This month’s Artist Chair features author of Solum’s upcoming essay collection Love &. As a bonus, please enjoy the audio recording of Emma’s featured piece below.

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is a Tasmanian wife, mother, and journalist whose freelance work has been published by news outlets, print magazines, and literary journals in Australia and beyond. She has a particular interest in relationships, literature, culture, ethics, and belief. From short, silly reflections on cultural norms to long philosophical essays, you never know what she’s going to write next, or where it will be published. Neither does she.

We invite you to pause and receive from Emma’s words and the reading of her piece below.

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“This Plum Life,” the opening essay from Love &, written and read by , forthcoming from Solum on July 4th.

Personhood

Please tell us a bit about yourself! What places have formed you, how you would describe yourself as a writer, what your niches are, what enlivens you, and what you’re currently reading. 

I spent most of my childhood in Tasmania, Australia, within walking distance from family and friends, beaches and bushland. I’ve lusted after and lived in other places, and I love to travel still, but I no longer want to live anywhere else.

I grew up with books, tapes, videos, CDs, and the beginnings of the internet; now I work remotely for an online publication and interview people via video call. I’m enlivened by stories, ideas and thought experiments, by exploring what delights, troubles, surprises, amuses and perplexes me (in conversation or in writing), by faith, family, friends and community; by baking and entertaining; by passionately giving, and gratefully receiving, recommendations (usually books or podcast episodes, sometimes recipes or TV shows or films); by walking, by gazing at the sky, by walking while gazing at the sky—by life!

Speaking of passionate recommendations, I recently finished reading the extraordinary On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. Before that I read my first James Salter novel (Light Years), and, after loving Orbital, I’m now reading The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey. The experience of each book has been deepened by the ways various themes overlap between them—mortality, memory, marriage...

Light Years (which I read after hearing Eric Puchner, the author of Dream State, sing its praises) was dazzling, especially at the sentence level. There were scores of descriptions that I read and re-read for the sheer joy of it, then recorded in the hope of someday having cause to quote them. I was intrigued by the way Salter depicted time passing and youth fading, the impermanence of life stages, and life itself, and the way physical descriptions seemed to reinforce and radiate meaning and mood. I loved the cinematic quality as well. Pictures of the river and the (human) characters remain in my mind’s eye.

Piece

Tell us a bit about your piece in discussion today. What would you, as the author, want us to know as we approach reading it? How do you hope we connect with your piece? What are you inviting us to contemplate?

I originally wrote this for a national paper’s weekly “This Life” column. I’d submitted a piece to the column once before, 10 years earlier, and received no response, so I had little hope they’d accept this one. The column had a very tight word limit (500 max), but when you write more than you can keep, the words you’re forced to cut aren’t wasted—the final piece would not be what it is if they’d not helped to pave the way. If there’s not a riddle about how going backwards (delete, delete, delete) can take you forwards (polish, polish, polish), there should be.

This piece is a fitting opening to my essay collection because it was one of my earlier personal (versus journalistic) pieces of writing. Every “win” of publication early on made the idea of keeping my staff-writer hours part-time so I could write for myself part-time seem a tiny bit less outrageous and a tiny bit more possible.

Process

What inspired this piece?

The short answer: Byron. His presence in our lives, his final days, his presence in his absence.

The long answer: I don’t keep a diary, but I have kept a record of thoughts/ideas/questions/notes (alongside a collection of reading/listening quotes) for some years, and I just thought to search the document. There I found a handful of words, jotted down after my family visited him in 2019: Byron - sitting in a deep chair, a box of celebrations and a half-full glass of black currant juice (large glass of port) by his side. (‘Black-currant juice’ should have inverted commas!) But the story didn’t come until the cake, and the cake didn’t come until the next plum season, and the next plum season didn’t come until the following year.

Bonus

What aspect of this piece seems to linger with you the most?

An image of dear Byron, and my dear “cake fairy.” The feeling that lingers is tenderness.

With these authorial ponderings in mind, we invite you to listen once more to Emma’s featured piece.

“This Plum Life,” the opening essay from Love &, written and read by , forthcoming from Solum on July 4th.

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Monthly Book Giveaway

Every month, Solum will be giving away a reader-selected book or journal to one of our paid subscribers. For the month of June, is the winner of a free Solum publication. Congratulations, Thomas! Be sure to check your inbox for more details.

New Patronage Opportunities

Besides the Monthly Book Giveaways, paid subscriptions also get you access to Featured Guest Essays and Paid Subscriber Workshops. Consider upgrading your subscription today to help continue the work of Solum Press!

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AVAILABLE NOW - The Blackbird Ballad by Liv Ross

We are thrilled that The Blackbird Ballad by Liv Ross has arrived, and we are eager to see readers young and old holding copies in their hands. Order today and experience the illustrated poem that demands to be re-read!

