On Books & Writing

A collection of 56 posts

On Books & Writing

To Read or Not to Read: The Confessions of X

In which Looking Closer launches a new, intermittent series on creative writing and the art of the opening chapter. Writers—take note!

Journal

Who I thanked on my MFA graduation day

One week ago today — Saturday, March 19, 2016, at Camp Casey Conference Center on Whidbey Island — I was invited to the podium before my special guests, as well as the students, faculty, and staff of Seattle Pacific University's MFA in Creative Writing. This was the moment: I would

On Books & Writing

Is there a better review of Raiders on the Internet?

C.S. Lewis once said, "An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only." Ah, but there are so many books! How does one decide which volumes to read a second time? Lewis's line might be revised to apply to moviegoers: Those

Journal

Once in a while...

I'm coming up on the tenth anniversaries of my first two published books. The arrival of Auralia's Colors was a great thrill, a dream come true, a privilege — all the clichés. To see some of my work published and set out on tables in Barnes and

On Books & Writing

75 Masterpieces

This week has been one marred by the loss of masters — C.D. Wright, David Bowie, Alan Rickman — artists whose work will be meaningful for many generations to come. We don't remember them for the originality of their "messages" or "themes" — although they explored

Journal

Looking Closer's New Year's Party

Start your 2016 with some inspiration. Turn to the Specialists. This website is brought to you by generous contributors who help cover the costs of its design, production, and resources. I call them the Looking Closer Specialists. We have our own private Facebook group where they influence my vision for

Interviews

Bret Lott and the Ambition contest winners

It's Christmas Eve. I feel like handing out some gifts. A few weeks ago, I invited people to send me their lists of films, books, or songs that speak to them about ambition. Then I asked a jury of Looking Closer Specialists to vote on the lists they

Interviews

Writers of Ambition: a roundtable interview

This may be a first: I don't know that I've ever interviewed several of my favorite writers at once. But Ambition has made me ambitious. In Ambition, the Chrysostom Society’s latest collaborative book of wisdom and testimony, nine members of the Society — Diane Glancy, Emilie

On Books & Writing

Is it okay for artists to be ambitious?

There was a time when women were frowned on for their ambitions... if those ambitions were for anything other than becoming a wife and a mother. Thank God, we are leaving those days behind. I am grateful for those who dedicate themselves to marriage and to motherhood — two of the

Journal

A rabbit's gospel

I've become weary, in recent days, from the aggression, the vitriolic language, and the fear-driven messages coming from professing Christians — in their social networking, their politics, and their protests. I've seen so much hate speech. I've seen a forceful refusal to make "room

Journal

Ambition book giveaway

Well, it's not as miraculous as Christmas coming early. But it's close. New writing by Eugene H. Peterson, Luci Shaw, Scott Cairns, Jeanne Murray Walker, Bret Lott, Emilie Griffin, Dain Trafton, Diane Glancy, Erin McGraw, and Gina Ochsner has just arrived. And it's all

On Books & Writing

Gregory Wolfe Book Winners

Read the winning entries in the "We Love Gregory Wolfe" contest.

On Books & Writing

Invitation, not coercion

James P. Carse, from Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility: Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not

Journal

Details, details...

James Wood in The Nearest Thing to Life: bits of life: converted into (fictional, which is to say new) life. This quotation from Wood's extraordinary book addresses, in one potent paragraph, the big question I explored in a presentation I gave at The Glen Workshop in 2013 — "

On Books & Writing

Needful thwarting

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realized after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel

On Books & Writing

What to Read on Veterans Day: The Things They Carried

“Everything sparkled.” That line from Tim O’Brien’s The Things We Carried would be sentimental and sugary in most contexts. But in this masterful short story collection, it’s all we need to know about how, when the writer was drafted into the Vietnam War at a young age,

On Books & Writing

Gregory Wolfe Book Giveaway

I have four copies of Gregory Wolfe's new book The Operation of Grace, and I'm giving three of them away. (I'm going to be selfish about that fourth one.) But I want these giveaway copies to go to readers who appreciate the author. Do

Interviews

Cary Elwes made a Madeleine L'Engle movie?

Today is the birthday of Cary Elwes — best known (whether he likes it or not) as Wesley from The Princess Bride, and as the author of a new memoir: As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride. Here's something that isn't very

The Auralia Thread

Get ambitious. Order now.

Soon, I'm going to give away ALL of these copies of my new favorite book. So stay tuned... details of the giveaways are coming. Who wrote my new favorite book? Eugene Peterson, Luci Shaw, Scott Cairns, Jeanne Murray Walker, Gina Ochsner, and Bret Lott... just for starters Read

On Books & Writing

The strength of a thread

I've sometimes wondered if I made a mistake by calling my four-book fantasy series The Auralia Thread. Even people who have read the series, and who can remember the names of the individual novels, forget the series name. (Let's not even talk about trying to teach

On Books & Writing

Collectors: Why do you collect?

With this weekend came came the latest breaking news from the Criterion Collection, and once again my cinephile's heart did its dance of joy. The announcement came with their semi-annual posting of titles that have been recently given the high-quality Criterion treatment for an upcoming release on blu-ray.

Journal

Want to be the best? Want to be famous?

When my friend Mark was recounting his recent vacation in New Orleans, he talked about how it didn't take long for his wife — who has an incredibly powerful singing voice — to start thinking about moving there. No surprise there: New Orleans is one of those places that attracts

Journal

Simone Weil on pagan mythology

Here's Simone Weil writing — in Waiting for God — on how, by resisting Christ in her pursuit of the truth, she came to realize that he is the truth waiting for her within everything — even pagan mythology: ...After this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that

Journal

The power of material presence

To think through things, that is the still life painter's work — and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling

On Books & Writing

Danger: Art on a vehicle

uration of sound or shape which requires attention and development from the artist. In the process of that development, we find meaning we had not suspected; but if we try to begin with the meanings, they will shrink to the scale of what we already understand: whereas the creative activity