Category: Guest posts

Comedy and tragedy

I am delighted to welcome Fran Hill to my blog today. She has just released her second book, Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean?, a memoir filled with comedy – but also tragedy. Here she explores the relationship between the two…

The actor Peter Ustinov said: ‘Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.’ He won Grammys, Tonys, Baftas, Emmys and Golden Globes, so I’ll take his word for it. 

Despite what he says, we’re still tempted to create false dichotomies. For instance, we categorise comic and serious fiction in separate generic boxes, confidently labelling novels ‘rom-coms’ or ‘domestic noir’, or perhaps that’s for the convenience of booksellers.  

But Ustinov is right, surely. Comedy is rarely just ‘funny’, free from underlying, serious themes. Think Bridget Jones, Adrian Mole or the fool in a Shakespearean play. Whether commenting on loneliness, teenage angst or the foolishness and vice of monarchs and nobles, each uses comedy, making us laugh while simultaneously plugging in to universal issues of humanity.

The Bible isn’t afraid to mix funny and serious either. How about Balaam’s donkey having better angel-vision than Balaam did and then backchatting his sulky master? Then there’s Jonah, trapped inside a giant fish (vowing never to eat spare ribs again). And Jesus’ own parables were filled with ironic humour and implication, sometimes lost on his listeners. 

However, my favourite Bible story (Acts 20) is of Eutychus. A young man, he falls out of a third-floor window from the windowsill on which he’s perched, having nodded off during a long sermon of the apostle Paul’s. 

Imagine the scene: everyone listening to Paul, the respected man of God. Their faces are serious, intent on learning from the great man. Suddenly, Eutychus disappears, there is a thud and everyone waits for a scream. They rush downstairs to find him dead on the path outside the house. 

Paul could have said: ‘He found my sermon boring. Someone else resurrect him!’ but instead he graciously throws himself on the boy who is instantly revived. 

This is a funny story but it speaks compassionately of average people, trying to do the right thing, and not always managing to keep up or cope: normal folks, not able to meet society’s expectations. That’s all of us at some point. Just like Eutychus, we can’t maintain interest or momentum. Sometimes it’s just too much because we’re tired of life: its worries, griefs, addictions, illnesses or pains. In the same way as Eutychus struggled to keep his eyes open, we too struggle to stay focused, despite it all. 

The story also speaks of a world in which dead things can be brought back to life. Paul makes it look easy, in fact. After he resurrects the youth, he trudges back upstairs to finish his sermon. Eutychus doesn’t get taken home until afterwards, so, where did he sit for Part 2, I wonder? Also, we’re told ‘they took the young man home alive’ as if this was a bonus event, rather than what they’d have expected! Or maybe it suggests that he’d made a habit of this and had been resurrected 17 times before. ‘Honestly, Eutychus!! Again?’ 

I wrote a little poem in his honour: 

I’m comforted by Eutychus
to find that he is one of us.
Asleep, he falls without a push
when Paul the preacher will not shush.
This poem’s an ode to him because,
though dead and gone, that Eutychus
gets resurrected with no fuss.
I think that makes him Euty-plus. 

Erma Bombeck, the American humorist, said: ‘There is a thin line that separates laughter from pain, comedy and tragedy, humour and hurt.’ And, of course, there’s a tenuous distinction between laughter and tears; they both make us feel better, releasing tension-relieving hormones.

Two Radio 4 comedies I’ve enjoyed have been set in depressing situations. One called ‘Rigor Mortis’ is set in a hospital’s pathology department and another – ‘Old Harry’s Game’ – in hell. Somehow the more sombre the setting, the sharper the comedy. And as Dr Adam Kay’s recent book, This is Going to Hurt demonstrates, many whose professions involve tragedy speak of black humour as a vital coping mechanism even amidst horror. 

Teaching can’t be compared to pathology or emergency gynaecology – relief! – but my new book, Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean? also combines comedy and tragedy. It’s a funny memoir in diary format about a typical year in my teaching life and portrays comic classroom moments and the hapless attempts of the protagonist (me!) to keep control of her days as they slip out of her grasp. But it also explores the misbehaviours of both pupils and teachers, including my own, examining why people misbehave, are cruel to others or lack empathy. Sometimes this is linked to past trauma that affects our relationships, perhaps making it hard for us to accept the kindness of others, even though that kindness is vital to survival.  

To go back to Ustinov, Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean? is my attempt to say something serious by being funny. 

Hopefully, no one will fall out of a window at any of my readings. 

Fran Hill is a writer and English tutor living in Warwickshire with her husband. She has three grown-up children and two grandchildren. Her first book Being Miss was self-published in 2014. Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean? is her second. Fran has been a freelance writer for over 20 years, contributing to a wide range of publications, both faith-based and secular. Read more at www.franhill.co.uk 

On writing a memoir

Penelope Swithinbank has just had a week-long official blog tour to launch her new book Walking Back to Happiness. I am thrilled that she agreed to guest blog here to talk about what it was like to write the book…

“Good artists copy; great artists steal” Picasso.

Austin Kleon, the young American writer and artist, uses Picasso’s line to illustrate how we ‘steal’ ideas from everything around us, and advises us to focus on how to transform, remake, improve, thus unlocking our creativity. And, he warns, ‘computers have robbed us of the feeling that we are making things’ (steallikeanartist.com). Simply using pen and paper can help us to be more creative. 

You often don’t know what you think of something until you write it down and describe it. I discovered that as I sat and wrote my journal each evening after completing the daily steps of a long walk. We were backpacking across France, my husband and me, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, partly to celebrate our retirement and partly in an attempt to heal the pain of a broken marriage.  