The Blackbird Ballad is a fairy tale told in verse. In a far country, beside the sea, two boys face the joys and griefs of life together. Their bond grows with them, and becomes their source of strength to see them through when a fairy curse takes Rocas deep into the heart of Faerieland to find a cure, and Bran sets out after to ensure his friend returns safely home. It is a story about the risks and wonders of an enchanted world, and about the necessity of fellowship to see us through.

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Preorder Love & by Emma Wilkins

Through a collection of stories, essays, articles, and reflections, Emma Wilkins—an ordinary "unfamous" daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend—explores modern life, culture, and relationships, with conversational curiosity, earnestness, and playfulness. Some explorations are long, some are short, some are ridiculous, some are sublime; none are stiff or scholarly. Love & is an opportunity to stop and think about what we value and undervalue, what we worry about, long for, delight in, and forget. It exposes a world that's broken yet beautiful, infused with hope, brimming with love.

Coming from Solum on July 4th. Preorder now.

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Solum Monthly Feature

Thank you all who submitted to June’s Solum Monthly Feature. We hope this rhythmic showcase provides you with an opportunity to revel in the craft of our community, and spurs you on to make and submit yourself. Each month there will be a new opportunity to participate in this collective endeavor of beauty & excellence.

June-Emma McCoy

Emma McCoy (M.A) has two poetry books: This Voice Has an Echo (2024) and In Case I Live Forever (2022). She’s been published in places like Vast Chasm Magazine, Stirring Literary, and Across the Margin. She’s the operations editor of Vessels of Light and reads for Chestnut Review and Whale Road Review. Catch her on Substack:

We invite you now to pause and receive from Emma’s featured poem, “Isaac,” published by .

Submit to the Next Solum Monthly Feature

Solum is always accepting submissions for our future Solum Monthly Feature posts, such as the one you’re reading here. Each month there will be a new opportunity for one of your poems, short stories, essays, homilies, or visual art to be featured. Your piece will be followed by an artist statement, and if applicable, your Substack page will be invited to collaborate on the post.

The submission guidelines follow the same parameters as listed on our website here.

To be considered, please email emma.winchell@solumpress.com with your selected pieces, and include Solum Monthly Feature [Month] as the title of the email. We look forward to sharing your craft with our community!

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We are delighted to announce this month’s feature: .

has been writing online for fifteen years and writing in general much longer than that. He primarily writes on his Substack Slow Faith, and he is frequently pitching million-dollar-ideas to various online outlets, some of which see the light of day. More than anything, he hopes to live a sustainable life amidst a world constantly rushing towards efficiency and commodification. His life is infinitely more sustainable and lovely because of two people: his wife Alexis and a ninety-one-year-old farmer in Kentucky.

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Writer, let your life breathe: Recklessly protecting your soul as an online writer

I started my first blog in the fall of 2011. I was a freshman in college, and I was on a date with a girl who told me I had to have a blog. So we sat on our campus commons and created a log-in and password for Wordpress. I learned what a widget was, and I learned how to type words into a little textbox and send them out into the world. In January of 2015—a few months before graduating college—I had my first piece published by an online magazine. I remember I was in my kitchen when I got the email. I thought, at that moment, I had arrived at something huge. I was an official writer.

Over the next few years, I left Wordpress and started a Squarespace website. Everyone told me that, if I dreamed of getting published someday, I needed to get a platform. So I went to work. I put my name in the site URL, and I plastered quirky headshots on every page. I was active on Twitter and Facebook and posting clickbait headlines meant to drive people to my site and, hopefully, to my email list. If Disney Channel and Chrisitanity Today were to merge and produce a cute little writer, I thought I was him.

But here’s the thing: I was miserable. I struggle with anxiety anyways, but it was at a level ten almost all the time. I felt exposed to the world and trapped in a constant promotion cycle. But the work never stopped, my performance for God (or for my own platform?) felt never ending.

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About a year ago, I lost my writing somewhere in the city. Because of an internship, I packed my bags and left my home in the country for Washington D.C., and to say I was unprepared would be an understatement. I was raised on the dampness of mulch and the smell of rain-glossed pine. I didn’t step a toe into a big city until my early twenties, so when I moved, I moved into an alien planet, where traffic was eternal and highway ramps conspired to create something like a labyrinth from Greek mythology.

It was a world turned upside down, and I didn’t care for the view. To make matters worse, I just couldn’t write while I was there. I was truly a writer unmoored, lost in the tangle of a hazy city as unfamiliar as a stranger you meet at midnight. I had plenty of spare hours, but my creative well had dried up. At the time, I couldn’t understand it.

Pining for home wasn’t my fatal mistake, but this was: I was looking at my new locale with nothing but condemnation, unwilling to even try to see any mystery or beauty springing forth from such a bizarre landscape. It wasn’t home, so it didn’t matter. I know now that such thoughts poisoned my writing for months.

