Literature – Page 13 – Into the Woods

Location, location, location

⬆︎ Gragg, North Carolina, with Grandfather Mountain (altitude 5,945 feet) in the background

If you’re shooting a movie, shooting on location costs a lot of money. But if you’re writing a novel, good locations cost nothing. The author is limited only by what he can imagine and describe.

As a rule, I like for the locations in my novels to be places that I actually have been to and seen. Book 1 of the Ursa Major series, Fugue in Ursa Major, mostly because the story is just getting started, doesn’t stray very far from Phaedrus’ cottage in the Appalachian backwoods — places such as Charlottesville, Washington, and the national forests of West Virginia.

Book 2, Oratorio in Ursa Major, travels much farther — the coast and highlands of Scotland, an oil rig in the north sea, and an enormous space ship in deep space billions of miles from earth.

Book 3, Symphony in Ursa Major, which is in progress and which I plan to release next year, will get deeper into the Appalachians and will return to Charlottesville and Washington. But we’ll also go to London for some scenes at Westminster, and we’ll also go to New Delhi. And we’ll get even deeper into space and learn much more about galactic history and politics when we visit the galactic capital.

Back in the 1980s, on my first trip to London, my Welsh friend in London, who was a lawyer and policy wonk, wanted to impress me, so he requested tickets from his member of Parliament to visit Parliament on the prime minister’s question day. The prime minister was Margaret Thatcher. The tickets were for the sergeant-at-arms’ private box. So I have seen a good bit of Westminster, including of course the greatest abbey in the world, Westminster Abbey. And I’ve heard Margaret Thatcher getting rough with the opposition in the House of Commons. In my archives, I have a copy of the Times of London from the next day, which includes a story on what Thatcher was asked and what she said.

I was in Delhi in 1994, and though I have not seen the government buildings in Delhi, I’ve seen plenty of Delhi’s streets and markets including, of course, Connaught Place.

In Oratorio in Ursa Major, there is a brief visit to the place I call the Pisgah abbey. In Book 3, we’ll return to the Pisgah abbey. This place is deep in the Pisgah National Forest of western North Carolina. The abbey is imagined, but the location is real. I searched out the location using Google Earth. I was looking for a small clearing in a deep valley, surrounded by high mountains. I wanted a location reachable only by winding, treacherous roads. I settled on Gragg, North Carolina.

On a trip to Asheville last weekend, I went to Gragg. The place is so remote that GPS cannot be trusted. At one point, GPS wanted me to turn left on a nonexistent road that would have sent me crashing down a forested mountainside. But I finally found a way into Gragg by going to the little town of Linville. From Linville, GPS gave me a route down into Gragg on roads that actually existed. The road — narrow and unpaved with lots of one-lane bridges — looped and wound down a mountainside and gave up about a thousand feet of altitude in five miles. There is a small settlement of people at Gragg and even a small lake. Gragg seems to possess the only fairly flat parcel of land for many miles. The road to Gragg is so steep that, when I climbed back up toward Linville, my little Smart car stayed in 2nd gear (of five) for almost the entire drive.

Writers and readers know how important a story’s settings are. Writers and readers also know that, for some reason, stories just work better when the plot moves characters from place to place. When characters are in the middle of nowhere, the author is probably exploring the characters’ inner lives, their motivations, and their inner obstacles. But if the story deals with larger, planetary issues, then you can expect the characters to show up in places where planetary power is concentrated. In Symphony in Ursa Major, that will be Washington, London, and Delhi.

Many writers (and films) have imagined what a galactic capital might look like. In Symphony, I’ll have my go at that.

⬆︎ A resident of Gragg, with his hoe.

⬆︎ The Blue Ridge Parkway, one of my favorite roadways in the world.

⬆︎ Gragg viewed in Google Earth

⬆︎ Westminster

The search for a lost heritage

Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, by Mark Williams, Princeton University Press, 2016. 578 pages.

Like many people who have worked hard to understand how our Celtic ancestors lived, I regularly grapple with a smoldering fury. No matter what thread to the past we try to follow, we find it broken. “Broken” is too weak a word. The thread wasn’t merely snipped cleanly in two. Entire centuries have been deliberately hacked from the record and have been lost to us. We owe a huge debt to scholars such as Mark Williams who spend their lifetimes trying to reconnect the threads.

