agents, books, seasons, poem

I hate announcement, clean up posts, so I've put poetry at the end of this. (You can look back to see who won the copy of Tyler's book, here.) I off-handedly mentioned last week that I have a literary agent now, that there were now two books in the works, not just one.

I can't tell you everything, not yet, but I can tell you that the title Tables in the Wilderness is being held by Rhizome, my original publisher, but it is likely that they shall be pursuing it as a project about the way we read Scripture, specifically the parables of Christ. I can also tell you that A Common Faith is the title of my memoir--the one about the silence of God--and has been of interest to some larger publishers, who would make a good, marketable home for it.

I have to be vague for now, with some things left to be signed, but I hope it paints the beginning of the idea: there are two books now, one on Scripture and one on memoir.

It's a swiftly tilting planet.

This rounds us to a conversation about seasons.

I board a flight for Scotland in eight days--I have, I know, repeated this bit of statistical information to you without fail since it became completely, vulnerably real a half week ago. With the boarding, with the ocean and the space between and the graduate school and the book(s) writing, I find it implausible to continue sharing in this space as I have done so in the past. I wouldn't be giving you my best work, not by a long shot.

Seasons.

I shall continue to keep the series on Thursdays, Conversations with Ourselves, which has been a delight. I shall continue being a regular contributor to Deeper Story, Prodigal Magazine, Transpositions, and wherever else I may happen to guest post--Which is one of my favorite things to do.

But in this space I shall now only be sharing with you original words on Tuesday, keeping the link revues every Friday.

I am hoping that posting once a week here as well as keeping busy elsewhere, we can still keep in touch. For now, I need to get down to the hard work of writing and earning a master's degree.

More on the books when they can be shared. For now, some poetic lines, unrelated, but I can't make a whole post out of announcements, no matter how lovely.

---

a hymn of Echo

you talk to me now like I am everybody else-- I suppose I could dial a prayer with the operator, press 0 and wait for her voice to recite the time, she would speak to me like I was, for a moment, a someone.

I wrap myself in the nostalgia of the laundry heap, which piled high once but has now been hung to dry, summer sun keeps fresh the tattered things but summer wind billows and threads unwind.

it would have been an easy thing, if word had passed between the discomfort of our shared understanding, but I could dial a prayer with operator, and we decided that for a time this would be enough kind.

you talk to me now like I am everybody else-- that is the problem that is without name. press 0 and wait for her voice to recite the time, summer wind billows and topples like chaff the lame.

Meet Preston

Preston is a twenty-something once-upon-a-time conservative Southern Baptist from Texas who learned to read saints, cross himself, and move across the world to China, England, and Scotland. Since, he's been theologically conservative, oft politically liberal, but radically pro-life, a believer in sacraments and sacramentality, a sort-of Christian feminist, an idealist pacifist who also understands the need for civil defense ... and a handful of everything else in-between. He thinks of himself now as a haphazard and patchwork Bapto-Anglican, though he is becoming confirmed in the Anglican tradition. This blog is his repository of working this whole faith thing out day by day, bird by bird. His first book, Tables in the Wilderness, a memoir of God found, lost, and found again, is due out autumn 2014 with Zondervan.