Eventually, I made it back to my trees and hills. I came home, but I returned with nothing. I can’t help but wonder what I missed seeing there in the city because I refused to look. If I had let myself, what could I have written? Who could I have become? I’m afraid to say that I sneered at my opportunity and therefore squandered it. I won’t get a chance to explore that time and place again.

As people, we’re profoundly connected to place, which means as writers, we understand that a setting is not only where something happens; it’s the north star of our stories, the soil in which we plant all the good stuff. In terms of characterization, place is often the incarnate explanation for a character’s choices and thought patterns, which makes it intricately synonymous with a character’s very soul.

Place can also be transformative. Something amazing happens when you toss characters into a wild darkness or when you etch a poem into the bark of an unfamiliar tree. But it would be unwise of us not to also acknowledge the risky side of place. It’s tough hiking to leave home and hearth and venture into the unknown. We leave much when we leave our familiar haunts, when we say goodbye to the shadows we recognize and the roads that know our names. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” Bilbo says to his nephew. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”1

Fairy tales know this truth well: sometimes you must leave home to find out exactly who you are and where you belong. We must bid farewell to the Shire and crawl through strange valleys. Leaving the usual scenes, getting lost, being whittled down by different sights and smells, finally returning home with new eyes, hands, or hearts—it’s how we deepen. To wander is to grow. This is the true story of place.

Though, on the flip side, sometimes we need to learn to stay, which comes with its own bundle of challenges. There’s something sacred about being able to stroll beside the same river, walk the same streets, and never lose wonder for them. Problems invade when we scoff at the familiar because it’s familiar. No treasure in this place, we say, but this damages writing because it damages the soul.

Whether we go far away and long ago, across seas and up summits, whizzing through stars or standing on the grass right beneath our feet, writing makes us all pilgrims. We must dig past familiar ground and brave unknown chasms to go deep enough to unearth the hidden heart of a place. Familiar or unfamiliar, we miss riches when we refuse to look closely at place and how it can shape our writing. With this in mind, we invite you to embark and Write This:

• Write an imaginative piece that focuses on place. Challenge yourself to write about an unfamiliar setting or to discover something new in a familiar place.

Today’s piece is brought to you by Solum’s wonderful intern, .

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This month’s Artist Chair features , author of Solum’s upcoming poetry book The Blackbird Ballad. As a bonus, please enjoy the audio below of our the author reading her piece aloud from the collection.

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is an urban monk, a poet, and essayist writing in and from the Ozarks. She also serves as Managing Editor for . In addition to writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, music-making, and mischief. This is her first book.

We invite you to pause and receive from Liv’s words and the reading of her piece below.

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The opening lines of The Blackbird Ballad, written and read by , forthcoming from Solum on May 24th.

Personhood

Please tell us a bit about yourself! What places have formed you, how you would describe yourself as a writer, what your niches are, what enlivens you, and what you’re currently reading. 

I have been living in the Ozarks, southwestern Missouri, for the past eleven years. Celtic and Irish folk myth and fairy tales always drew and captured my interest. W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney were primary influences as I developed as a poet, and I struggled a bit with reconciling this with my desire to be a poet of place. I wondered if I might have to turn my back, to some degree, on the Celtic stories that I loved when I began to study Ozarks myth and lore and history. I knew that my ancestors were Scottish and Irish, and I learned that much of the Ozarks folklore was largely descended from Irish lore that immigrants brought with them, planted into the new landscape. That was an exciting discovery and it has felt like discovering that the soil for a new garden bed is a lot more ready for planting than I anticipated.

Piece

Tell us a bit about your piece in discussion today. What would you, as the author, want us to know as we approach reading it? How do you hope we connect with your piece? What are you inviting us to contemplate?

This is the opening stanza for my book-length poem, The Blackbird Ballad. I modeled the structure of the poem after an ancient tradition of storytelling that opens out with an invocation of the muses, a request for blessing on the story and its telling, as well as a sort of summary of the story—a glimpse into what the reader (or hearer) is in for. While the book is obviously a written medium, I wrote it with the intention of the poem being read aloud, particularly with the idea of bedtime stories in mind. I organized the poem into clear rhyme and meter to help carry the cadence, but tried to pay as close attention to the words within the lines as the words that end the lines. I have been encouraged by the cultural movement towards a re-enchanted world, or a re-enchanted view of the world, but there is danger there. A world full of blessing and magic, for now, anyway, is also a world with curses. Pain and danger cannot be avoided, but they can be navigated and healed if the journey isn’t taken alone.

Process

What inspired this piece?

