On My Vocation as a Writer

And Some Changes Coming to this Substack

Photo by Daria Kraplak on Unsplash

First, let me apologize. Between work and then falling ill this past weekend, I’ve fallen behind on my writing. So, apologies for this being the first post of this week. Writing while working and having a family and friends can, sometimes, be a lot. But, as I’ve said at least to myself before, writing is one of if not the primary thing I want to do. This is one of the gifts God has given me, and I want to make use of it. I doubt I’ll ever be able to do it in a way that will be sufficient income for my family, but I love to do it. And so I’m working on some ways to do it more consistently and more intentionally.

Second, and on the front of writing more intentionally, there going to be some changes here at It All Begins with Wonder. September and October saw some amazing growth in my subscribers and readership, but not much else. So, for now, I won’t be posting poems on Wednesdays, at least not every Wednesday. For now, my poems will be shared once a month. The main reason for this is that I only have so much poetry written. Yes, I’ve written three books of poetry, but there’s still only so much of it and I would like it if the poems I posted inspired you to buy the books, but that doesn’t seem to be the case (though perhaps some of you own them already). Also, right now a new fiction project has captured my attention so I’m not sure I’m going to a draft of “Christmas with Kelpies” done in time for Christmas. So my Friday Fiction slot is going to be changing as well. Now, every Friday, I’ll be pulling a book off my bookshelf and telling you why I love it (obviously, I’ll be keeping myself to books I have read and love). These won’t be reviews so much as telling you that the book exists, that’s important to me, and why it’s important to me. So there’s some of the changes you’ll be seeing here over the next few weeks.

Third, I said at the top that I love writing, that I consider it one of my chief callings. But one of the things I have fequently struggled with is what kind of writer I would be. When I wrote for Patheos Catholic, I tried to be more of a journalist, commenting on recent events, usually with an eye toward Catholicism in the United States. I’ve tried being a poet, an academic scholar (particularly of historical theology), an author of fiction, and an essayist. But the truth of the matter is, none of these hats fit me, not as a single source of writing. I’d be working on an idea for a book on theology when a fantasy novel crept into my head. I was trying to write a novel when all the sudden I found myself writing poetry. I tried to write poetry and regular essays and instead put out a short story.  The truth of the matter is, I love all of these things, and I don’t really plan to stop doing almost any of them with one exception. I’m done with the kind of academic scholarship I started doing in my Master’s.

Back in 2009 as I was finishing undergrad, I was undecided what I wanted to study in grad school. I was torn between two main ideas: so-called Celtic Christianity and C.S. Lewis. To make either of them a more “academic” subject, I thought I’d couch them in the terms of historical theology. Well, this ended with me being somewhat coerced into doing a Master’s in Church History/Historical Theology and working as a TA for the department’s one historian. Well, when I made that call I ended up studying Celtic Christianity and pretty soon discovered it didn’t exist, not in the way I had thought. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved my Master’s program and my boss/advisor. Without the work I did there I wouldn’t have done my PhD and, more importantly, I likely wouldn’t be Catholic now. Studying the Church Fathers and medieval theologians opened up worlds for me that might have otherwise remained closed. But when I went to do my PhD, I realized I couldn’t keep doing history. I just wasn’t interested. So I did the best I could to wed the work I was trying to do on deification to some of my other interests in literature and poetry, and thus my thesis was written.

After finishing, I tried to find work, and mostly failed. I started teaching High School and still tried to do scholarship so I could get an academic job. Well, I’m not terribly interested in doing the kind of scholarship I kept trying to do 8 years ago. And, I’m not terribly interested in working in academia. But there’s still a subject that is near andd dear to me and which I want to spend more time writing about: the work of the Inklings. I’ll need to write another post about how I came to learn about the Inklings and why I love the work they and those who influenced them and those on whom they’ve had an influence, but this is the scholarly work I want to do. So if you see an uptick in essays about the works of Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, Williams, and others, that’s why. But most important for me. While I want to do work on these authors because I think they are important and can help us understand and transform the world in which we live, I also want to do the kind of work they did.

So, I’m a writer. That’s not going to change. And I’ll likely never be the kind of writer who only writes one kind of thing. I’m not only an essayist or scholar or poet or fantasy novelist. I’m a writer, and I’m going to write.