Author: Stan Shinn (Page 105 of 111)

Saturday morning at the Art & Soul conference Lauren Winner presented “On Writing and Prayer.” Lauren Winner is best know by her autobiographical Girl Meets God. She is also author of the devotional text Mudhouse Sabbath, and the co-author of Protestantism in America.

Some excerpts from her lecture (Part 1 of 2):

Writing and Prayer
Some have pointed out the irony of much modern prayer. You work hard all day at a job, be parent to your children, and then save prayers until right before bed. But is waiting until the most exhausted hour of the day the best time to pray? Writing, like prayer, is another task you might not want to save until you’re about to fall asleep.

Lauren Winner speaks at the Baylor Art & Soul conference

The Myth of Productivity
Winner said:

Prayer has freed me up to think that not all writing must be productive. Society says our work has to be measured by productivity. Prayer is not productive the same way a factory is, although it is fruitful.

Winner talked about the liberating and sometimes healing aspects of writing creatively without the artificial constraints imposed by task-focused writing. She continued:

There has been a cost of sorts to being a productive writer. I felt for three years I felt that I was wasting my time if I wrote a paragraph if it didn’t see it into print. The measure of my writing was the finished paragraph I produced that made its way into publication.

She no longer has this worldview. Many days she writes just to write.

The Silence of Writing
Like prayer, writing is more about listening than talking.

Winner quoted something she read once:

People that pray and people that write both need time to be silent.

Prayer is not just about petition. It is also about listening. Most of our problems in prayer stem from that we don’t listen to God enough.

The root of the work comes from listening to the story we already know.

Winner also gave an interesting story from a Rabbinic Midrash. The first letter of the first of the ten commandment is Aleph — a silent letter. This is because, the Rabbis explain, in speaking the 10 commandments God was not saying anything new. As we enter silence, we can hear beyond the static noise in life and hear the ever-present truth of God’s presence about us.

The task of prayer, and of writing, is the task of the letter aleph.

Michael Hyatt, the President of Thomas Nelson, reports these interesting statistics from the CBA Marketplaces’ Top 50 Christian Books report on his From Where I Sit blog:

On Monday, I received the May list. It is sent to ECPA voting members (our trade association) a month in advance. Here’s how we stack up against our competitors. The second number is the 12-month rolling average.

Here’s his report on the titles Thomas Nelson and others had in this top 50 list:

Hyatt also notes the CBA market accounts for approximately 44% of their publishing revenue; presumably the rest is ABA and other channels.

Now what is misleading about this for the Christian Fiction author is this is all book sales, not just fiction. If you were to break this down by fiction sales it might be somewhat different.

Steve Laube said on the My Writers Group blog:

The majority stockholder of Thomas Nelson Publishers has placed all of his stock into a foundation that cannot sell those shares. This keeps the control of the company in Christian hands…to keep a secular company from coming in and doing a hostile takeover of the largest Christian publisher in the world.

It is interesting that this CBA juggernaut is positioned to maintain its Christian ownership, while larger secular companies have purchased many of the other publishing houses.

Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River, the best-selling novel described by The Boston Globe as “…a miracle well worth witnessing,” spoke at the Baylor Art & Soul conference Friday night.

After a laughter-filled lecture, Enger answered questions from the audience, and then signed his book (I don’t normally put much stock in signed books, but I bought a copy and waited in line to chat with him and get a copy signed; who knows, maybe someday he’ll be heralded as a Hemmingway.)

Enger’s Tight Prose and Overt Spirituality
Having chatted a bit with him personally, I can say Enger is a kind soul with a loving spirit; this is coupled with tight prose to produce the honest, overt spirituality that laces his writing.

Enger’s Peace Like a River (Grove Press, 2002) is the winner of the 2001 Book Sense Book of the Year Award; was named one of Time Magazine’s 2001 Top Five Books of the Year; and was named best book of the year by The Christian Science Monitor, the Denver Post and the Los Angeles Times.