The poem started out as a creative exercise in poetic character description. I knew, four years ago when I began the poem, that I wanted to write long form stories in verse. I was reading a lot of old epics and several fairy tales at the time, and writing mostly lyrics to learn and understand form and rhyme. While I was driving one day, this character of the Desert Mother of the Green and her “Wine dark cure for burning malice/Swirling in a wooden chalice” came clearly to my mind. I decided to sketch her out in words, just as an exercise, but other characters—Rocas and Bran and Roisín—began to appear. At some point, it began to feel like I was transcribing a story as it was being dictated to me. This is, I believe, one of the best feelings when writing. That’s not to say that the story came out fully formed and perfect. The first draft was maybe half the length of the finished book. Revision was difficult, and I had several friends—poets and non-poets—read it and help me shape it. And then Emily got involved as my illustrator. This happened before I had a finished manuscript, and her artwork helped further shape the story.

Bonus

What aspect of this piece seems to linger with you the most?

I had to work my way backwards, a little bit, to get the beginning of the poem figured out, but the opening lines “Clear water from the mountain streams/Runs brisk and cold unto the sea” ended up becoming a refrain. Water itself became a central imagine the poem, from the sea near the cottages where Rocas and Bran grow up, to the stream that Rocas follows through the wood, to the River that Rocas and Bran must eventually seek for healing. The need to be cleansed to become whole again was something I thought deeply about as I was writing this story.

With these authorial ponderings in mind, we invite you to listen once more to Liv’s featured piece.

The opening lines of The Blackbird Ballad, written and read by , forthcoming from Solum on May 24th.

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Monthly Book Giveaway

Every month, Solum will be giving away a reader-selected book or journal to one of our paid subscribers. For the month of May, our friends at are the winners of a free Solum publication. Congratulations! Be sure to check your inbox for more details.

New Patronage Opportunities

Besides the Monthly Book Giveaways, paid subscriptions also get you access to Featured Guest Essays and Paid Subscriber Workshops. Consider upgrading your subscription today to help continue the work of Solum Press!

Subscribe now

Announcing The Blackbird Ballad by Liv Ross

Although many have heard the excited murmurs, we are thrilled to finally announce The Blackbird Ballad by , coming from Solum this Pentecost, May 24th.

The Blackbird Ballad is a fairy tale told in verse. In a far country, beside the sea, two boys face the joys and griefs of life together. Their bond grows with them, and becomes their source of strength to see them through when a fairy curse takes Rocas deep into the heart of Faerieland to find a cure, and Bran sets out after to ensure his friend returns safely home. It is a story about the risks and wonders of an enchanted world, and about the necessity of fellowship to see us through.

This narrative poem is the perfect read-aloud for children, or to be savored by adults. Complete with original block print illustrations by Emily Coffman, this compact story offers a compelling vision of friendship in a world of danger and enchantment.

Did you know that the preorder period is the most important timeframe of a book’s lifecycle? Please consider preordering this collection to support the ongoing work of Solum, and upcoming writers like Liv. Even one purchase goes a very long way!

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Announcing Love & by Emma Wilkins

We are delighted to direct your attention to Solum’s first essay collection, Love &, by Emma Wilkins, coming from Solum on July 4th.

Through a collection of stories, essays, articles, and reflections, Emma Wilkins—an ordinary "unfamous" daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend—explores modern life, culture, and relationships, with conversational curiosity, earnestness, and playfulness. Some explorations are long, some are short, some are ridiculous, some are sublime; none are stiff or scholarly. Love & is an opportunity to stop and think about what we value and undervalue, what we worry about, long for, delight in, and forget. It exposes a world that's broken yet beautiful, infused with hope, brimming with love.

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Festival Recap

We had the most wonderful time at the 2026 Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing! Our masthead finally met in-person, and we were able to fellowship with many of our Solum authors and contributors, including , , , Paul J. Willis, Andrew Reichard, and more.

Thank you to the Calvin Festival for hosting us, and thank you to our Solum community for your overwhelming support at the event. We even sold out of multiple books, including ’ Blackbird Ballad and ’s This Voice Has an Echo. We will most certainly be back!

Solum Monthly Feature

Sadly, we don’t have a Solum Monthly Feature to share with you this month. Take this as a prompting to polish off some of your pieces to be featured in June!

Submit to the Next Solum Monthly Feature

Solum is always accepting submissions for our future Solum Monthly Feature posts, such as the one you’re reading here. Each month there will be a new opportunity for one of your poems, short stories, essays, homilies, or visual art to be featured. Your piece will be followed by an artist statement, and if applicable, your Substack page will be invited to collaborate on the post.

The submission guidelines follow the same parameters as listed on our website here.

To be considered, please email emma.winchell@solumpress.com with your selected pieces, and include Solum Monthly Feature [Month] as the title of the email. We look forward to sharing your craft with our community!