Each evening, after a shower and change of clothes, and hopefully, tea or something stronger, I used a good pen and a beautiful journal to record the day’s experiences –  places, people, conversations, thoughts, feelings. Someone once said that genius can write on the back of an envelope but mere talent requires a fountain pen and excellent paper. It certainly helps.

Margot Asquith, a well-known hostess and socialite, as well as wife to a prime minister, published a work in the early 1920s, based on her extensive diaries. When complimented on it, she is said to have replied, ‘Keep a diary, my dear and later on, perhaps, the diary will keep you.’ 

It was not in my mind to keep a diary in order to write a book about the 330-mile walk. But when the God-given prompt came, the daily accounts were there to be enlarged and rewritten. And for the most part, I wrote it chronologically – it was, after all, an account of getting from A to B. 

Chronological seems easy and straightforward; but it can come over as dull and predictable. Sometimes it’s good to ask if there is some other way to write a memoir. For example, Penelope Lively’s autobiography, A House Unlocked, has the ‘umbrella’ of her grandparents’ house in Somerset, but her life story is told using different objects in the house. Rather than the ‘cradle to the grave’ autobiography, she has a more kaleidoscopic approach to time. In Moon Tiger Lively has Claudia say, ‘Chronology irritates me. Shake the tube and see what comes out.’  So there are some flashbacks in my book, and some pointers to what has gone before. 

I tried to remember to ‘show not tell’. Significant sounds or smells, or the response of the body – the ‘sand between the toes’ image where you make the reader actually feel what your words are bringing to mind.  Or describing the colour as if to a visually impaired person, and the sound to the deaf. Margaret Forster, writing about Daphne du Maurier’s father in Daphne du Maurier draws the reader in with noting that at a certain theatre, ‘Gerald du Maurier was scoring an immense success, the night his new daughter was born, in a light comedy entitled Brewster’s Millions.’ Much more interesting than merely ‘Daphne’s father was an actor.’

So I was noticing what had happened each day; I used the senses; I used the weather. I used people, conversations, a sense of time and place. I used my own reactions and feelings, because this is memoir, after all. And later, when I was writing the book, when there was a danger of it all becoming too serious, I added humour to lighten the touch. 

Morning by early morning, I sat up in bed, writing desk across my knees, and I typed my story. I made myself do it for a couple of hours every weekday for several months. Until it was done, and I’d reached nearly 60,000 words, and the story had reached the Atlantic. Then I sent it to my beta readers – a few good friends, some acquaintances who would be honest, my (grown-up) children – and a professional editor.

It cost £100 for that edit (www.thebooklab.co.uk). And it was worth every penny!  The editor divided the story into ‘blog size’ sections within chapters of different lengths. People have short attention spans, he said; people are busy. A short section can be read quickly without the need to concentrate for too long. 

Then he took out all my erudite words. He told me it read like something from Brideshead Revisited, the book I had been reading while in France. I took that as a compliment! But he reminded me that the majority of people are not going to plough through that style of writing. I had to remember my target audience, their likely preferred writing styles, their vocabulary. This was for the normal market, not professors of literature. Fewer adverbs, plain English, making every word earn its place. And he removed all the descriptive speech words, such as ’retorted’ or ‘cried’, and put back the basic ‘said’ or ‘says’.

Lytton Strachey, a great biographer of the early 20th century, advised the writer to ‘aim at a brevity which excludes everything which is redundant and nothing that is significant’. That much at least has not changed!

Eventually came the final edit. I found it helpful to print it in a different font and different colour, to trick the brain into being more objective. And then, I went to a writing day organised by the Association of Christian Writers, something I’d booked several months earlier, never guessing I would have a manuscript waiting to be revealed. The editor had recommended a particular publisher; to my surprise, the co-publisher was one of the speakers that day and I was able to talk with her, whereupon she asked me to send her my manuscript immediately. The rest, as they say (and you should never use clichés, of course) is history. And an answer to prayer.  

Penelope Swithinbank is an avid walker and spends a lot of her time stomping in the hills and valleys near her home outside Bath. She is a chaplain at Bath Abbey and a spiritual therapist and counsellor for clergy (and some normal people too). Since becoming a vicar nearly 20 years ago, she has worked in churches in the UK and the USA, and has led pilgrimages in the UK and in Europe. She and her husband Kim have been married for more than 40 years and have three children and six grandchildren. Penelope rarely sits down, loathes gardening and relaxes by walking,  reading, going to the theatre or playing the piano. She is the author of two books, Women by Design and Walking Back to Happiness and is currently working on her third, due out in 2020: Scent of Water, a devotional for times of spiritual bewilderment and grief, especially after bereavement. She also contributes to Bible reading notes for Scripture Union. https://penelopeswithinbank.com

Tell a convincing story

It is my pleasure to introduce Chick Yuill to my blog today, sharing his thoughts on Christian fiction, and why he feels telling people compelling stories can lead them to an encounter with God.

Over the last thirty years I’ve written eight books on subjects such as discipleship, spiritual warfare, holiness, sexuality etc and published with IVP, Authentic and Monarch. I got weary of doing that and troubled by the increasing realisation that the only people who would ever read them would be committed Christians. 

I try not to write ‘Christian fiction’ with heavy moralising and glib easy endings.  But because I am a follower of Jesus, because my worldview is firmly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that will be reflected in my writing. 

