

Where: Queen of Peace Books, 807 1/2 Grand Boulevard, Vancouver, WA

Come, Holy Spirit!

Lumen Gentium, watercolor (c) Carol Anderson

As we draw nearer to Pentecost, we often find ourselves reflecting on the ways the Holy Spirit may be working in our lives.

In that vein, please take a few minutes to read my latest piece in ,Catholic World Report! It's a profile of Oregon artist, Carol Anderson, a talented and humble woman who allows the Spirit to work through her trauma, transforming her life lessons into beautiful works of inspirational art.

Upstream Reviews of "Silence and Starsong!"

Trevor Denning, clearly a reader with impeccable taste in fiction, recently posted his impression of the inaugural issue of Silence and Starsong magazine! He provides a mini-review of each story in the collection, including the pieces by yours truly: "Free Lunch" and "The Secret of Phelim Darke".

Please check out the review here, (and sign up for their updates)! Buy a copy of the mag here, and don't forget to leave your own review.

Spread the word about high-quality, imaginative Christian fiction!

Arising from the bunkers

Photo: abandoned pillbox, cc-by-sa/2.0.(c) Walter ,Baxter-geograph.org.uk/p/449209

Last summer, on a sweltering afternoon in early August, I found myself shuffling along at the back of one of the longest lines I’ve ever been in. The winding train of humanity, encompassing all ages, toiled past outbuildings and dumpsters, zig-zagged up and down hilly fields mantled with parched grass. The scene was bathed in the failing day's golden light, and the air was heavy with the scent of sun-warmed vegetation. We were at McMenamin’s Edgefield, a legendary outdoor concert venue in Troutdale, Oregon, to enjoy the sold-out concert by the Decemberists on their "Arise From The Bunkers" tour. The turnout was heavy enough that it was mentioned on the local news the following day. All of us were happy, enjoying a mutual a sense of joyful anticipation, of relief.

Why was this event noteworthy, and why were we sharing this sense of relief? Because we were all of us finally ready, downright eager, to put the covid lockdown nightmare behind us, to get back to normal as soon as possible.

Is it even possible to go back to normal after living through the events of the last three years?

This past month, April 2023, marked the third year since the traumatic announcement that the world would lockdown for ‘two weeks to slow the spread’. On a more personal level, this past February also marked the third anniversary of my mother’s lung cancer diagnosis. As I shuttled her and my Dad to various pulmonology and oncology appointments, breathless talk of a devastating virus continually percolated in the background, but we didn’t pay much attention at first, we were too focused on our own dire woes, on the reality of a different sort of mortal illness that loomed far more immediately in our lives.

By the time the official lockdown was in effect, she was on home hospice care in my Dad’s house, next door to my own. Given that she was dealing with the effects of her first (and only) chemo treatment, we were okay with going out as infrequently as possible, to limit the risk of bringing any infection home. As doctors called to discuss palliative care, as news bulletins updated us about the pandemic, about shortages and hoarding, it seemed our options and freedoms were whittled away on a daily, almost hourly basis.

I really did have the sense we were being locked down in a bunker, while bombs of uncertainty and misinformation continually pounded our small sanctuary. The vigorous assertions that we were ‘all in this together’, the sense that so many people all over the world were hoping and praying for a good outcome, helped make it bearable. The prayers and thoughtfulness of so many friends and family kept us uplifted; the flower arrangements that were delivered regularly formed a heavenly bower about her deathbed. Thus, nebulous fear existed alongside blind trust that perhaps whatever dark cloud we were all entering wouldn’t be too big or scary in the long term.

Against the backdrop of reports of massive hospitalizations and mounting global death counts, we watched for any little victories and improvements in Mom’s situation, even as her overall trajectory was downward. Due to covid regs, hospice nurses didn't visit as frequently as we’d have liked, although overall the program was wonderful.

Fortunate to be able to work from home, my husband was also the one to regularly venture forth into the dystopian landscape to do some grocery shopping, and we worked to maintain a fairly normal routine, or as normal as possible under the circumstances. In some respects, because we are a homeschooling family, we weren't impacted as much as many others were.