Leave a comment

We are delighted to announce this month’s feature: .

is a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic, at home for the last seventeen years in a small town in the North Carolina Piedmont. She is the author of two books of poetry, Motherland and the forthcoming Among the Living, as well as a novel, Works of Mercy, and a collection of short fiction, The Blackbird and Other Stories. Now that her four children are grown, she spends her time teaching for the MFA program in creative writing at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, writing essays on poetry for her Substack newsletter, Poems Ancient and Modern, and striving to see, as Hopkins did, that “Christ plays in ten thousand places.”

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Cruel April: Reality Remade

“April is the cruelest month,” declares T.S. Eliot’s speaker at the opening of his great poem “The Waste Land.” The line is so familiar to us by now, so embedded in our literary consciousness, that we don’t even stop to wonder what it is that makes April so cruel. But whether we ask or not, Eliot’s speaker proceeds to tell us. April’s cruelty lies in its insistence on waking the world from sleep, calling forth “[l]ilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”

He’s not wrong, of course. Anyone who’s ever been shaken out of dreams, to arise from a warm bed to start the car in the cold of a Monday morning, knows in his marrow the raw injustice of having to wake up. “The Waste Land,” written in 1921, in the shadowed aftermath of the First World War, is a great poem not least because it bears witness to the pain of consciousness: consciousness of violence and fragmentation, but also of the banality of human existence. The poem bears witness, too, to our attempts to make our peace with a broken reality. Shantih Shantih Shantih, the poem ends. Peace, peace, peace.

But with what are we consenting to make our peace? With life in the “Unreal City, / under the brown fog of a winter dawn?” With a universe disenchanted and empty, in which we’re left to wring from our insufficient selves the gifts of charity, compassion, and self-control? If this is the reality to which April awakens us, then yes, April is cruel. For the Eliot of 1921, simply to look the vacant cosmos in the eye, and to resolve to be at peace with that vacancy, had to suffice as an act of hope.

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The other side of Easter is a strange time. In a way, we’re torn in two, somewhere between the infinite joy of what’s already happened, dawn and rolling stones and the mysterious third man on the road, and what’s yet to come. We’re still here, tending to our gardens best we can, trying to snatch glances of anything that looks like an angel with good news wandering our way.

Well. What do we do in the meantime? How should we live our lives? There’s probably about a hundred different answers to these questions, each one undoubtedly good in its own way, but I think 1 Peter nails it with a brief yet striking command: “Live as people who are free.”1 Of course, this freedom doesn’t mean throwing caution to the wind and doing whatever we want. Be servants, Peter says. Honor your brothers and enemies. Love God and his people. Live wakeful and free.

Peter gestures well to what this kind of living might look like, but, because we’re writers, this verse gives us something else to consider: What does it mean to write like we’re free?

Again, there’s probably a hundred different answers, but to truly understand this question, we must ask a few more. What animates our work? What sort of spirit weaves together our pages? Is it one that says death has won, evil reigns supreme, and nothing matters? Or does a different tune hum beneath our words, saying that life is worth living because he now lives?

Writing like we’re free depends greatly on how we frame hope (or lack thereof). Ultimately, we mustn’t lose sight of what the Resurrection means for our lives and, therefore, for our writing. J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” calls the Resurrection the ultimate eucatastrophe, or “good catastrophe,” a miraculous turn that conquers the unconquerable and unravels great evil.2 This sudden invasion of grace, he says, does not deny the reality of sorrow and tragedy, but it does deny “universal final defeat” since it always gives “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”3

More than anything, we must write with our vision fixed on this blurry, beautiful Joy. This doesn’t mean we revise reality into something it’s not. We shouldn’t craft mirages, pretending that terrible things aren’t scheming to steal our attention and catch us unawares. At the same time, we mustn’t write like broken realities are final realities. After all, if we show only apocalypse, we’re bound to create it.

In the context of art making, Makoto Fujimura deals with this tension in Art and Faith: A Theology of Making. He tells us to weep and lament for the suffering around us, but, as faith-filled artists and writers, we shouldn’t lose sight of the good world to come—what he calls “New Creation” or simply the “New.” He elaborates with this:

“Artists already live in the abundance of God. They see beyond the pipes. They hear the ‘music of the spheres’ and desire to respond; they see a vista beyond the world of gray utility; they desire to paint in color; they dance to a tune of the Maker who leads us beyond restoration into the New World to come.”4

Writing free means knowing hope still pulses beneath ruins. We recognize that a far kingdom waits for us, its light and power much greater than any destruction or death. Because of this, we shouldn’t evade or ignore reality; instead, we should roll up our sleeves once more, ready to spin groans into splendors and herald the New as it breaks through our battlegrounds.

