Murder, Jesus and Me

The summer I was seventeen, I gave my life to Agatha Christie. Curling on the floor of my room, I read a book a day.  I liked Hercule Poirot best, then Miss Marple, then Harley Quin. I did not care for Tommy and Tuppence. At the beginning of the summer, I felt as though I […]

Books as Soulmates

Books are like soulmates— friends who meet us at just the right time and connect to our souls more deeply than we had anticipated. They teach us, help us, inspire and shape us. Madeleine L’Engle says, “Stories are able to help us become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses […]

On Writing My First Book

A few weeks ago, I turned in the manuscript for my first book to my publisher, Finding Holy in the Suburbs. I suppose there had been others — scrawled words in composition notebooks and spiral notebooks, abandoned stories where I gave up writing and thought I could only write about writing, and a PhD that approximately […]

Book Awakenings

Some people have spiritual awakenings. I have book awakenings. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love me some Jesus (and more importantly, some Jesus loves me), but for purposes of this post, books have oftentimes been the soul-waking catalyst in my story. I learned to read in the first grade, a fact that felt neither […]

Books Can Keep You Stitched Together

The first book to ever hold this type of “keepin” power for me was, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I slept with this book under my pillow every night. I was even willing to pay the “lost” fine fee that my middle school library would eventually charge me for not returning it. […]

Lifting the Veil

Our collective imagination is haunted by a certain image of the artist: a solitary bard, brooding alone, awaiting a burst of inspiration from a mysterious and magical muse. We see the person with the creative spirit as one who stands above and apart from the common lot, a secular priest who mediates between regular folks […]