What is amazing is that a book which so overtly talks about God, prayer, and Christianity should be so well accepted in the larger ABA marketplace.

A Writing Vampire
When asked how ‘Cowboy Poetry’ entered into the book, Enger said:

I’m a writing vampire – anything I hear goes into the book.

He then goes on to tell the tale of writing one early morning when his four year old came in, still in his feet pajamas, and asked him how the writing was going. Then his child said “The problem is, you don’t have any cowboys. Add some cowboys; that will fix it.”

And so Cowboy poetry entered Enger’s novel!

On Humorous Writing
Leif recommends Charles Portis, author of True Grit, as one of the funniest writers he knows.

On The Writing Life
Enger early on in his lecture said:

At most I’m a storyteller, which is a confusing occupation.

Enger says Peace like a River took 5 years to write.

Though Peace Like a River is billed as Enger’s debut novel (his first solo effort), it should be noted that writing with his brother Lin under the pen name L.L. Enger, Enger co-wrote five mystery novels with Pocket and Simon & Schuster in the early 1990s.

He now writes 500-1000 words a day. He reads to his wife each day; he says his wife is a good first listener. Enger says there is an advantage of having his wife critique his work, as she is not also a writer, and so is not caught up in the psychology of critiquing someone’s book who is also your critic, as is sometimes the case in writing groups.

On The Benefit of a Good Listener
Enger was 100 pages into a novel at the beginning of this year. He got an inspiration and wrote for a day on a totally different concept, and read it to his wife. “This is the novel you should be writing,” she told him. Enger dumped those hundred pages and recognized the wisdom from his wife. Enger started writing early this year on the new novel, and hopes to be finished by June.

David Long (right) works the Baker Books/Bethany House Booth

Phyllis Tickle
Phyllis Tickle, author of more than 2 dozen books and as many essays, spoke on Theology, the Writing Life, and Me – The Business of Compiling a Contemporary Breviary. A breviary is a liturgical book that helps you with fixed hour prayer. Raised Presbyterian, Tickle entered Anglicanism at an early age and has long practiced fixed hour prayer (praying the ‘hours’ in a sort of lay-monasticism).

On the Reality of Publishing
Tickle said:

Religious publishing is a field that requires dirty hands and an open heart and if you forget it you’re in trouble. No publisher is going to publish a book that does not have an audience.

Publishing Trends Act as A Conduit
Phyllis Tickle said publishing trends act as conduits for the re-introduction for many ancient aspects of Christianity, from praying the hours, keeping the Sabbath, fasting, & even tithing as spiritual disciplines.

Art & Soul Conference Floor

Influence of the Self-Help Movement
Phyllis Tickle also traced much of current religious book sales to the history of the self-help movement.

Alcoholics Anonymous developed a program in 1937 that had two hallmarks: a structured self-help program, and the talk of a Generic God. This movement began the self-help wave when in 1959 AA began to publish their Blue Book title including these principles.

Fast-forward to today. Now Americans are trained to go to bookstores to get solutions to what is wrong instead of the pastor’s study. I’m personally not sure this is a good thing, but I do find the trend interesting and Tickle’s observations ring true.

Sustained Growth in Religious Literature for Next 10 to 15 Years
Tickle was introduced as a Futurist among other things, and her many decades in the publishing industry may lend some authority to her forecasts.

Tickle said religious book sales are booming, and have been for years.

Baker & Taylor (the Library distributors) in 1992 posted a 92% increase in religious material. Ingram in 1995 reported a 246% increase in religious material! Since then each year has shown double digit growth.

Will it hold? Yes, she thinks so. Tickle predicts this growth to last for at least for the next 10-15 years..

Tickle explains that:

… we are in a cultural upheaval, at the end of modernity and denominationalism. Until the dust settles on these issues religious books will boom.

She said she’d be amazed if we solve it in less than 15 years.

Books Taking Place of Pastor’s Study
She also found troubling the rise of anti-clericalism. She hopes for the return of the priestly role, and an increase of pastoral role, and a return to the era when you can take things to the pastor’s study.