Then my youngest sister took ill and it fell to me to break through her denial and get her to the ER. Again, due to covid restrictions, we didn’t see her for nearly a month. I was kept updated via phone by her team of wonderful doctors and nurses, but I still felt helpless. The responsibility of caring for her mopey, neurotic little dog at least provided my kids with a distraction from the daily sorrow and grim uncertainty of the family situation. When I could, I threw myself more deeply into my long-term writing project, which I had begun in 2019. And while crafting a series of dystopian novels might not seem like the best way to tune out world events, the creative outlet really did help soothe my nerves.

Although the medical scans hadn’t shown anything wrong with my Mom’s brain, she exhibited dementia-type signs even prior to her diagnosis. These worsened sharply, while the outside world also continued to crumble. Her personality and awareness eroded like the perimeters of an ice floe heading for tropical waters. At least, wrapped in her own inner world, she was spared a lot of anxiety about global events, although I’m pretty sure she, in her unshakable confidence in God’s providence, would have shrugged much it off with a few witty quips.

As she continued to fail, and the round-the-clock supervision and medication schedule became more bewildering, I was grateful that my brother and another sister were able to join us. My sister’s journey, from Europe, was especially challenging due to various travel restrictions, but she did make it in time to help share the burden of care-giving in those last few days. Since neither she nor my brother had been witness to Mom's deterioration from the beginning of her illness, they were shocked when they saw the end results for themselves. My brother was especially shaken, and wanted to know how much longer she could hold on. Something prompted me to mention that the feast of Catherine of Siena was approaching; since that was Mom’s patron in the Dominican Laity, and we had a first-class relic of the saint nearby, was it presumptuous of us to hope she'd pass on that date?

I’m sure I don’t have to remind everyone that the churches were closed during this time. For me, that was one of the most distressing aspects of the entire tribulation. To be cut off from that source of community and grace when I needed it most seemed a grave injustice, a slap in the face as I struggled to do my best. Watching livestreams on Sunday morning was, in some ways, almost insulting, and scarcely better than doing nothing. However, while in-person Mass attendance was out of the question, our pastor visited us when he could and brought the Sacrament, heard confessions of other family members, and most importantly, gave Mom Last Rites.

She did, in fact, arise from the bunker of her wasted body on the evening of April 29, the Feast of St. Catherine of Siena. Needless to say, this was a hugely comforting sign to those of us left behind. As awful as this situation was, we’ll always be grateful she was with us until the end, rather than dying alone as so many others did, isolated in a hospital with overworked staff unable to check on her regularly. So, in many ways, despite the horrific situation, there were many blessings and bright spots.

My sister from Europe was effectively marooned with us while the whole international travel situation slowly sorted itself out, and it was a wonderful experience for us all, especially my kids, to spend time with her. When my other sister was at last released from the skilled nursing center, we were all reunited, and began the process of coming to terms with what we’d witnessed during Mom’s final ordeal.

Slowly, we passed from that trial into the ongoing storm of pandemic-related news, rumors, controversies and civil unrest. Whether we wanted to hear about them or not, these issues were constantly thrust in our faces. The sense that we were 'all in this together' rapidly dissolved as resentment and mistrust developed between various parties. It was clear that as battle lines were drawn and misinformation from all quarters permeated every aspect of life, we were witnessing a vast upheaval in the previous order. No matter how much we wanted it, there was no going back to what life had been like before.

This feeling was strengthened during the months-long riots that terrorized the city, and by the threat of the wildfires that came within miles of our neighborhood. To say nothing of the veritable armies of zombie-like homeless addicts living on the streets of Portland, their numbers seemingly mushrooming overnight. The ground beneath our feet felt like it had dissolved to quicksand, and trust in our most revered institutions was shaken to the core.

Even three years later, it's hard to put this all behind, when it was only a few weeks ago that the Oregon Health Authority lifted its mask mandate for medical settings. Nearly three years of ‘two weeks to slow the spread’.

I have shared here only a handful of snapshots and impressions of that era; the real scars---and growth--are much deeper and harder to express. Yet I also feel it it's time for me, before I can move on, to look back for a moment and acknowledge the stress, the helplessness, the sense of betrayal on so many levels. So many questions echo through my mind and heart:

Why hadn’t Mom told us earlier that she suspected she was seriously ill?

