This Week's Miscellany (06/17/23)
BIG NEWS!, Brutal Feedback, Cormac McCarthy, Not Enough Kids, Lewis Carroll, and More
Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.
Award-Winning Mouse Nuns!
It always warms the heart to have someone say they’re proud of you, but when nuns say it? Well, that’s just a special day.
I received an email on Tuesday from the wonderful sister who does marketing for my publisher, Pauline Books and Media, with exciting news: the second book in my mouse nuns series (The Curious Christmas Trail) is now an award-winning book!
It won first place in the Picture Book category for the 2023 Excellence in Publishing Awards from the Association of Catholic Publishers. There were some beautiful picture books released last year so I’m honored that my beloved mouse nuns won the award. They are first in my heart, too!
I am also delighted because this is my favorite book in the series. It’s cozy, new character Sr. Dymphna is a joy, and the mystery is wrapped up just in time for the Christmas Eve feast. Betsy Wallin absolutely outdid herself with the illustrations. They are darling!
And if you need to read a cold weather story during this hot, hot summer, you can order from my publisher and get this adorable sticker sheet in the mail, too! (And FREE shipping for orders over $40 now through Monday.)
The Case for Brutally Honest Criticism
I’ve been organizing all the boxes of paperwork we brought from Texas when we moved last summer and I’ve weeded out so much: outdated health insurance information, tax records from 2008, so much that’s no longer needed. But I did save a handful of my essays from college—not because they’ll all good essays (they are not) but because of the impact of the feedback I received.
There’s the first essay I ever wrote for Dr. Ralph C. Wood where he offered the brutal but life-changing note: “Dear Miss Payne [my maiden name], you have some good insights here. Unfortunately, no one has taken the trouble to teach you to write well. Please give me the honor of being that person!” As a distinguished professor he could have focused on graduate students. But he labored over our undergraduate papers, fixing our grammar, finding the holes in our arguments, because he gave us the gift of taking us seriously. And that meant pointing out where we were going wrong.
He taught me to write. As I looked through the essays I wrote over the three years that I had the honor of taking his classes, the feedback became more positive (with the occasional: “Not up to your high standards!”). I see the genius of the honest criticism marked with the confidence that I was capable of more. If Dr. Wood thought that I could learn to write a good essay, then it had to be true. Would I be a writer today if not for the criticism that was painful to receive but life-changing? A gift.
Links
I wrote about the Visitation, the pain of childbirth, and that time I almost had a baby in a parking lot.
In a culture in which the male body and male experience is normalized, being a woman can be disorienting. Instead of seeking community to support us in our suffering, we may avoid acknowledging our pain. We simply push through everything from painful menstrual cycles to exhausting pregnancies. It is considered admirable to beat one’s body into submission after a new baby, the more invisible the marks of motherhood, the better. “Is motherhood really painful?” we ask ourselves. “Or am I just weak?” It’s the second guessing of our own suffering that can be the most agonizing.
Lots of excellent articles about Cormac McCarthy after his passing this week including this one:
A Panegyric for Corman McCarthy by Andrew Tolkmith (one of my brilliant coworkers!)
He seamlessly apprehended the contemporary human problem through timeless fiction, and with intense clarity showed that we can’t ignore that problem. The post-Nietzschean social imaginary guides our life, and we are helpless to avoid that. But his sobering insight is also a penetrating exhortation: don’t run away from it. Engage it. Face it head on. Tackle it. Wrestle it like Jacob wrestled the angel at the Jabbok.
And as an author and an editor I was fascinated by this piece by
noting that one of the greatest American novelist’s books were flops sales-wise for decades. A great reminder that you can’t base the value of your writing on the numbers—sometimes the very best books never hit the bestseller lists. (But I love that after so many years, Blood Meridian is finally a bestseller.)Cormac McCarthy’s first five novels were totally ignored by the culture media, and hence by readers who take such verdicts seriously. None of them sold more than 5,000 copies. Even Blood Merdian—now widely considered a modern classic of American fiction—got remaindered after only selling 1,883 copies. (That’s why first editions now sell for $10,000.)
And since I’m re-reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for The Catherine Project, I really enjoyed this one:
On the Low Door in the Wall by Peter Hitchens
She still affects us. Evelyn Waugh, in Brideshead Revisited, wrote of an Oxford one hundred years ago which is also now totally vanished. He described how he had at first sought the “low door in the wall” which led to Alice’s enchanted garden. And he had found it and pocketed its golden key. But soon, disillusioned in love, learning and other things, he had stalked away and decided never to go back. “A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden . . . ‘I have left behind illusion,’ I said to myself. ‘Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.’”
And thanks to my friend Boze for sharing this piece on kids and smartphones since it’s becoming a bit of a soapbox of mine:
The Case for Phone-Free Schools from
And while we’re talking about schools….
Soon We Won’t Have Enough Kids to Fill Our Schools. That’s a Problem by Jessica Grose
And I’m having a hard time narrowing down which pieces from Plough Quarterly’s most recent issue to highlight. There were so many good ones, but this one is my favorite:
In Praise Of Costly Magnificence — Alastair Roberts
And I’m praising God that my dear friend
is still with us after a near death birth experience. (Baby Junia is okay, too!) Trigger warning for traumatic birth but if you want to read her story she has written it out here:But for the Grace of God by Jessica Hooten Wilson
When my children prayed for me to live through childbirth, it felt eery, not prescient. I’d assured them every night for months not to be concerned because women today don’t die as often giving birth as they used to. I was going to come home. Yet I was almost made a liar.
Recent Reads/Re-reads
Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master by Bishop Robert Barron
The Reckless Way of Love by Dorothy Day
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman
And in case you missed it, my new book available to order!
Order from my publisher, Pauline Books and Media or from Amazon.
(If you order from Pauline, remember you’ll get an adorable sticker sheet and that sweet, sweet FREE shipping if order over $40 worth of books)
And if you can leave a review on Amazon or Good Reads (of any of my books!) it’s a huge help.
The Year of Jane
And there were SUCH insightful replies on my most recent Year of Jane post about Mansfield Park’s Henry Crawford. Definitely take a minute to go read them!
And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. This email is free to receive but time-intensive to produce, so I want to offer a huge thank you to Kristen and Brenda for upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.
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Thanks for reading!
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
Well done! To the award committee I mean, for recognising excellence.
Congratulations on the award, Haley! That's splendid news.