From genetic testing, because I carry the genetic marker for the Uí Néill family (carefully studied because it’s a royal genetic marker and is common in Ireland), it can be said with high confidence that my ancestors were in Ireland (probably the north of Ireland) before Patrick. For that reason, I take very personally the cultural catastrophe that the church brought to Ireland.

In this book, Williams brings us up to date on what scholars of the written record can tell us about pre-Christian Irish history, insofar as Irish history can be deduced by studying the rich body of Irish literature that was produced from around 500 to 1400 A.D. The catch, though, is that this literature was produced in the church’s monasteries, in the centuries after Patrick. Though surely the literature contains some older, pre-Christian elements, no clear or consistent picture of the past can be reconstructed from it. The stories are muddled, often contradictory, and they have been polluted with Christian allegory and snippets that appear to have come from Bible stories. And obviously, for someone who was writing in, say, 1200 A.D., the trail had gone cold, because the Christian subjugation of Ireland was well under way by 500 A.D.

Like it or not, that’s where things stand. The Celtic people of Western Europe know next to nothing about their pre-Roman past because the Celtic past was systemically expunged and can be glimpsed now only through a Christian fog. Williams acknowledges that those of us who make an effort to reconstruct the Celtic past have no choice but to speculate. Williams seems to respect that speculation, but he wants the speculation to be grounded in a scholarship that is up to date.

He mentions a movement that began in the 1980s that he calls Celtic Reconstructionism. “Celtic Reconstructionists,” writes Williams, “have tended to ally subjective feelings with thoughtful investigations of the writings of classical authors, archaeology, and comparative Indo-European mythology.” That’s pretty much my method, so I suppose I am a Celtic Reconstructionist. Most reconstructionists, I think, are searching for a religious practice with which to replace the poverty of Christian theology. My purpose, on the other hand, is to make use of the Celtic past in my novels and to encourage people to think about how the world would be very different without the imperial Roman religion, which was imported from a little cult in the Middle East and which is based on very thin and very silly texts. In his notes, Williams even includes a link to the web site of a Celtic Reconstructionist in Scotland whose work he clearly respects. Here’s the link, for those who might like to follow up: Tairis: A Gaelic Polytheistic web site.

An abbey literary update

Ken’s third book, This Land Is Our Land, has been in the final editing stages here at the abbey and is due at the publisher, Penguin Random House, next week. The book is scheduled for release in March 2018.

When the idea for this book was hatched last April, Ken was here at the abbey, traveling through on book tour for his second book. He had just published a piece in the New York Times, This Is Our Country. Let’s Walk It. After that piece was published, it was apparent that Ken had become the honorary owner of a “right to roam” movement in the United States and that a book on the subject was needed. Ken had no trouble at all selling his agent and his publisher on the idea, and in no time he had a contract to write the book.

A year ago, I would have assumed that this book would be a fairly bland and somewhat academic — but necessary — reference book for a new movement in need of a manifesto. But having read the manuscript twice during the past two weeks, I was reminded how Ken’s books always exceed my high expectations. It’s not just his superb research and the charm of his writing that make This Land Is Our Land such a good book. It’s also the way he surprises me, when I finally see the manuscript, with how deeply he delves and how high he flies, even though I was in on discussions about the book from the beginning. Though this book’s topic is seemingly narrow, Ken also has produced an incisive snapshot of contemporary American culture through the lens of our attitudes toward the land. And he has laid out a lion-hearted vision of a future America that is less insular and more benevolent.

If you’re not certain what a “right to roam” is, I’d suggest the New York Times link above. It’s not as radical a right as you might think. The people of England, Wales, Scotland, and Sweden have generous roaming rights, and even countries such as Lithuania and Latvia are far ahead of the United States with the right to roam.

This Land Is Our Land will be the fifth book to be born here at the abbey during the last four years. Ken’s other two books are Walden on Wheels (2013), and Trespassing Across America (2016). There also are my novels Fugue in Ursa Major (2014) and Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016). Symphony in Ursa Major is in progress and should be out next year.

Trespassing Across America now in paperback

Ken’s second book, Trespassing Across America, was published last year in hardback. The paperback version was released yesterday. It’s available at Amazon and at most bookstores.