Why did her mind leave so much earlier than her spirit?

Why were those in power over us such heavy-handed fear-mongerers?

Why were those individuals and institutions I trusted to know better, so easily swayed by rumors and blatant propaganda?

I could go on, but there's really no point; I suppose I already know the answers.

However, I don't know that I will ever truly be free of a nagging sense of unease, of a low-level shell-shock. I’m not presenting this retrospective to make the case that I suffered more than others; in fact, I do believe we were fortunate in many ways, and the prayers of friends and well-wishers offered during that dark time were truly felt and appreciated. As a family, we have confronted and moved past some painful private issues, and seem to have become stronger. Family and life-long friends that re-located across the country and across the globe are still in touch---one of the wonders of technology. I'm frequently aware of Mom's presence, and while that conviction isn't a substitute for speaking with her face to face, it's better than nothing, and I never feel that she has left us entirely. My kids are maturing and blossoming in many wonderful ways. I'm amazed that my writing career has gone much farther, in such a short time, than I had thought possible.

Life, as they say, goes on.

As we are now in the third Easter season following this epoch of great personal and global upheaval, the idea of emerging from darkness to light, from bunkers to the surface, from graves to Heaven, is greatly on my mind.

Mom left the known for the unknown, and the rest of us are still creeping forward, coming to terms with the the idea that nothing will be as it was before, not at home, not in our nation, not anywhere on Earth. This has always been the way of things, but it often takes experiencing some drastic and painful event—or series of events—to have one’s eyes opened and to truly internalize that reality. Perhaps hardest to admit is how little control any of us has over the big picture, we can only make small choices in the moment and hope for the best.

Looking back at both the bad and the good can help remind us to watch for blessings ahead, to trust that, no matter how dark the clouds, how tightly the bunker is shut, God is welcoming us into something different and perhaps better.

The concert on that warm August evening ended with the popular song "Sons and Daughters". Swaying happily beneath the stars, lit by the glow from the soft beer garden lights strung in the trees, five thousand people sang together:

Take up your arms

Sons and daughters

We will arise from the bunkers

By land, by sea, by dirigible

We'll leave our tracks untraceable now

When we arrive, sons and daughters (when we arrive, sons and daughters)

We'll make our lives on the water (we'll make our lives on the water)

We'll build our walls aluminum

We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon

Hear all the bombs fade away

Hear all the bombs fade away

Hear all the bombs fade away…

It was clear that each person there felt a sense of peace and hope; it was a truly blessed, magical, experience. And it hadn't come a moment too soon.

For the full song, please click here .

"Silence and Starsong" Magazine Now Available!

I'm thrilled to finally reveal that I have two short pieces included in the inaugural issue of "Silence & Starsong" magazine! Silence and Starsong is a site that, in their own words, "is an online and print magazine inspiring wonder and awe through stories of high strangeness and other modern fairy-tales for grown-ups."

To that end, they look to the examples set by writers such as George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. You can learn more ,here.

My two pieces, entitled "Free Lunch" and "The Secret of Phelim Darke", are brand-new tales that have not been previously published. They won't be available anywhere else for awhile, so if you want to read them, (to say nothing of the other excellent works in this volume), you can order an ebook or a physical copy ,here.

And after reading, please leave a review!!

IT'S HERE: "Harshest Dawn: Beyond Cascadia Four"

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/a22dde_0ba8535c6c1f4a11ba156185b83a1da3/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

I'm thrilled to announce my latest novel, Harshest Dawn, is now available!

Ebook/epub versions are here in my shop, ebook and physical formats also here: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play Books.

Please note that for epub and PDF versions purchased directly from my site, I retain more profits. However, books purchased on a bigger platform can be reviewed on that platform, which is greatly appreciated! For the time being, physical copies are available at Amazon, unless I happen to have some in stock and can arrange a direct sale/delivery. If you live in the greater Portland/Vancouver area and want to purchase from me, contact me for more details.

THE STORY: The action in this fast-paced installment picks up immediately after the conclusion of Book Two, Eclipse Rising, and follows Owen and Sofia's exploits directly following their escape from the impending coup on the West Coast!