Here, on the other side of Easter, we have much to write about. Once again, we’ve celebrated the good catastrophe that has freed us from the grip of death, and now we must take up our pens with our eyes fixed on the ultimate happy ending. With that, we invite you to Write This:

• Write an imaginative piece about a “good catastrophe,” gesturing to hope and endurance even amid great suffering or chaos.

Today’s piece is brought to you by Solum’s wonderful intern, Sarah Tate.

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This month’s Artist Chair features Ryan Rickrode, who previously served as Fiction Editor for Solum. As a bonus, please enjoy the audio recordings of Ryan reading a few excerpts from his newly released collection, The Mountains May Depart.

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Ryan Rickrode is the author of The Mountains May Depart and Accidents Will Happen: Essays & Photos. He received his MFA in fiction and creative nonfiction from the University of Montana in 2013 and has been writing and teaching in Central Pennsylvania ever since. As a senior lecturer in English at Messiah University he teaches courses on creative writing, composition, and literature. As a writer he’s interested in the ways narratives shape people, the ways in which faith and art can overlap, and the ways in which familiar stories like fairy tales can be made new once again. His shorter work has appeared in various places, including Dappled Things, The Windhover, and The Cresset. You can read more of his work at ryan-rickrode.com.

We invite you to pause and receive from Ryan’s readings of his excerpts below.

“Matins” — an excerpt written and read by Ryan Rickrode from his newly released collection, The Mountains May Depart.

“Missoula, Haunted” — an excerpt written and read by Ryan Rickrode from his newly released collection, The Mountains May Depart.

“Happiness So Easily” — an excerpt written and read by Ryan Rickrode from his newly released collection, The Mountains May Depart.

Personhood

Please tell us a bit about yourself! What places have formed you, how you would describe yourself as a writer, what your niches are, what enlivens you, and what you’re currently reading. 

Aside from the years I spent in Missoula, Montana working on my MFA, I’ve always lived in Central Pennsylvania. My mom was a public school teacher and my dad was—and still is—a carpenter and a contractor. As a kid I spent a lot of time helping him build furniture and frame decks, and then when I was older I helped him re-shingle roofs. That’s something I’ve written a lot about in my first book, Accidents Will Happen: Essays & Photos.

Growing up I also spent time in and around my grandmother’s Lutheran church. I remember most the scary sound of the pipe organ and the strangeness of the adults all saying the same words at the same time, so it’s funny to me now that, as an adult, I’ve come to find great comfort in traditional liturgical worship. As someone who spends a lot of time wrestling with words I appreciate the way liturgy gives me language, often language drawn directly from Scripture, that I can use to prayerfully open myself up to God. In liturgical worship you don’t need to be or to feel a particular way to come into God’s presence—the words and the rhythms are there to help you.

As for current reads, I’m right now working my way through some back issues of The Fairy Tale Review and The Windhover while also reading As Earth Without Water by Katy Carl. Two books I’ve just finished and would recommend to just about anybody are The Souls of Others, a collection of essays, poems, and interviews by Shann Ray, a psychologist who studies forgiveness, and Below The Brightness, a poetry collection by Steven Searcy published by Solum. I like how Searcy’s poems ask me to slow down and find meaning in small things. Up next on my reading list is Brave Souls by Gary Porter.

Piece

Tell us a bit about your piece in discussion today. What would you, as the author, want us to know as we approach reading it? How do you hope we connect with your piece? What are you inviting us to contemplate?

These are three scored excerpts from my new book, The Mountains May Depart, a novel about grief, prayer, and forgiveness set in Missoula, Montana. I call them “scored” excerpts because each passage from the book is backed by original music that I wrote and recorded to go with the texts. My hope is that the music, as it responds to the words that I’m reading, will reinforce the rhythm and the mood of the prose in each passage.

At the start of The Mountains May Depart a year has passed since Dan and Sarah lost their young son in a car accident caused by Sarah. Sarah is thinking about leaving Dan, Dan is struggling to figure how he and Sarah might begin to reconnect. The book shifts back and forth between their two points of view.

In the “Matins” excerpt, Sarah pretends to be asleep while Dan gets dressed to go jogging, then she gets out of bed and opens her prayer book. God feels distant but she prays anyway.

In the “Missoula, Haunted” excerpt, Dan jogs through the city, trying (and failing) to feel nothing. He recalls a fight with Sarah from the night before, he recalls how the town once filled him with wonder.

In the “Happiness, So Easily” excerpt, the novel shifts to a happier time in the couple’s life, telling the story of how they first met in college and fell in love while exploring Missoula after the Bible studies Sarah held in her dorm.

Taken together, I’d like to think these three excerpts invite listeners to contemplate God’s presence in people’s lives, how we seek it, how we shut it out, how we sometimes receive it so easily.

Process

What inspired this piece?