I think there are really only two kinds of novels  –  well-written novels and not so well-written novels.  I want to write stories that are accessible to Christians, to people of other faiths and people of no definite faith  –  stories that deal with the big issues of life, that face readers with the big questions, and that leave them free to make up their minds.  

Too much ‘Christian fiction’ in the past was really evangelistic tracts unconvincingly disguised as novels.  That was dishonest and artistically flawed.

My first aim is to tell a convincing story with believable characters who are dealing with credible and challenging situations and who are encountering truth. The highest compliment I receive from readers is that they couldn’t put the book down and that it made them laugh and cry.

When I start to write the first chapter of a novel I have no real idea of what’s going to happen.  I know that, as the author, ‘I’m making it all up’, but it really doesn’t feel like that. I follow the characters and get to know them as life happens to them. 

For example, in The Man who Broke into St Peter’s I didn’t set out to deal with the results of sexual abuse.  That’s just where the story took me.  In The Mystery of Matthew Gold I didn’t choose to deal with suicide and sudden death. Again, that’s just where the story took me.  

Three things drive me:

1) I get a little irritated at times by what I see as the glibness of too much evangelical thinking, although  I stand firmly in the evangelical tradition. Telling a convincing story means that you can’t get away with glib and easy answers.  Life just isn’t like that!  

2) My increasing conviction is that what we have to offer the world is not primarily a set of doctrinal propositions but a story  –  a messy story, with all kinds of loose ends and questions we can’t easily answer, but a story in which people encounter God – the only story that in the end makes sense of life. As I try to say in The Mystery of Matthew Gold, the story that takes them beyond the mystery of life not to a set of neat answers, but to the deeper mystery of grace and love and forgiveness.

3) Evangelism often focuses on telling people what they should believe and trying to get their agreement. And that approach, of course, has its place. Yet it seems to me that Jesus rarely did that. He told stories, most of which didn’t specifically mention God! They raised questions that settled like seeds deep in people’s minds.

I want my readers to enjoy a really good read, I want to move them emotionally, I want to stimulate their thinking, and I want to leave them with questions that will lead them to an encounter with the One who perfectly embodies grace, truth and love.

Chick Yuill has spent over 45 years in full-time ministry and church leadership, mostly leading and pastoring local congregations both in the UK and the USA. He is a passionate communicator and has appeared on national radio and television in the UK, as well as regularly been a speaker at major Christian conferences. Writing has been an intrinsic part of his ministry. His passion to engage with the wider culture beyond the walls of the church has stimulated his desire to write fiction. His stories include: Rooks at Dusk, The Man who Broke into St Peter’s and The Mystery of Matthew Gold.

Appealing to all…

Bobbie Ann Cole speaks to us about what she believes has changed in Christian Fiction, as well as explaining the inspiration behind her new book Being Lena Levi (shortlisted for the Eyelands Book Awards 2019).

Christian fiction is definitely changing. It was very clear to me at the Christian Resources Together event last year [Christian book trade event] that what was wanted by commissioning editors of Christian imprints was crossover material. By that I mean something that is perhaps less overtly Christian than in the past, to appeal to non-Christians as well as Christians. 

I see two drivers underpinning this. Firstly, many Christian bookshops, particularly independent Christian bookshops, have closed in recent years, so the market for books that are purely Christian has reduced. Secondly, and probably more importantly, is the realisation that a book can be a jolly good evangelical tool, if it can appeal to the non-Christian reader. 

I believe Being Lena Levi will appeal to non-Christians as well as Christians. It is the story of a young girl who discovers, in 1950, that she’s not the English Sunday Christian she thought, but the daughter of a Holocaust survivor now living on a kibbutz in Israel, ie she is Jewish. She sets out on a quest to find her true identity and, in the process, grows in her Christian faith. However, the tussle between one faith and the other – or none – is a legitimate part of Lena’s journey to work out who she is.

The book was inspired by the Bible story of King Solomon, who is presented with two mothers, both claiming the same child. He found in favour of the one who was willing to give up the child and deemed her the true mother. I wondered how it would be if both were willing to do that? And what would it take to make any mother give up a child? How would they react when that child subsequently rejected them? Because my heroine is furious with both mothers when she discovers the truth, which comes as a bombshell. The birth mother has waited five whole years since the end of the war to claim her daughter, while the adoptive one hasn’t told her she’s adopted. 

Being Lena Levi is set in Canterbury, where I now live. In 1950 it was still a mess of bomb sites. And it is also set in Israel, where I have previously lived. My own background is Jewish. I was claimed by Jesus 12 years ago, in a Jerusalem church where I thought I wasn’t supposed to be, while on a quest of my own for meaning and purpose. He picked me up, dusted me off and led me to meet and marry my Boaz of strong faith.  

In my book, I have highlighted the wonderful thing Britain did in bringing 10,000 Jewish children to live in England immediately before the war – the Kindertransport. They came on temporary visas, supposedly until things quietened down, when they would return to their families. Of course, it turned out that could never happen. By the end of the war, most of their families had been wiped out. 

In addition to my heroine’s quest for her true identity, I have intended through this book to subtly remind my readers – because many people today seem to have forgotten – why the United Nations created the State of Israel in 1948. Six million plus were murdered in the camps. The hatred shown to them in the countries they came from hardly incited the survivors to return there. The terrible abuse that they suffered was possible because Jews were stateless. It was vital they should have a place to call home…

Bobbie Ann Cole is the author of two Amazon No 1 bestselling Christian memoirs. Her debut novel, Being Lena Levi, was published in September on the  Instant Apostle imprint. She is available for talks and to teach Bible storying and creative writing: https://bobbieanncole.co.uk. 