Here's the summary:

"A grim dawn rises in the Pacific Northwest…

The progressive “Successor” party has seized control of the West Coast, further isolating the region from the decayed and feckless United States. Imposing their warped utopian vision on the defenseless citizens, the leaders of the new nation of Pacifica swiftly ramp up persecution of all social and religious opposition.

In a haven far from the chaos, American cyber defender Owen MacIntyre hears disturbing rumors about conditions in his former home, but there’s little he can do to help. Frustrated and powerless, he wonders if it’s time to abandon politics and focus instead on building a peaceful life elsewhere with his wife, Sofia.

But Owen’s ex-supervisor, Pacifica’s Chief Enforcer Hayden Singer, has other ideas. Even a world away, he has MacIntyre dead in his sights and is determined to make him pay for his disloyalty

Thus politics becomes personal when the fugitive couple is caught in a revenge-fueled scheme that rips their family apart. Desperate and driven, Owen and Sofia will need every skill at their disposal—and some top-secret, risky new technology—to overcome the nightmare of Singer’s sadistic plans."

Pick up a copy in your preferred format TODAY and lose yourself in a fast-paced, gripping tale with lots of personal drama and political intrigue! (Details about the hardback giveaway are still pending, so stay tuned for those updates)!

Book Four Cover Reveal and Sneak Preview!

Harshest Dawn cover proposal, (c) Ryan Williamson

Here's the latest version of the cover for Beyond Cascadia Four: Harshest Dawn!!

Of course, there will be some final tweaking, but I am so pleased with how it is turning out, I couldn't wait to share! The novel is the final stages of editing and proofing, and is on track to be released in March!

Enter to win a FREE signed hardback edition, (no purchase necessary, drawing to be held in April, exact date to be determined). Put your name in the hopper by replying "I'm in" to this post, emailing me through this site, or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.

In the meantime, here's a brief tease for Harshest Dawn, which focuses on Owen MacIntyre and resumes action following the conclusion of Eclipse Rising:

A grim dawn rises in the Pacific Northwest...

The “Successor” party has seized control of the region and broken from the United States, ramping up a brutal campaign against all opposition in their march to establish a progressive utopia.

Far from the chaos, American cyber defender Owen MacIntyre is powerless to influence events in his former home. Weary of political intrigue, he wonders if it’s time to focus instead on building a new life for himself and Sofia elsewhere.

But he can't escape the reach of the ruthless new regime: soon, he's thrust back into the conflict when Chief Security Enforcer Hayden Singer ramps up a personal vendetta and threatens his growing family.

Using every skill at his disposal—and some risky new technology—MacIntyre will put it all on the line to thwart Singer’s sadistic plans. But are the odds against him?

I hope this fires up your interest, and you'll be ready to continue exploring the Beyond Cascadia saga when the next installment releases!

Mark your calendars: In-Person Book Signing, Jan. 28

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/a22dde_fd686e9852e141cc94b406bc9cfe1751/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

I am thrilled to announce I will be at Queen of Peace bookstore in Vancouver, WA, to sign books, answer questions, and generally get to know my readers!

Limited quantities of all three of the first titles in the Beyond Cascadia series will be available for purchase at the shop. If you already have any copies, you are welcome to bring them in and get them signed!

Please share this notice with anyone you believe would be interested, and I hope to see you there!

When: Sat., Jan. 28, 6. p.m.

Where: Queen of Peace Books

807 1/2 Grand Boulevard,

Vancouver, WA, 98661

(Some of the) Best Books I Read in 2022

I was invited to share some of my favorite titles in Catholic World Report's "Best Books of 2022" feature. Needless to say, it was really tough narrowing my list down to a manageable level. Of course, expressing myself in very few words when I had so much to say about each book was also a challenge.

Take a look at my choices, as well as the wonderful recommendations from many other readers, and be ready to spend your Christmas gift cards on books next year!

Link to Catholic World Report here.

A Writer's Fiat: An Interview with Sally Thomas

One of life's great pleasures is spending time with a kindred spirit discussing literature and the creative life in general. Through the miracle of the internet, I was recently blessed with the opportunity to have a virtual 'sit-down' with the Catholic poet and novelist, Sally Thomas.