I didn’t have a term for this when I was drafting the novel back in the mid-2010s, but I think writing this story was an act akin to what my priest has called “righteous imagination.” In a recent sermon he said if we can’t imagine what reconciliation might look like we can’t work toward it. I don’t think my imagination is particularly “righteous”—I think “redemptive imagination” is a better term to use in the context of fiction writing—but I am very interested in using the imaginative, empathetic, evaluative process of writing fiction to explore how my characters might realistically arrive at things like peace, forgiveness, healing, connection, understanding, and even strength in the midst of brokenness, adversity, and despair.

The redemptive impulse that led me to write this particular novel came in response to a short story I read in college about a couple who experienced a similar loss. In that story the husband cheated on his wife and their marriage fell apart. That certainly isn’t unrealistic, but as a reader I felt frustrated by the passivity of those fictional characters. Neither of them struggled against the emotional trajectories they found themselves on, they were resigned to their fates—which, again, isn’t unrealistic, but drama comes from struggle. I wanted to write a story in which a grieving couple struggled against very real temptations toward despair and self-destruction. What would have to happen for Dan and Sarah to reconcile with each other, to get to a place where they are grieving together instead of grieving apart?

The musical component of these excerpts was inspired by other scored stories that I’ve listened to. When I was living in Missoula, I had the chance to hear the writer Rick Bass perform scored versions of his short stories with the folk band Stellarondo. More recently I got to hear James McBride perform a (very abridged) scored version of his novel The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the Midtown Scholar bookstore during the Harrisburg Book Festival. In the coming months I’ll be partnering with poet, musician, and Solum contributor Louie Land to create a scored stories album featuring his music and my fiction.

Bonus

What aspect of this piece seems to linger with you the most?

Right now, for me, it’s the music. This first foray into creating scored stories has been a way for me to breathe new life into a story that’s been with me for a long time.

Thank you to Ryan for collaborating on this interview with us, and we hope you go on to support his writing by purchasing a copy of The Mountains May Depart today.

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Monthly Book Giveaway

Every month, Solum will be giving away a reader-selected book or journal to one of our paid subscribers. For the month of April, is the winner of a free Solum publication. Congratulations, Kim! Check your inbox for more details.

New Patronage Opportunities

Besides the Monthly Book Giveaways, paid subscriptions also get you access to Featured Guest Essays and Paid Subscriber Workshops. Consider upgrading your subscription today to help continue the work of Solum Press!

Subscribe now

Preorder No Billboard Gospel by Emma Galloway Stephens

We have loved witnessing the excitement in response to our announcement of ’ coming poetry collection, No Billboard Gospel. This is a collection that we believe will resonate deeply with our audience of sincere people of faith who grapple with the paradoxes of corruption and beauty.

In No Billboard Gospel, Emma Galloway Stephens sees the unseeable—a poet’s charge––alive with ache and trembling. She beckons us forward with a power kin to her grandmother’s buckwheat-and-butter spells, biscuits rising like small miracles. With these feral hard-won truths she wakes us with wonder and witness.

— , author and First Poet Laureate of Greenville, SC

Did you know that the preorder period is the most important timeframe of a book’s lifecycle? Please consider preordering this collection to support the ongoing work of Solum, and upcoming poets like Emma. Even one purchase goes a very long way!

Preorder on Amazon

Preorder on Bookshop

Preorder on Barnes & Noble

Preorder on Kindle

Upcoming Events:

Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing (April 16th-18th, Grand Rapids, MI)

• We will have a table at the Festival with books and exciting new merchandise for sale. Come meet our team! Let us know if you are attending in the comments below.

• Learn more here.

Cultivate Retreat (June 19th-21st, Greenville, SC)

• Our Managing Editor will be hosting a workshop at this collaborative retreat. Come connect with like-minded writers and be refreshed.

• Use our code SOLUMPRESS10 to get 10% off your tickets! This special ends on April 15th. We’d love to see you there!

• Learn more and buy your ticket here.

Solum Monthly Feature

Thank you all who submitted to March’s Solum Monthly Feature. We hope this rhythmic showcase provides you with an opportunity to revel in the craft of our community, and spurs you on to make and submit yourself. Each month there will be a new opportunity to participate in this collective endeavor of beauty & excellence.

April—Matthew Pullar

Matthew Pullar is a poet and teacher based in Melbourne, Australia. His poetry has appeared in places like Amethyst Review, Fare Forward, Reformed Journal and The Penwood Review, and his collection This Teeming Mess of Glory (Wipf & Stock, 2025) was shortlisted for Australian Christian Book of the Year. He is currently working on a new collection of poems, while sharing life with his wife and their three children. His spiritual reflections and poetry can be read at mpullar.com.

Today we invite you to savor Matthew’s poem, “Sara Teaches Abraham About the Constellations.” During the submission process, Matthew mentioned that this particular poem was inspired through the reading of Solum author, . We are so grateful for the enduring work our authors, and the generative impact they have on our community. Pause for a moment and enjoy the piece below.