Creativity: the Church’s stealth bomb

I am delighted to welcome Beth Moran onto my blog today. When researching the article on Christian fiction, I asked Beth for her thoughts and she gave me some really interesting comments on Christians and creativity. I’ve included them here as I think they give all writers (and other artists) food for thought…

As Christians, we are called the light of the world. Not the light to the Church. And as great as our sermons might be, when it comes to influence in our nation, most people are not listening. But if we really believe that words anointed by God are powerful, that they can heal or set free, releasing supernatural breakthrough, transforming an atmosphere, impacting a culture and changing the course of history, shouldn’t we be sharing words of life and truth in such a way that people will listen?

The Church was once the most influential cultural force in the world. To some extent, in recent times it has hunkered down into its own nice Christian world. We’ve created our own safe little culture, most of which will never grab the world’s attention. Not because it’s religious – that’s our fear, that the God bit will be the problem – but because it’s not good enough. 

But shouldn’t those who walk and talk with the creator be leading the way when it comes to culture and creativity? Shouldn’t our art be the most beautiful, because it speaks truth about how things should be, not just how they could be? It speaks the truer, better word – a word that brings hope and light into the darkness. 

We need to tell a better story, in a way that the world will bother to listen to. Because we are getting used to a lesser story – our culture these days is full of the anti-heroes, the stories that worship at the altar of self, science or a twisted view of success. 

People are interested in good art and great stories, irrespective of the subject matter. And that enables God to sow seeds, start conversations and get people thinking. To breathe life and bring change. Creativity moves and connects us in ways that teaching often can’t. Great art speaks to the longing of every soul – the hope that we are more than a bunch of cells firing off chemical reactions.

Before faith, does there need to be hope? Hope that there even could be something more, a better way, an answer. And to be able to hope in that something, we need to be able to imagine what it could be, to see a possibility that things could be different from how they are. 

If Jesus rated creative stories so highly as a way to speak to people, shouldn’t we? 

Jesus’ parables mostly weren’t even about God, on the surface. Why did Jesus tell stories? They were interesting, enjoyable and they got people’s attention. We love stories because they make us feel; they connect us to the people and world around us. We think – “yes, that’s me!” or “I know someone just like that”, so I can trust you, the storyteller. 

When we, as writers, describe things as they are we gain the reader’s trust. We can then lead them on a journey to resolution, to the world we were made for. When people read or hear a story, they use the same part of the brain as if they were experiencing those things for themselves. So when we point people to stories about hope and peace, joy and forgiveness, and love, they get to feel those things for themselves. And hopefully want more. 

Beauty moves us; beautiful words organised well inspire and heal us. This is what the psalms do, when we read them and think: “yes! That’s it! I too want my enemies to dissolve into slime like snails” (Psalm 58). We respond with: “That was what I needed to pray but couldn’t express.” Then, the psalm takes us on to that better reality, tells the better story (surely the righteous will be rewarded, there is a God who judges the earth). It takes us from where we are to how it should be, and so offers us the invitation to come too. 

Creativity – art, fiction, poetry – is the Church’s stealth bomb. People are drawn to a great and beautiful story, well told, no matter what the topic, but for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, there is treasure to be found. 

Another role of the creatives, in telling a better story and shaping culture, is to simply get God and faith back in the conversation. We want some portrayal of Christians in the media that are ‘normal’ people, as in not hypocrites or serial killers. We need art that is salty – I have never had a non-Christian write a review saying there is too much God or church in my books. I have had Christians, especially in the US, say there isn’t enough, and I want to ask them what they think about the parables, or the book of Esther. 

The power of words can change someone’s future. With words and stories, we can create a vision of how this world should be that is so irresistible, in its beautiful, glorious hope, that it touches the hearts of those who hear it like nothing has before. 

Beth Moran writes women’s fiction: her latest novel is Christmas Every Day.

If you want to read the article on Christian Fiction that appeared in November’s issue of Premier Christianity you can request a free copy here. It will be available for request until November 25.

Can we be honest about Christmas?

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I was thrilled to be asked to endorse Lucy Rycroft’s book Redeeming Advent earlier in the year. It was published in October and she is now in the throes of a blog tour – I am delighted to welcome her to my website today. And the fantastic news for you is that she has provided a free copy of the book for one of my regular readers to win! (Please see below for details of how to enter.)

It’s a privilege to be guest posting for Claire today. Her passion for honesty and authenticity has been inspiring and challenging me ever since I came across her writing.

Claire’s ministry is vital because, in real life and on social media, I’m increasingly noticing that people desire integrity over ‘relevance’. Once upon a time we all thought we had to dress a certain way, have a few piercings, act and speak ‘cool’ in order to draw others to Jesus.

But the gospel has always been, and will always be, more relevant than any of us could ever be. It doesn’t need glitz and glamour, it needs authentic people, sharing vulnerabilities and weaknesses, prepared to stand up and say ‘I struggle’ or, even, ‘I’m not very cool’.

This is the thinking behind my blog The Hope-Filled Family where I share the honest chaos (and believe me when I say it is chaos) of my family life. With four children aged 5–10, a clergy husband, an open home and a plethora of church and school commitments, we frequently boast laundry mountains, sinks full of dirty dishes, forgotten packed lunches and badly-dealt-with tantrums.

I mess up so much – and yet, in that mess, God affirms me as His daughter, Jesus redeems me from my failures and the Holy Spirit inhabits me with peace and joy.

THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA…

The blog is where my new book Redeeming Advent was birthed. In December 2017 I decided to write an Advent reflection for each day leading up to Christmas. This in itself could have been another item on my ‘failures’ list, but – by God’s grace – I made it to December 24th!

Each day I would take something that had happened that day – however mundane – or something ‘d been mulling over, and write what God might be teaching me through it. There was plenty of reality, honesty, humour and potential embarrassment, as I shared the highs and lows of our Advent that year.

Early in 2018 I found a publisher for these devotionals, so in the summer I found myself editing the whole lot, to tie them together in a way that would work for a book.

BEGINNING TO QUESTION MYSELF

During this editing process, as I read what I’d written the previous December, I started to think: Is anyone bothered about this? Do people care that I bought too much gift-wrap one year, or that I have a fear of under-catering, or that I don’t know how to use a real-life bookshop?

Of course all writers need to ask themselves questions as they write, challenging themselves to write deeper or more descriptively or in a more accessible style.

But the problem with the questions I was asking myself was that they were rooted in deep fear. Fear of what people would think of me. Fear of coming across like an idiot. Fear that literally no one would be able to relate to me. Fear that I was alone in my thoughts.

We read in 1 John 4:18 that ‘perfect love drives out fear’, and it can sound hollow to those of us whose fears are very real, very dominant and don’t look like they’re going anywhere. But I can tell you that it is only the love of God that made me confident to write openly and honestly about Advent: the fun traditions alongside the stresses and strains.

I have come to realise that I write for the people God puts in my path. That means it doesn’t matter if 99 people who read my writing think that I’m an idiot, if one person relates to what I’m saying so much that it draws them into closer connection with Jesus.

CULTURAL EXPECTATIONS

Letting go of the desire to meet others’ expectations as I write parallels the way I believe we need to let go of the cultural expectations of Christmas.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t decorate our trees, give presents or enjoy special meals – in fact, Redeeming Advent talks quite a bit about redeeming these ‘secular’ festivities to glorify God. 

But there are a lot of expectations around this time of year that weigh heavily on us, and these will be different for each one of us. 

Perhaps you are the person in the family who others expect to organise the Secret Santa/host Christmas/make travel plans – and it’s just draining all the joy out of you. 

Perhaps you’re a sucker for the John Lewis Christmas adverts, and feel you’ll never be able to meet this (unrealistic, by the way) cultural expectation of a beautiful Christmas from start to finish. 

Perhaps you feel the weight of your children’s expectations to provide elaborate presents, when you desperately want them to treasure Jesus first of all.

LET’S BE HONEST

This Advent, I want to plead with you: Can we be honest about Christmas? Please? Can we acknowledge the tricky family dynamics, the tight financial budget, the job uncertainty, the worry about our children, the state of our mental health, the marital difficulties, the grief, the loss, the sadness?

Because, if we do, I think we might discover better connection to others, as we share our burdens and empathise with the suffering of others.

And, even more importantly, I think we will discover more of the Jesus who came down to this damaged earth in a busy, messy way, who knew what it was like to be a refugee, an outcast, an oddball, a target of others’ attacks.

This, friends, is where we will find our perfect Christmas. Not in the perfectly arranged place settings at the Christmas table, nor in the perfectly coordinated baubles on our tree, but in the perfection of our Saviour, who endured the suffering caused by others, so that He might rescue us from ours.

Have a very blessed Christmas!

Lucy Rycroft blogs about parenting, adoption and faith at  The Hope-Filled Family. Her first book Redeeming Advent is an accessible 24-day Advent devotional and you can buy it here. Lucy lives in York with her husband Al and their four children.

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

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Chris Aslan on Christian fiction

I recently got in touch with many different Christian fiction authors, as I was preparing to write an article for Premier Christianity magazine entitled ‘The changing face of Christian fiction’. There was so much great material that we didn’t have room to include, so I’ve decided to create a mini-series with comments from authors that will hopefully give you an insight into their writing journey, why they write the type of books that they do and what they think of Christian fiction in general. 

We are kicking off this mini-series with Chris Aslan, author of Alabaster, Manacle (published by Lion Fiction) and new book Mosaic. So…over to Chris:

I probably shouldn’t admit this but I don’t tend to read ‘Christian fiction’ as published by Christian publishers, because I find it usually comes from America and tends to be either right-wing fear-mongering, too twee or with a heavy-handed message to which the story is subservient. I’d much rather read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead trilogy or some Tolstoy. In fact, one of the reasons I wrote Alabaster, Manacle and Mosaic (Mosaic will be published next year or early 2021) is because of my frustration with not having anything to hand that I could give to my friends who aren’t Christians that wasn’t polemic. Where were the stories? 

My favourite writer in the Christian Fiction category is probably Patricia St. John. She wrote for children but tackled some tough issues and I wish she’d written for adults as well. Because she’d lived in the Middle East for many years, she was able to bring that world alive and her characters felt convincing and true. I wanted to write stories that wove in my own experiences of living for much of my life in rural traditional Muslim cultures. 

In Alabaster, the voice of Maryam came effortlessly to me because she’s a composite of some of the spirited and enterprising weavers who came to work in the carpet workshop I set up in a small desert oasis in Uzbekistan. Women outside the home were treated with suspicion and so these women put up with a lot. I longed for them to know how valued they were by God, even if they weren’t valued by their own community. 

I didn’t write Alabaster for Christians. I wrote it for Muslims and when I hear from Muslim women who’ve felt I’ve put into words some of their story, it’s better than any award! 

I’m reluctant to call my books Christian Fiction, much less a sub-genre of that. It’s not that I’m in any way ashamed of the truths within them, but that I want them read by people who don’t know Jesus and wouldn’t read stories with religious themes. 