One of the abbey’s bookshelves is reserved for the abbey’s own output. It will grow next year with the publication of Ken’s third book, This Land Is Our Land, which is about the right to roam (or the absence of the right to roam) in America. I also plan to release next year the third novel in the Ursa Major series, Symphony in Ursa Major.

Ken’s box of complimentary paperback books from his publisher

Where poets’ lives matter

In the Irish media, the death of poet John Montague was a major event. As far as I can tell, the American media have not mentioned it, though there is an American connection.

Ten of Montague’s books were published by the Wake Forest University Press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The editors were Dillon Johnston (who founded the WFU press in 1975) and Guinn Batten. Johnston and Batten — old friends of mine — had a very strong interest in Irish poetry and Irish literature, and the WFU press for years was a key publisher of Irish poetry. Johnston wrote Irish Poetry After Joyce (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), which was the first book I ever helped edit. Guinn Batten now teaches at Washington University and is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Duke University Press, 2012). I met John Montague many years ago at an event at Wake Forest.

As far as I can tell, Irish culture still very much looks up to its poets. Its billionaires (if any), not so much.

From Montague’sThe Great Cloak (1978):

At the end of a manuscript
I was studying, a secret message.
A star, a honeycomb, a seashell,
The stately glory of a peacock’s tail
Spiralled colour across the page
To end with a space between a lean I
And a warm and open-armed You.

An hour later, you were at the door;
I learned the word that the space was for.

19th Century post-apocalyptic fiction?

As a writer of post-apocalyptic fiction, naturally I’m interested in the classics of the post-apocalyptic genre. Until I read Robert MacFarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, I was not aware that some post-apocalyptic fiction was written during the 19th Century. MacFarlane devotes much of a chapter to Richard Jefferies, a prolific nature writer who also wrote fiction.

After London was published in 1885, the same year that Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I can’t say that After London is a particularly exciting novel. It’s packed with unalleviated exposition. The plot is thin. The conversations (such few as there are) are dull. Of the characters, only the protagonist Felix is much developed. However, Jefferies does succeed in painting a vivid and cinematic picture of his post-apocalyptic setting. In his imagined world, some catastrophe that he never describes (because the survivors don’t really know what happened) has wiped out most of the population. London is gone and is mostly flooded. Debris and siltation have blocked the major rivers, and a large lake forms in southeastern England. It’s on and around this lake where the story takes place.

You can read that Jefferies was an influence on J.R.R. Tolkien. I’m not so sure about that, since Tolkien was a great writer and Jefferies a pretty pallid one (his fiction, at least). But Tolkien and Jefferies did have in common a love of terrain and a love of wild nature. I don’t doubt in the least that After London occurred to Jefferies’ imagination because he hated the filth and sprawl of 19th Century London. And so Jefferies imagined London wiped out and its suburbs covered by a lake. Tolkien, too, hated modernity. Tolkien was born in 1892. By 1892, London was much cleaner. When Jefferies was 16, he and a cousin ran off to France. The year was 1864, and London’s sewer system was not completed until 1866. Jefferies probably saw London at the peak of its 19th Century filth and squalor. Though Tolkien’s England probably was nicer in many ways than Jefferies’ England, still Tolkien hated any change and grieved for every fallen tree.

Jefferies died in 1887 at the age of 39, of tuberculosis.

You can get After London in Kindle format. I believe there have been a couple of revival editions, particularly in the United Kingdom. Though some modern scholars have taken an interest in Jefferies (for example, Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision (2006), there doesn’t seem to be much likelihood of a Richard Jefferies revival. Judging from my reading of After London, Jefferies’ books won’t hold much interest for today’s general readers. However, readers and writers with a particular interest in nature writing and post-apocalyptic fiction will want to explore Jefferies’ books.

A couple of book reports

The old translation and the new

Plato: The Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, 1997. 1838 pages.

For years, my only volume of Plato was the translation by Benjamin Jowett, first published in 1871. I bought the volume in a used bookstore. It seemed like a good find at the time. From the pencil markings in the front, it appears that I paid $12 for it. Most of my previous reading of Plato was from the Jowett translation. The Phaedrus dialogue, in particular, figures into my Ursa Major novels. One of my two main characters even is named Phaedrus.