Thomas' acclaimed works have appeared in such prestigious journals as Dappled Things, the New Yorker, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Associate Poetry Editor at the New York Sun. Her novel, Works of Mercy, was published earlier this year by Wiseblood Books.

If you are not yet familiar with her work, I am delighted to remedy that situation right now! Brew a cup of your favorite warm drink and settle in for a conversation filled with wisdom and prayerful insights on different aspects of the Catholic creative journey.

SKP: What would you most like readers to know about your personal journey as both a writer and a Catholic?

ST: Well, maybe mostly that they're both ongoing journeys. I've been a writer all my life; I've been a Catholic since 2007. But both of those things --- and I think of the faith as the world in which everything else happens, including the writing, so it's not like these are two poles pulling in opposite directions --- both things involve daily conversion. It's not as though you just get there, and there you are. I have to say fiat to God daily, and I have to say fiat, daily, to the work of writing, which probably helps me with the other, larger fiat.

SKP: You have an extensive and impressive background in poetry. Did you always plan to delve into short stories and longer fiction as well, or was that an organic off-shoot from a love of using words to explore the human condition?

ST: I've always been a reader of fiction. In fact, as a reader, I've always gravitated more to novels than to anything else, even as I've read and written poetry. I love story, I love character, I love the sense of worldmaking that happens in fiction. Now, poetry can involve those things --- my friend Marly Youmans, for example, has a whole fantasy-in-verse coming out from Wiseblood sometime this winter. There are verse novels. And so on. But there's a lot of pleasure and latitude to be found in writing prose.

As far as planning to write one thing or another goes, I'm not sure I've really planned to do anything that I've done. Things just nag at me to write them, so I do. Sometimes the "appetency" I feel --- a great word from Samuel Taylor Coleridge! --- is a hunger to make music in rhyme and meter. What I hear is a line that I know is poetry, and immediately my mind wants to supply the next line. But sometimes the "appetency" is different. I start to daydream about characters and the things they could do and say, and the world in which they could live and move and have their being. That too might start with a sentence. Works of Mercy began with the sentence which still opens the novel. It was clearly a line of prose, and clearly a voice, and I needed to write another sentence, and another, and another, to set whatever was going to happen in motion. I didn't know what it was. But I knew that if I kept writing it, I would find out.

I did start publishing short fiction about ten years ago, again because stories just nagged at me until I wrote them. But it really wasn't a large vision I had had about how my career (and I use that term loosely!) was going to go. Again, it was just largely a matter of saying fiat.

SKP: You are also a seasoned homeschooling mother and mentor. What led to your decision to home-educate, and what were some of the biggest challenges and rewards of that decision?

ST: That's another thing that really wasn't planned. The short version is that our oldest child was having a rough time in school, and the problem really seemed to be more a problem of fit between her and institutional school, than a problem with that particular school. We had no idea how long we'd keep doing it. For years we just said that we were taking it year by year. Gradually the number of years added up to seventeen, at which point our two youngest children graduated and left home, and we were done with that whole project.

Challenges: My own executive-function skills, which have never been great. Just finding a way to keep our whole educational enterprise in the road was its own sometimes-overwhelming process.

Rewards: The time spent with my children, and the time they spent with each other. As adults, the four of them are very close and involved with each other. The great reward really is hearing them laugh together when they're all at home, which only happens at Christmas now, but is the best thing ever.

SKP: Did you ever experience tension between answering the call to glorify God through your art, and the managing of your obligations to family? If so, what are some practical tips for balancing the demands of those two spheres?ST: I think everyone who is any kind of artist experiences some kind of tension between the artistic vocation and everything else. Just practically speaking, most people can't do the art thing all day long, whether it's because they also have to make a living, and practically nobody makes a living at art, or because of the needs of a family, which don't wait, or because in terms of energy there's only so long you can sustain the artistic work. Flannery O'Connor wrote for two hours in the morning, then she was tapped out. Some people really do write all day, or paint, or sculpt, or write music, but I know far more people whose natural inclination is a lot less hyperfocused than that. On the other hand, I know a lot of people who know how much they hyperfocus, and who are always trying to figure out how to balance things so that their work or family demands don't get swept under the carpet. Anthony Trollope, who worked as a civil servant in the British postal service, wrote his very many novels in increments of fifteen minutes out of each hour of the working day. That was a life-changing little factoid for me, and I wish I'd known it a lot sooner than I did.

