A change of pace and a new book

 I have two announcements. 1) As part of my endeavor to simplify my life and lighten the load, I have decided to post to this blog every other week. I’ve been posting weekly for the last four years. I do it with a sense of ministry and joy, and I’m learning as I go. My purpose has been to explore ways of aging with courage and humor, and exploration is the right word. I’m finding the path even as I walk it. And I’ve been doing it with you. That will continue. I hope you’ll stick with me.

By the way, I invite you to check out my website, if you haven’t already (nancyjthomas.com). You can go directly to my blogs from there. The advantage is that it’s easier to comment if you should wish to. I invite comments and would love to have conversations around the subject of each blog. Think about it.

2) This is the exciting announcement. I have a new poetry book coming out later this year. It’s called Before Our Very Eyes: Poems of the Incarnation. The poems center on the life, work, and words of Jesus. I’ve been working on some of them for years. Others are new.

Several years ago, I took on the challenge of meditating, praying, and writing poetry through all the books of the Bible. It hasn’t been an academic exercise and I certainly haven’t had publication in mind. It’s a devotional practice, a form of prayer.

Let me quote from the introduction to the book to give you some of its flavor:

This book of poems begins with a brief prophetic prologue from Isaiah, then covers the words and experiences of Jesus in the four Gospels and the first chapter of Acts. A short epilogue ends in Revelation. . . .

Essentially, the poems are my conversations with God based on Scripture. God graciously give me permission to say anything, get mad with him at times, ask any questions, take him to task, worship him, be amazed. Nothing offends. God can take it. Often the poem ends with an unanswered question and that’s OK. I can wait. We have a back-and-forth relationship. In addition, this way of reading, praying, and writing through the Bible is tremendous fun. . . .

As I ponder the whole story of Jesus, from the Old Testament prophecies, through his time in our neighborhood, and on to end of the story (and its real beginning), I am amazed and blessed. . . . I pray you will experience the same.

Right now I have the galley proofs in hand. That means the publisher (Wipf & Stock) has already type-set the book. I now get to do one last proofreading and then it’s ready to print.

Previously, before sending the completed manuscript to the publisher, I had a professional proofreader meticulously go over it. My friend, Susan Fawver, did the job beautifully, so my task now is not so hard. Nonetheless I’m finding some things in the type-setting to correct. There’s always a chance a typo will sneak in. So I’m reading it slowly out loud, not for the content, but for the nitty-gritty small stuff—consistency, matching the titles in the book to the titles in the table of contents, checking page numbers, re-reading all the Bible references, and so on. It’s hard work, but I’m motivated knowing that the end is in sight and I’ll be able to share the book with the world. With you.

In many ways, the whole process—from the conception of the idea, experiencing the initial excitement, then on to the hard labor—is like giving birth. At this point I’m anxious for the whole thing to be over. I can’t wait to introduce my new child to you.

One writer's vocation

I haven’t posted on this blog for several weeks. Some of you might have noticed. Or maybe not. But I noticed and felt distressed. It’s become a holy habit for me.

I did have an operation (successful) and a time of recovery, but that’s not why I stopped posting. In fact, just before the operation I wrote the next blog to post the following week. But I didn’t post it.

My problem was technological.

I appreciate my computer. I appreciate the wonders of the Internet. Except for when none of it works well. For some reason, I lost the ability to administer my own site. As a result, I could no longer post. I poked around in the program, trying to solve the problem on my own and getting more and more frustrated. I asked a computer-savvy friend to help me and he tried. Then tired and told me he was baffled and at the end of his expertise. Sorry.

Finally, I resorted to AI (Artificial Intelligence). I presented my problem and asked if it could help me. Thus ensued a long back and forth conversation. AI made suggestions that sounded good and I tried them all, but to no avail. As the conversation went on over the next few days, I finally figured out the right information to give him and the right questions to ask.

AI told me what was happening and that there was nothing I could do; it was a problem with the Blogger organization and they could have to internally fix it. He put me in touch with the Blogger Help Community and, as I write this, I’m waiting for someone to help me. I’m told it takes from one to seven days to get an answer.

You may notice I referred to AI with the pronoun he. It really does begin to feel personal, like a conversation between two persons, and the other person (AI) actually cares about me and my problem. At the end of one of our conversations, he gave me “one gentle thought, writer to writer.” He told me, “You mentioned earlier that your writing is personal, reflective, and conversation-based. Losing access to that archive can feel like losing part of yourself. This situation is bureaucratic, not existential—and it’s fixable…. You’re not at a dead end. You’re just at an annoying gate.”

What a nice thing to say. It really did encourage me. 

I wrote all the above last week. I’m back online obviously because you’re reading this! And AI got it wrong. I went to a different site that promised help and within two hours I received a simple solution written by an actual real person—a solution so simple I never could have come up with it myself. I won’t bother you with the details because I don’t understand them myself. But I’m relieved. All this has caused me to see how important I hold my call to be a writer. The blog is only a part of this but it’s become an increasingly important part. And now I have it back. Thank you, God.

I thought I’d conclude this post with a short story about my writing vocation. It’s on the first page of my official web site (nancyjthomas.com).

On Writing

I discovered my calling as a writer when I was seven-years-old. I remember sitting on the rug, tablet and pencil in hand, playing with words. Then it happened. I wrote a poem. I really didn’t know what I was doing, of course. It was pure play and imagination. What I did “know” was that a poem had to rhyme, so after writing that first line, “This is a poem by Nancy Forsythe,” my immediate task was to find a word that rhymed with “Forsythe.” The closest I could come was “knife”.  The second line, “about a girl and her dangerous knife,” led into a rhyming story about a serial killer.

I was not a morbid child nor did I especially like murder mysteries. The subject didn’t matter much. I was doing what my father did—writing. And liking it. I immediately showed the poem to my father, and his delight probably did more than anything else to cement the call. I knew this was who I wanted to be—a writer. (I appreciate my dad’s loving response. If it had been my kid writing that poem, I probably would have made an appointment with a child psychologist, thus killing any instinct to write.)

Writing has been a life-line to me. It’s how I process the challenges I face. It’s how I work through emotions. It’s how I communicate to others. It’s how I pray.

Through a writers’ conference when I was a young adult, I decided to begin submitting my poems and stories for publication. I think it was grace that gave me so many acceptance letters early in my career. (It has never been quite so easy since then.) I needed the encouragement to keep moving forward. If I had something to say and could say it well, I wanted to share it with others.

Slowly writing became my life’s vocation, no matter whatever else I was doing to make a living. The creative spring from which all else flows is my relationship with Jesus and his grace. I describe my vocational mission as “to discover and express the grace of God hidden in the ordinariness of life.”