In fact Philip Yancey kindly read both of them and sheepishly told me that it was only two thirds of the way through Alabaster that he suddenly realised what the story was really about. This was, of course, extremely gratifying as that was my intent. 

Sometimes stories have more resonance when they don’t lay everything out on the table in the first few pages. So, I avoid referring to the books as Biblical fiction, as to do so spoils the impact of suddenly realising that this is 1st-century Palestine.

As for Biblical fiction in general, I personally think it works best when compelling stories are told in which Jesus is key to the whole thing but not necessarily centre stage. Ben Hur is a classic example. I remember sitting on floor-mats with the Uzbek family I lived with watching it on TV. They loved it and were so moved when Jesus healed lepers. It wasn’t distributed by some kind of mission society but was broadcast in a majority Muslim country on national TV. 

That’s the power of a good story, well told, that’s got the salt in it that Jesus talked about, but isn’t over-salted and unpalatable. 

I wrote Alabaster fairly quickly and met the non-fiction editor for Lion Hudson at a writers’ event. I pitched Alabaster and asked her to read the first chapter and to keep going if she wanted to, and then maybe pass it on to whoever they were about to hire as fiction commissioning editor. She was really moved by it, as was the new editor, so it was a far easier journey than I’d expected. 

My challenge hasn’t been getting published but how to get these stories into the hands of people who don’t know Jesus yet. I figured that maybe the easiest way to do this is via the hands of people who do. 

If you would like to find out more about Chris’ books please click here.

And if you want to read the article on Christian Fiction that appeared in November’s issue of Premier Christianity you can request a free copy here. This particular issue will be available for request until November 25.

Chris was born in Turkey and spent his childhood there and in war-torn Beirut. After school, Chris spent two years at sea before studying media and journalism at Leicester University. He then moved to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, establishing a UNESCO workshop reviving 15th-century carpet designs and embroideries, creating income for women.

After a year in the UK writing his first (non-fiction) book, A Carpet Ride to Khiva, he moved to the Pamirs in Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down, spending three years there. Next came two years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut forest and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Chris has recently finished rowing and studying at Oxford and is now a curate at St. Barnabas, North Finchley, and author of Alabaster, Manacle and Mosaic. He returns to Central Asia whenever he can and conducts tours there.

National Poetry Day

To celebrate National Poetry Day, I have the pleasure of introducing Janet Morley as guest blogger on my site today.

I am fortunate enough to have had my new book, Love Set You Going – poems of the heart (SPCK) published just as we are celebrating the importance of poetry in our lives. Some readers will immediately identify with this, while others may feel that they have never really seen the point of poetry – or believe it to be a bit of a niche interest, an escape from the real world. 

But I believe that poetry is needed more than ever in the turbulent world we are living in, where language is used in highly manipulative, quick-fire ways to conceal what is really going on. By contrast, poetry seeks to be truthful; it pays close attention to detail, whether in the landscape of politics or the human heart. It makes us slow down and attend to language that is pared down and carefully shaped, with layers of insight available as we engage our own brain and heart in the search for meaning. 

As such, poetry is a real resource for spiritual exploration, and I enjoy introducing Christians who have never ‘got’ poetry (and indeed poetry lovers who have never quite ‘got’ Christian faith) to its extraordinary power to make us go deep. This is what my selection of poems and interpretative commentaries try to do. While some of the individual poems are explicitly religious, many are not so – but they all address important human issues of life and death that Christians should be concerned with.

Love Set You Going is a book of love poetry, but with a difference. Most collections of love poems centre just on erotic or romantic yearnings only (and usually only in that first flush of enthusiasm). But there are many different kinds of love, and love itself has different moods and seasons over time. There is the primary love between parents and vulnerable infants, an ever-shifting relationship that can almost reverse itself by the time parents themselves become frail. Of course there is passionate, erotic love – but this may be undeclared, or unreciprocated, or may go wrong – or it may become a mature companionship that does endure until the death of one partner and the deep grief of the other. But all our human loves are rooted in God, who created us in love and destined us to be fully known and fully loved in eternity.

As the introduction of Love Set You Going puts it:

‘In this anthology, the selected poems are grouped into sections: Up and down the generations; Grown up love; God and the human heart; and a short Postscript. The reader will find that there are many resonances between the sections, since we are constantly moved to understand one kind of love by reference to another: the earliest kind of love experienced by a needy infant is a startling image of God’s love for us; an adult lover soothes his beloved to sleep almost as if he were singing a lullaby to a child; the restless searching of a passionate woman for her lost lover becomes a metaphor of the soul’s seeking after God; and so on. In many of the poems, we see that images of the natural world are vital to conveying love’s force and bodiliness: the changing seasons; the interplay of sunlight and darkness; outdoor activities like farming, mountain climbing, or walking in the woods or across the prairie; gazing at stars; following the flight of birds; watching the tides. It is as if we cannot love another without also being attentive to the vital details of the bodily world we live in. Love set us going; love formed us in the womb; we were made for love, and all our efforts at living well are nothing, if we lack love. And to love we shall return.’