So I guess the main thing is to know yourself and to know what's important, and to prioritize, and also to know that writing, particularly, doesn't mean just doing nothing else all day long. I did write a lot more in the handful of years when my oldest children went to school, I have to say. Homeschooling, and the all-day relentless demand of that on top of normal mothering, made it hard to do anything else, especially since for most of that time I didn't know about Trollope and his fifteen-minute increments. Eventually I got somewhat better at time management, and eventually I also realized that I couldn't live without sleep. In the years when everyone was home, and life was really all family all the time, I was glad to be a poet, because I could do something tiny --- change a word in a line --- and feel that I'd done something.

I do know young mothers now who are writers who are managing to do remarkable things. Jane Clark Scharl and Tessa Carman, for example, are two poets and mothers who have done a stunning translation of The Dream of the Rood together, which appeared in The Lamp magazine some months ago. I am in awe of them, because when I had young children, I was not making things like that happen.

On the other hand, I was pretty satisfied, a lot of the time, just to be in the company of my children. I think that's okay, too. It's okay to let the field lie fallow for a time, and to let whatever is in front of you be satisfying to you. I did have some existential crises, but I don't think it has to be all existential crisis all the time. Years ago, before I even had children, I read an essay by the poet Pattiann Rogers, who said that when her sons were young she hadn't written much. She noted that for years and years, she had found her relationships with them so nourishing that she hadn't felt the need to write. Then the big wheel turned again, the sons grew up, and the hunger to write revisited her. I thought about that a lot when my children were small.

SKP: It seems much mystique surrounds the art of poetry. Do you feel poetry suffers from a misconception that it is hard to access for the average reader? As the Associate Poetry Editor of the New York Sun, what are some insights about the state of the art of poetry in the American literary scene?I think people often feel that poems are shrouded in impenetrable mystery, whether that's actually true or not. A lot of people seem to have been scared off poetry by their high-school English teachers, whose way of talking about poetry (whatever that was) made students feel dumb and locked out --- locked out of the poems they were supposed to be reading, discouraged from making any kind of personal connection with the poems, for fear of getting it wrong.

Now, some poems and some poets genuinely are difficult. And there are conventions in some contemporary poetry which engages in all kinds of postmodern interrogations of language and breaking-apart of forms, that can make those poems really hard to track for a reader.

But what I think poetry largely demands is attention. You can't read it like fiction, where you're just working your way to the end of the page, the end of the chapter, the end of the book, to find out what happens. You can't read it in the same way that you read a news article, for information. There are conventions for poetry that it's useful to know --- that you might have to read carefully over many lines to track the unfolding of a sentence, for example. That in addition to syntax, you're also paying attention to patterns of rhythm and rhyme. That you're not looking for a meaning, in the way that you read a news article to find out where the hurricane made landfall. In a poem, language is not there necessarily to convey information, though usually something is happening intelligibly on a literal level. But in a poem, words carry resonances of meaning and association that amplify how the poem might mean for a reader. And it's important to read a poem again and again, and at least once out loud, to steep in those words and pay attention to what associations they call up, and how those associations might make sense with other suggestive words or images in the whole picture of the poem.

At the ,New York Sun, we're largely publishing older poems that are in the public domain, five days a week. What we want is to revive that old habit of reading a poem in the course of reading the paper, and of being familiar with poems generally. If poetry has been edged to the margins of our culture, then it's our mission to edge it back again into people's field of vision. We are deliberately foregrounding poems that access the traditional devices of rhyme and meter, because the music of a poem is what makes somebody remember it. And we are occasionally soliciting poems from contemporary poets who work in traditional forms, because that's certainly not a thing of the past. It's a tradition, but like any tradition worth having, it's alive. People are engaged with it today, enlarging and carrying it forward.

