If your idea of celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day goes beyond green beer and “Kiss me, I’m Irish” stickers” here are some reading selections that feature Ireland, many honoring its faith and its patron saint.
Fiction for Saint Patrick’s Day
fiction
My Proven Remedy for A Funk
I’ve been in a funk lately.
A combination of things have been wearing on me. Financial issues. Big decisions. Discouragement in just about every area, from mothering to marriage to writing to my spiritual life. My mother is in the care of hospice, hundreds of miles from my home. Nothing earth shattering. Just life. Or mid-life, as the case may be.
Not surprisingly, I process feelings through writing. Typically with a pen and a lined journal, in cursive. The journals stashed in our attic are teeming with emotions. Most of the near-daily entries spanning ages 12 through 26 will meet a fiery fate at some point in the future.
I let the journaling habit slide for years, as if the bliss of marriage would negate my need to work through my disappointments, anger, fear, or joy with a ball point pen.
Then, when the rosy glow of newlywed life wore off, as it inevitably does, I resumed writing in fits and starts over the last decade or so as the urge struck me. The result is a rather unbalanced look at my life from the inside, chronicling only my most extreme highs and lows and leaving wordless the even keel that marks most of my days. Continue reading
Digging Deeper, Growing in Virtue Through Fiction
Contemporary authors, particularly independently-published authors or ones published by small presses, face seemingly unlimited obstacles to finding readers for their books.
Some are as simple and as critical as quality. Some fall under personal taste or prejudice. Readers have many valid reasons for rejecting a book.
For authors, it is a multifaceted problem including everything from marketing to the widespread availability of free entertainment.
Writers in my Catholic fiction niche have additional obstacles. The secularization of society, the predominance of Evangelical Christianity in American publishing, the hunger for Catholic catechesis following what author Mara Faro calls “the Felt Banner Years,” and, finally, what I’ll call the Tolkein/O’Connor factor. (The belief that everything contemporary falls short of these Catholic literary greats and is therefore not worth reading.) Continue reading
Image and Likeness: Literary Reflections on the Theology of the Body
Today is the feast day of my favorite saint – St. John Paul II. There are so many things to love about this man. His lifestyle and his personalist approach made him relatable. His love for hiking, skiing, poetry, and drama, as well as his experience in Poland during and after World War II, make him a remarkable and fascinating man. His love, as evidenced in all that he did, is a stellar example of what it means to be a Christian, including the sacrificial nature of the universal call to holiness. So, what better day than today for Full Quiver Publishing to release Image and Likeness: Literary Reflections on the Theology of the Body?