As a taster, Christina Rossetti’s long poem ‘What good shall my life do me?’ (quoted in full in the book) begins in a rather gloomy reflective space, as you can gather from the title. But she swiftly directs her attention away from herself towards the glories of creation – the ‘pomp of blossoms veined or pied’; ‘the winged ecstasies of birds’ – incorporating insights from both biblical psalms and contemporary scientific discoveries. It becomes a paean of praise for the ‘Love that moves the sun and the other stars’, in Dante’s phrase:

Love hangs this earth in space: Love rolls
Fair worlds rejoicing on their poles,
And girds them round with aureoles:

Love lights the sun: Love through the dark
Lights the moon’s evanescent arc:
Same Love lights up the glow-worm’s spark:

Love rears the great: Love tends the small:
Breaks off the yoke, breaks down the wall:
Accepteth all, fulfilleth all.

O ye who taste that Love is sweet,
Set waymarks for the doubtful feet
That stumble on in search of it.

Janet Morley is a freelance writer and retreat leader, who used to work for Christian Aid and the Methodist Church. She has produced a good deal of liturgical writing using inclusive language (All Desires Known), and her recent work has focused on poetry anthologies with commentaries that explore poetry as a spiritual resource (The Heart’s Time, Haphazard by Starlight, Our Last Awakening). She is a grandmother of six.

Hope through the seasons of life

I am delighted to welcome Jean Gibson to the Unmasked: stories of authenticity blog series. Two of her books have appeared in a new, combined edition and, to celebrate, I asked her to share with us some stories of hope, which also tie in well with the devotional series currently running.

‘Hi Karen, how are things this week?’

She grimaced. ‘Not so good.’

Then her face lit up. ‘But I’ve found a great verse. Whenever I feel down I repeat it to myself. It’s Romans 12:12. “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”’

Karen had terminal cancer. As I looked at her, I thought, ‘Joyful in hope. That’s the title for your chapter in my book. In fact, that’s the title of the whole book.’

I had just completed my first book, Seasons of Womanhood, and was working on the second – another book of stories demonstrating how God brought hope into the lives of women in a variety of challenging situations. Karen’s story was still being lived out in front of me.

The books had come about as I realised how many of the women I knew were seeing God at work in their lives through their everyday circumstances. From the ‘wild child’ teenager caught up in the Northern Ireland troubles to the young singer struggling with childlessness and the mother facing the end of life, women were finding God as the ultimate answer. 

Sometimes that answer was a miraculous change in their circumstances, but sometimes it was a deep awareness of the hope brought by his presence as the difficulties continued. 

The phrase ‘joyful in hope’ reminded me how often the themes of joy and hope are linked throughout the Bible. In Nehemiah 8, the prophet encourages the people to rejoice in the God who had helped them through their time in exile and through the challenges of rebuilding temple and city: ‘The joy of the Lord is your strength.’ (Nehemiah 8:10) The rebuilding project involved everyone, at different stages of life. But they all knew God’s joy upholding them as they hoped in him to work out his promises. 

There are times when life is tough for all of us. But as we focus on God, not our problems, we find his hope and joy building within us. The secret is in living close to our Heavenly Father, in waking each morning with the realisation, ‘This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ (Psalm 118:24) Through everything that happens, our relationship with him holds firm.

Zephaniah 3:5 tells us, ‘Every new day he does not fail.’

Whatever season of life we are living in just now, the excitement of springtime, the beauty of summer, the joy of harvest or the challenge of winter, we can rejoice every day in the hope he offers.

Further on in the same chapter of Zephaniah we read, ‘The Lord your God is with you. He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with his love. He will rejoice over you with singing.’ (Zephaniah 3:17) When we come to him, he delights in us, he loves us, he even rejoices over us. We cannot understand it but as we trust him, we come to know the truth of it.

Whatever is happening in our lives, God’s faithfulness is constant. And so we can embrace this day – get outside, enjoy the beautiful world God has given us, move our bodies, exercise our creativity, meet friends, make the most of every day he gives us.

If we grasp the opportunities we have today, with God’s help we can have lives that are extraordinary in his strength. We have an all-powerful God. There is no limit to what he can do through us if we are willing to find our hope in him.

One of the stories I told in Seasons of Womanhood was of my dearly loved Auntie Jean. As I grew, Auntie Jean shared with me her love of books, her love for nature and her love for God. In later life, she developed dementia and, although our relationship remained strong, she began to change as her memory deteriorated and her behaviour altered. 

The effects of Alzeimer’s disease became more marked and yet her faith in God remained alive. Although she was often confused about day-to-day events, she could repeat many psalms from memory. Her favourite was Psalm 91: ‘He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”’

In the frightening confusion of memory loss, right to her last day, she still knew the security of God’s love surrounding her. The hope she found in him as a young teenager kept her strong all those years later.

Illness, sin, anxiety, loneliness and many other circumstances can shake our world. But nothing can remove the reality of God’s love and the hope we have in him.

Prayer: Lord you know the challenges I face today. Thank you that your love and power are greater than them all. Help me to be joyful in hope throughout this day.

Having been involved in theological education in Kenya for a number of years, Jean Gibson now focuses her attention on writing and speaking. Her books include Seasons of Womanhood, Joyful in Hope and An Open Door. Jean’s website is http://www.jeangibson.co.uk

Writing as a piece of history…

Writer Paul Alkazraji is guest blogging here today as part of the blog tour celebrating the release of his new book The Migrant. He reveals his journey into writing as well as some of his writing methods…

When I became a believer, just after graduating from Bath University in the late 80s, I wanted to communicate something of the Christian faith to others through writing. Things really began to flourish after I took a correspondence course with the London School of Journalism in Freelance Journalism.

From the mid-90s onwards, I relished the freedom of pursuing the subjects and the people who interested me – drawing out what other believers had to say about their life, faith and work. I very much enjoyed formulating a range of questions, giving people space to talk and then eeking out the gems of their experience for others to appreciate. 