SKP: Your recently published novel, ,Works of Mercy, (Wiseblood Books) is receiving glowing reviews. I’d like to learn a little more about the influences that went into this specific book. For example: Robert Southwell’s work, Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, is a persistent presence throughout the life of the narrator, Kirsty Swain. I’m curious: in your mind, did her story grow around the original seed of that specific work, or did you match his words to her needs later?

ST: A lot of things probably indirectly influenced this novel! I have some --- I guess I'd call them archetypal, maybe? --- novels that are always present in my mind for one reason or another, and have been, for me, the models of the kind of novel I would most want to write. Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness occurs to me as an example, mostly because I thought that if I were going to write a first-person narrative, I would want the narrative voice to be as flexible and malleable as the voice of Father Hugh Kennedy in that novel. Father Hugh is very funny, especially when talking about his curate, who emerges as heroic in the course of the novel, but in the beginning, Father Hugh, who is wrapped up in ironic distance, is ironic about him, too. The whole novel tracks Father Hugh's development into someone who can be restored to a fuller presence in the vocation to which he has been called, and as the story progresses, the pathos that's possible in that same voice is remarkable, as that narrator moves into greater vulnerability and self-knowledge. I really wanted to be able to write a voice like that. The narrative voices in Alice Thomas Ellis's The Summerhouse Trilogy were very present to me, too.

I'm not sure how Kirsty Sain first started talking about Robert Southwell, in some early draft of Works of Mercy, but once she did, I found I had to read more of him. I was familiar with many of the poems, of course, but in reading about him, and casting about for things he had written that might be significant for Kirsty, I did happen on Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears and read it. It's a remarkable text, through and through, but there were phrases that stood out to me, like all that Sorrow is the sister of mercy business, that seemed as though they could be important for Kirsty. At the time I didn't entirely know why, and I had to read the text multiple times (it's not that long), just to have Southwell's whole thought in mind, while Kirsty was thinking her thoughts and recounting her story.

SKP: Creating a novel of this psychological depth demands a lot from a writer. Were any parts especially challenging to write from an emotional standpoint? ST: I've heard people say that they cried writing certain passages in their own novels, particularly deaths of characters. This was not my experience at all. Beyond a certain point, I knew that there was going to be a death --- nothing else could break things open in the world of that novel in the way that grief would do, and I knew that things had to be broken open. But I didn't know who, or how, or anything like that. Obviously I had some leading contenders as soon as the characters really began to take shape. But the real challenge was in discerning all that, and then figuring out how to write it in a way that would be not maudlin or overwrought, but true to the grief that the characters would feel and the ways that they would respond to that grief. To me it was an artistic challenge, not really primarily an emotional one. I also knew that what I was creating was an emotional effect. In one sense the question was how to construct what the reader would experience, which I guess is to say, to figure out how to manipulate the reader in the right way. That's a terrible term, manipulate, but I had ideas about how reading the emotionally intense passages in the novel should feel. Not that I wanted to jerk people around emotionally, or dictate how they feel --- just that I wanted the gravitas of the things that happen to be felt and experienced.

I felt kind of emotional about things later, and I might find that I'm really emotional when I read certain passages aloud. But that wasn't the experience of the actual writing. SKP: Are you planning to write any more novels?Again, though I would love to, plan is what God loves to thwart! Unless it's His plan. So . . . fiat. SKP:Do you have a favorite daily prayer or routine that specifically aids in your writing process?ST: My prayer life is honestly pretty garden-variety. I usually make a Morning Offering --- and I know that one of the things I'm going to do, one of my works, is going to be writing. I read the Mass readings and try to meditate on them and hold them in my mind. My husband and I pray the rosary together at night. When I've taught writing to high-school students, I've sometimes thought about how writing, or any art form, is given to us as a means of growing in virtue, and I've begun classes with a little meditation on and prayer for a particular virtue: diligence, say, or patience, or humility. For one class, I tracked down all the various saints who could be invoked at patrons of writers or poets --- St. John of the Cross, for example --- and every week we'd ask one of them for his or her intercession. But for myself, on a daily basis, I don't tend to do that. Just the basic prayers, because I know I'll do those. Anything elaborate very quickly becomes something I don't do!

Note: I plan to post an in-depth review of Works of Mercy soon, so please stay tuned!---SKP.