Appendix A: Jane Austen, Flannery, Writing

• Love Jane Austen? Now she’s in comics!

• Most Britons have lied about the books they read—According to the survey, 65 percent of people have pretended to have read books, and of those, 42 percent singled out 1984. Next on the list came War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and in third place was James Joyce's Ulysses.

Kent here: Why do books continue to impress people, but so few other art forms are mentioned to “impress”? I mean, how many people lie about the classic films they've seen or Broadway musicals they've attended? Is it because persistence & dedication & understanding are required at an unusual depth for authoring books?

• Summer Writing: Going it by yourself is okay, but writing can be a solitary craft. Perfecting that craft w/strangers is often wiser than w/people who know us and place expectations upon us. So if you’re wanting to write, you need to attend a writing camp, convention, or class. Or, if you’re in the Midwest, try this festival. (You might see me there.)

• Janet Maslin at the New York Times states “Brad Gooch’s rapt, authoritative Flannery is the first major biography of a writer who died 44 years ago. Where is the flood of other biographical material about this mystical, ornery, ardently admired Southern writer?”

“It’s a wonderful children’s book,” she said about the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird by her fellow Southern loner Harper Lee. When she inquired about films by “this man Ingmar Bergman,” she came unusually close to identifying a kindred spirit steeped in spiritual rigor. “They too are apparently medieval,” she said, considering common ground between his works and her own.

Kent here: Maslin should’ve read Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which highlights O’Conner with three other Catholic writers who spanned the 20th Century. It’s a majestic read on writing, authors, and putting the spiritual on the page in a believable way.

It’s Gotta Be The Atheists!

We can’t whine that the mainstream publishing industry is unreceptive, even hostile, to literature that has Christian characters, themes, and/or metaphors. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary. (And no, I’m not talking about Christian book publishers that, with few exceptions, are by Christians to Christians, and that only Christians know exist.)

Major awards and publicity have been given to overtly Christian literature in the last decade. To name just a few:

• Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a book about an aging Calvinist minister writing to his young son (how’s that for an exciting concept?), won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
• Kent Haruf’s Plainsong was fiction finalist for the National Book Award in 1999.
• Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River (2001) was a Book of the Month choice and featured in an NPR book club discussion.
• Brett Lott’s Jewel (1991) was an Oprah choice in 1999.
• Still one of the most prestigious forums for short fiction, The Atlantic Monthly’s annual Fiction Issue (on newsstands now) features three (of six) short stories that involve religious faith. Last year, there was one—Tim Gautreaux’s “The Safe.”

True, it’s not an overabundance of riches, though once you start including highly-regarded authors who include Christians or characters struggling with God in their works, the list noticeably inflates.

Shooting The Canon

This doesn’t include the Western Canon, where two of the all-time best were Christians:

• Many consider Dante’s Divine Comedy to be a greater poetic accomplishment than anything Shakespeare created.
• Leo Tolstoy created two fascinating prose classics—War and Peace, Anna Karenina—that are too often known for their length instead of their brilliance. He was also a master of short stories (“Master and Man”) and novellas (The Death of Ivan Illych).

Then there’s these Christian slackers:

• Flannery O’Conner’s short stories (“Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”) were powerful enough to power her into the canon.
• Graham Greene (The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter) is said to have been short-listed for the Nobel Prize for literature.
• C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia are undisputed children’s favorites.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky is still proclaimed the most psychologically astute novelist who has ever written, penning Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Defining their Christianity is not my intent. Showcasing their unflinching portrayal of Christianity, its themes and characters, is.
The Truth We Ignore?
Publishing isn’t nearly as biased against Christian works as it is against inferior works, (though it sometimes seems too eager to publish the inferior). Perhaps the problem isn’t hostile atheists, but Apostolics unwilling to bleed on the page for their calling. Perhaps we’d rather kind of give it a go from the safety of our churches rather than dive into the requirements publishing today demands.

Like Christian musical artists unwilling to move to Nashville to risk their lucky break, we may find ourselves not attending writing conferences (where agents and publishers examine manuscripts), or taking writing courses with experienced professionals (that costs money!), or going the extra mile for our calling, then wonder why we can’t get connected to major publishers. Everything takes work.

Most of the titles mentioned are the current and classic standards of literary excellence. If we’re to continue this tradition we must read them, study them, love them, and then seek to build upon them..

I think we can do it. I know we will do it. Wanna be first?