Now I know that relying on such an old translation was a huge mistake. An academic friend happened to mention a couple of months ago that the Jowett translation is badly bowdlerized. Instead of Jowett, we now have a new and far superior translation, published in 1997. It’s edited by John Cooper, and it isn’t bowdlerized. It also isn’t cheap. The hardback will cost you over $50.

Benjamin Jowett, by all accounts, was a heck of a scholar. He was at Oxford. But he also was a theologian and a 19th Century evangelical. Do you hear the alarm bells going off? It means that Jowett can’t be trusted not to censor the Greeks. I’ve not spent that much time on side-by-side comparisons of the translations, but it was easy enough to see that where Jowett used the English word “love,” the Cooper translators used the word “sex.” Now that’s a very different thing, isn’t it? And one of the areas in which we most don’t want to misunderstand the Greeks is on the distinction between love and sex. Sex is discussed quite a bit in the Plato dialogues. It’s discussed very casually and without the slightest sign of the squeamishness that is detectable in the Victorian translation. Jowett’s theology prevented him from understanding this. I sometimes wonder how Greek literature even survived the long, dark Christian era. My guess is that it’s only because Christianity required the fetishization of Rome, and along with Rome, Greece. We’re lucky that the squeamish made do with mere bowdlerization, though I have little doubt that some lost texts were lost because it was thought best to copy over something so un-Christian.

There’s another, more subtle, difference in the translations. That is that, in an archaic translation, Plato himself seems archaic. But, in a modern translation, Socrates and his young men seem thoroughly modern. Their wonderful sense of humor seems just the same as ours. Human foibles, it would seem, haven’t changed a bit. And so, reading Plato in a modern translation makes us realize that the distance between (ahem) us smart folk and the Greeks is about a millisecond. They were just like us in a great many ways, and that’s incredibly endearing. There is nothing at all formal about the dialogues. They’re super-casual, just the guys sitting around talking, jesting, and trying their wits against each other. You realize that Socrates was popular not just because he was smart, but also because he was funny, always kind (even to the gym rats with their modest intellects), and fun to be around.

So, as a smart folk and as a reader of this blog, you do keep a volume of Plato by your bed for fill-in reading, don’t you? If you have the Jowett translation, slip a card into it with a warning to the next owner about bowdlerization, sell it to a used bookstore, and get yourself the new Cooper translation.

Don’t fret too much over the The Republic. Utopias as a form of literature are interesting, but their shelf life is terrible. Instead, browse the other dialogues according to your mood.

If you’re new to Plato, I would offer a warning. It’s sometimes difficult to tell when Socrates is being serious. He sometimes elaborates on arguments that he doesn’t believe, at all. This is certainly true in The Phaedrus. If we were sitting at Socrates’ feet, no doubt he’d wink at us from time to time, and he’d sometimes be interrupted by laughter that isn’t mentioned in the dialogues. It’s like listening to Mozart. Frequently Mozart wants you to laugh at his music, just as Socrates wants you to laugh at some arguments. So one needs to be very careful about taking snippets of Plato out of context. It’s possible to get him exactly backwards.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. By Matthew B. Crawford, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 320 pages.

This is a strange book, difficult to review. I’d call it philosophy, but Crawford says that it’s more a polemic. The author wants you to take control of your own attention instead of allowing your attention to be dominated by the many forces that have such clever ways of usurping your attention for their own purposes. The author also wants you to be less abstract, less concerned with representations of the world (the most extreme of which would be virtual reality) and more concerned with the world right under your nose.

Crawford’s philosophical position naturally leads him to a great respect for skilled practice, both for the way it requires our attention and the way it requires us to pay attention to the real world, the world outside our heads. He mentions many skills — cooking, gardening, motorcycle riding, pretty much anything that requires the use of tools. He talks about how quickly you can get killed if your attention lapses while racing a motorcycle. He detests “drive by wire” automobile engineering, in which the brake pedal isn’t truly connected to the brakes, or the steering wheel barely connected to the steering. This, by the way, made me appreciate once again how much I like the honest Mercedes engineering of my Smart car, in which the driver is truly connected to the road. It helped me realize how good design — for example the design of my Nikon professional cameras — makes the camera feel like a natural extension of the body and the body’s visual system.

Having made his case in the first part of the book, he devotes his last chapter to the art of organ building, as an illustration of his message. As an organist, I found this fascinating. If Crawford himself is a musician, he didn’t say so. But the work and time that he put into understanding the craft of organ building made me realize that he is almost certainly equally diligent about whatever else commands his attention.