One person I interviewed was the Oscar-winning animator Nick Park. In A Grand Day Out Wallace and Gromit build a rocket in their cellar, and then embark on a holiday to the moon in search of cheese.

The source of his inspiration, Nick told me, was his family’s inventiveness. ‘My parents built this caravan from nothing, just a pair of wheels,’ he said. ‘They built a box on it and decorated it inside with furniture and wallpaper and all seven of us went on holiday to Wales in this thing.’

Nick Park and a little friend. 1996, Bristol.
Photo by P. Alkazraji.

To the question of whether or not his work is Christian, he replied: ‘The potential for making films is in the creation; I’m just playing a role in that. It’s part of God’s cultural mandate to be creative, and to do things which are pleasing to him. Being constantly challenged by the Gospel to live freer, and creating things in a loving way: I think these are very Christian things to do.’ I thought that was a memorable answer. 

A story that was a turning point for me was when I was invited to Albania in 1998 just before the Kosovo Crisis. We flew to Athens and drove up through the interior of Greece in the summer heat. My colleague felt anxious enough about our safety that he mentioned he’d been on the lookout for a bulletproof vest for me. More than any mild anxiety, I felt an odd affirmation that I was entering the zone of true reporting if such a thing were necessary.

As we drew near to the Albanian border and asked for directions, several people looked at us as if we were crazy, making the gesture of firing off rifles above our heads and shouting, ‘Pam, pam, pam!’ The country had only recently emerged from a phase of violent chaos. But as things transpired, we were untouched and unthreatened throughout our week in Albania.

The story, about a missionary couple, made a great feature forThe Christian Herald, and two years later I returned for five weeks to write the couple’s biography, Christ and the Kalashnikov, for HarperCollins.

In one incident in the book, a knock came on the missionary couple’s hotel door late one night as Albania was beginning to open up and break apart. Feeling very apprehensive, they were led to a stone cottage in the city’s old quarter dimly lit with a single light bulb and a candle. There they met a handful of old men who were the only remaining members of a church started before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Their leader spoke: ‘He says that they have kept their faith secretly for over fifty years, and word reached him today that the Gospel had been preached on the streets of his town for the first time since the Communists took control. He has been praying for this day for years. He says that he is ready now to die with contentment… They were the youth group,’ the translator said. Writing can sometimes lead you to feeling you’ve been given a little piece of history to record. 

One of the ways I worked on my first novel The Silencer, which I wrote after living in Albania for a decade, was to do close observation work in the places where the story is set. The Silenceropens with the main character, Jude Kilburn, sitting in a taxi-van as it speeds along an Albanian mountain road. I rode the very route several times, noting down visual details, and also trying to be hyper-conscious with all my senses.It’s quite draining, but the results, I hope, can be quite immersive for the reader. 

‘Whitewashed, stone walls, holding back the mountain dirt behind them, streamed past stencilled with logos and sprayed with graffiti: ‘Albanian Exhausts’, ‘Geri’, ‘LSI’… Then came a café plastered with Nescafe posters, a man selling ice cream from a scratched refrigerator, and an old man bobbing side-saddle on a mule laden with white sacks, flicking its rump with a stick…’ Chapter 1 The Silencer 

On the way to Athens doing research for my new novel The Migrant, I used audio notes, the video mode on a phone, a traditional journalist’s notebook, and collected seemingly inconsequential memorabilia like subway-tickets to help add those ‘apt particularities’ later that bring a place to life with authenticity. 

The Migrant is about Jude Kilburn, a pastor now, who takes on the responsibility to care enough for another person in his village, a young man, Alban, that he is ready to go the extra kilometre, over 500 of them in fact, to Athens to see if he is safe.

The reader is taken on an adventure into Greece, arriving in the capital as far right political groups march through the streets and anarchists clash with riot police. 

‘Jude turned back and ran. A nausea rose up from his stomach to his throat and his hands prickled with pins. He saw the amphitheatre of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus shaking below him on his left as he pounded along, and then, through the haze of smog and the water in his eyes, the vast rubble of buildings that was Athens.’ Chapter 16 The Migrant

It is a story about someone struggling with what his pastoral responsibility should be, and how far, like ‘The Good Shepherd’, he should go for that one sheep who wanders off. I have met many young men in Albania who have, in reality, made similar adventurous journeys into Greece in search of work, and returned to tell their stories of danger, of some financial success, but also of disappointment. 

There is redemption in The Migrant, as that is so centrally a part of my own worldview as a follower of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit assists the characters at crucial moments. As Jude searches for Alban on the Acropolis, he remembers the words of an old Demis Roussos song: ’My friend the wind…he tells me a secret.’ The secret is that Alban is very close by on Mars Hill. But can Jude get to him in time? Well, that secret, I’m afraid, is kept hidden in the pages of the novel. 

The author Paul Alkazraji in Albania.
Photo by Andrew LaSavio.

Paul Alkazraji worked as a freelance journalist in the UK from the mid-nineties. His articles were published in many Christian magazines, while his travel articles were also published in The Independent. His first book, Love Changes Everything, a collection of testimonies, was published by Scripture Union in 2001. His second book, Heart of a Hooligan, was published by Highland Books in 2000. His third book, Christ and the Kalashnikov, was published by Harper Collins in 2001. 

From 2004 to 2010 Paul was editor and publisher of Ujëvarë magazine in Albania. His thriller, The Silencer, was published by Highland Books in 2012. His new novel, The Migrant, was published by Instant Apostle in February 2019. You can read the first chapter for free here. Buy the full book here.