I’m appending a couple of paragraphs about the organ, not because it summarizes the book but because it’s funny, and it’s a great piece of writing.

“Pipe organs are to the Baroque era what the Apollo moon rockets were to the 1960s: enormously complex machines that focused the gaze of a people upward. Pushing the envelope of the engineering arts, a finished organ stood as a monument of knowledge and cooperation. Installed in the spiritual center of a town, a pipe organ mimics the human voice on a more powerful scale, and summons a congregation to join their voices to it. The point is to praise something glorious that transcends man’s making. Yet the congregants can’t help but notice that this music of praise, like the instrument that carries it aloft, is itself glorious.

“A big pipe organ thus expresses both humble piety and vaunting pride at once. It can be shockingly indiscreet in this later role; the organ often dwarfs the ostensible altar. But perhaps these tendencies get blurred together in the life of a congregation. When the choir is at full song, the stained glass is rattling loose, and the whole house seems ready to launch, what then? Then the organist pulls out all the stops. He shifts his weight to the right. His left foot is poised over the leftmost pedal, the low C, and now he stomps it, sending a thousand cubic feet of air per minute through massive pipes to blast heaven’s favorite pigeons out of the rafters. Now the very pews transmit joy to women’s loins, and the strongest man in the congregation feels himself reduced to a blushing bride of Christ. Now one feels it is God’s own organ that fills the sacred chamber, and when this happens, praise comes naturally: hallelujah!”

Signed advance copies of Oratorio in Ursa Major

Oratorio in Ursa Major will be released July 1. Between now and June 15, 2016, I’m offering signed advance copies of Oratorio, hardback only, at a discount, through this blog.

The cost is $25 per copy, which includes shipping by priority mail. The retail price of the hardback will be $29.99, so this is a nice discount, with free shipping. I’m afraid I must restrict this offer to the U.S. only because of the high cost of international shipping. Readers in Europe: Oratorio will be available for sale from Amazon in Europe starting July 1. Bookstores will be able to order Oratorio for you as well.

To order your copies, please email me before June 15 at david@acornabbey.com with this information:

1. How many copies?

2. How would you like to pay? The choices are PayPal and by mailing a check. If you choose PayPal, I’ll send you PayPal information. If you’d like to mail a check, I’ll send you the address.

3. Would you like a particular inscription? If so, please specify.

4. And, of course, please include your mailing address.

Reviews will be appreciated! You’ll be able to review Oratorio in Ursa Major at Amazon and Goodreads starting with the July 1 release date.

Here’s the blurb:

A global catastrophe has returned earth to the Iron Age and killed six billion people. Even the billionaires were tricked and eliminated. An Oxford intelligentsia have taken over the planet. Can such smart people rebuild the world in a better way? With help from the galactic federation, perhaps there is hope. But first, earth’s new elite must retrieve from the past some things that were destroyed long ago — ways of thinking and living that can avoid a fatal reawakening of the delusions bequeathed to us by Rome. Jake Janaway — young, modest, handsome, and scared — is selected for a dangerous mission into the pre-Roman past. Jake has no idea why he was chosen. Jake has a lot to learn. But perhaps no one in the galaxy ever had better teachers, or was more loved.

Ironies in the evolution of tyranny

Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. By Jack Rakove, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 488 pages.

My reading at present is focused on the American colonial era, the revolution, and the development of the American Constitution. I took a lot of notes while reading this book by Jack Rakove. But one passage in particular flashes at me as though it was written in bright red neon. Rakove is talking about James Madison:

“Yet this reactionary fear of the threat to property also converged with his youthful commitment to freedom of conscience to produce one powerful insight about the protection of rights in republican America. These two concerns enabled Madison to perceive a truth that the political theory of the age did not yet properly recognize. In a republic, unlike a monarchy, the problem of rights would not be to guard the people as a whole against the arbitrary power of government, but rather to secure individuals and minorities against the legal authority of popular majorities.”

This brings us to the so-called Tea Party, the contemporary right-wing movement by angry white losers, financed by billionaires. Though the Tea Party has taken a wrecking bar to the American democracy wherever it can gerrymander itself into a stronghold, I am thinking in particular about the state of North Carolina, where the Tea Party legislature actually called a special emergency session, ostensibly to shoot down a local ordinance in Charlotte that was meant to afford transgendered people some dignity in the use of public bathrooms.

But, in truth, the bathroom issue was just a smokescreen in this legislation, called HB2. The transgender part of HB2 was meant to appeal to the fears and hatreds of mouth-breathing voters in rural North Carolina while also distracting the media. The real and even more slimy intent of HB2, as is always the case with the Republican Party, is the billionaire agenda. HB2 prevents local governments from setting a minimum wage that is higher than the minimum wage set by federal or state law. HB2 also prevents local governments from passing ordinances that grant civil rights protections. But the biggest piece of slime is that HB2 prevents workers from suing for workplace discrimination in state courts. This part of HB2 is pretty technical and has sneaked under the radar, but it was a big item on the wish list of the billionaire Republican donor class, and now the billionaires’ servants in the North Carolina legislature have checked it off their list. Here’s an article on that.

And, by the way, HB2 shows that the Republican Party doesn’t give a fig for any principle, if power is involved. HB2 also tramples on the principle of local rule and local government. North Carolina’s cities tend to be liberal and to vote Democratic. But the Republicans in Raleigh never hesitate to use state law to keep counties and municipalities from doing anything remotely liberal. Even property rights are not sacred to these radical Republicans. If your neighbors want to frack for gas but you don’t, then the state will use its power to frack you whether you want it or not. Or, if you’ve got a nice water system, as Asheville does, or a nice airport, as Charlotte does, then the state will just take it from you if it can.

This brings us back to James Madison. Madison foresaw even in the mid-1780s how kings (or even “big government”) were not the only potential tyrant under the new American Constitution. Rather, it was the tyranny of the majority that Madison was concerned about.

Not until 1868 did we get a remedy — the 14th Amendment. The Southern states were trampling on the rights of former slaves during Reconstruction, and the federal government stepped in to try to stop it. Many of the ugliest parts of American history touch on the 14th Amendment. White Southerners fought back with Jim Crow laws and legalized segregation, which stood until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Why it took so long is a political mystery that I may never understand.

Today’s so-called Tea Party derives its methods and inspiration not from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists protested against a despotic king and a Parliament who gave them no representation in the government. Rather, the so-called Tea Party is shockingly similar in its methods with the Jim Crow racists, who with violence against blacks, the activities of “militias,” gerrymandering, and rigged elections used the government to allow the white majority to hold the black minority down.

The current era is the most shameful period in North Carolina’s history in a hundred years. We will eventually throw the right-wing radicals out of power in Raleigh — hopefully starting with the governor this year. Cleaning up the legislature will take more time. It is highly fitting that the de factor leader of this movement to restore justice in North Carolina is a black man, the Rev. William Barber of the NAACP, who started the Moral Monday movement. I may have some comments on Barber’s new book soon.

Ken’s new book

In a recent comment here, Jo asked whether Ken Ilgunas was involved in the upkeep of the abbey’s orchard. Yes he has been, actually, very much so.

Though the first trees were planted before Ken first came to the abbey, he has slaved in the orchard for many hours — planting new trees and replacements for casualties, feeding the trees, pruning them, straightening them, weeding around them, and mourning for the fatalities that always seem to overtake the figs.

Ken’s second book, Trespassing Across America, will be released April 19, 2016. It’s available for sale (or for pre-order, if you’re reading this before April 19) at Amazon.

Ken’s first book, in 2013, was Walden on Wheels.

Watching the development of Ken’s literary career is like watching his generation finding its way. Ken, however, insisted on blazing his own trail. Student debt? Down with that. Cubicle job? No way. A career-oriented education? Nope — English and history.

I will never forget a critical moment in Ken’s career on the abbey’s side porch. The year was probably 2011. Ken was sitting in one of the rockers in his dirty work clothes, in a quandary, looking off into space, as he often does. He had been offered a desk job at a salary that anyone else his age would have had to jump at. Ken was teetering: What kind of career did he want to have? Should he take the desk job, or did he want to take the risks of making a go of it as a writer?

He asked me what I thought he should do. I evaded the question, because I was pretty sure I knew what he’d do. I believe my words were, “Whatever you decide, I totally trust your judgment.”

Having published two beautiful books by the age of 32, I’d say that Ken made a pretty good career choice.