Here is some further background on the piece that Matthew shared with us:

This poem is part of a new collection in which I'm exploring ideas from astronomy, physics and Christian mysticism, and inviting figures from the past to speak into present-day evangelical anxieties. I'm particularly interested in examining the ideas around gender that shaped me growing up, and this poem emerged out of my reading and reflections on female astronomers, especially those who were people of faith. I began to imagine Abraham's wife Sara as someone with knowledge that was ignored or confined to conversations among women, and invited her to challenge the things I and other men, like Abraham, might assume about ourselves and our place in the world.

Submit to the Next Solum Monthly Feature!

Solum is always accepting submissions for our future Solum Monthly Feature posts, such as the one you’re reading here. Each month there will be a new opportunity for one of your poems, short stories, essays, homilies, or visual art to be featured. Your piece will be followed by an artist statement, and if applicable, your Substack page will be invited to collaborate on the post.

The submission guidelines follow the same parameters as listed on our website here.

To be considered, please email emma.winchell@solumpress.com with your selected pieces, and include Solum Monthly Feature [Month] as the title of the email. We look forward to sharing your craft with our community!

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A Life-Saving Dose of Mythos: On The Enchantment of Poetry

When I was in my 20s, a suspicion lurking in the back of my mind came to the forefront and became a full-blown realization: something was wrong with Christianity, or at least the Christianity I had come to know, or perhaps the perception with which I viewed Christianity, or maybe even all three. At any rate, the spell had been broken, the faith that was so foundational to my upbringing began to crumble, and I entered a long period of spiritual malnourishment.

There are a lot of reasons this happened, but chief among them was not just that I didn’t believe the things being articulated as important to the faith, but that I found them to be, at their core, unbelievable: the more I learned about the world, the more a biblical worldview seemed nonsensical; the thin space between God and our spiritual forefathers seemed an impenetrable chasm today; the values spewed from the pulpit seemed too simplistic for the complicated world outside the church doors. I very much wanted to believe, but I was suffocating in doubt.

There are a lot of ways to describe what I was going through; the more academic among us might use secularization, while several people I know would instead revert to more charged words like backsliding or apostasy. My preferred term, coined by Max Weber and prevalently used by those who’ve mined this field ever since, is disenchantment. It conjures up images of a world once teeming with magic that is now cold and lifeless. This is a picture with real emotional resonance.

In The Case for God, a detailed history of disenchantment, Karen Armstrong divides human knowledge into two categories, reason (logos) and myth (mythos), and argues that both are essential for humanity. While acknowledging that the term “myth” is off-putting to modern readers, she makes a case for its necessity as a more subjective kind of knowing:

Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos…They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thoughts and behavior…A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.

The problem today, Armstrong argues, is that as the world modernized, we adapted by sucking all the mythos out of our faith, creating the exact conditions that lead to spiritual anemia and, ultimately, disenchantment. Armstrong again, speaking specifically about evangelicalism:

Even though they continued to insist on the transcendence of God, they believed paradoxically that he could be known through science as a matter of common sense. Wary of learned experts, they wanted a plain-speaking religion with no abstruse theological flights of fancy. They read the scriptures with an unprecedented literalism, because this seemed more rational than the older allegorical exegesis. Like scientific discourse, religious language should be univocal, clear, and transparent. The Evangelicals also brought the Enlightenment concept of “belief” as intellectual conviction to the center of Protestant religiosity and perpetuated the Enlightenment separation of the natural from the supernatural.

So much of this tracks with my personal experience. We touted God as being grand and powerful, but in practice, he was classifiable and reducible, a being we could wrap our heads around, an idea we could coopt as we pursued our own aims. A God like this is bound to disappoint, and he did. In retrospect, I could see that I was starving for mythos.

One spring day, I listened to a sermon about Genesis and came home from church in a particularly foul mood. Why, I asked myself, did I continue to do this every Sunday when I could do literally anything else? Why not just take the final step and walk away entirely? I sat in the backyard, letting the warmth of a nearing sun wash over me as I wallowed in my existential crisis, when a thought—no, a whisper—came to my mind: so write a poem about it. I hadn’t written a poem in ages, but I grabbed a notebook and a pen and put a poem down on paper. In the coming days, I wrote more of them. Almost a decade later, I am writing them still.

And what did writing poetry do for me? Everything. It’s no exaggeration to say that the decision to engage with my doubts on an artistic basis rather than a rational one saved my faith.

If that sounds unlikely, or at least a little counterintuitive, it took me by surprise as well. Writing poetry did not materially change the things that rattled me, provide some apologetic escape hatch, or cure me of my deficiencies of faith. What it did do (albeit gradually, in fits and starts) was usher me outside of the realm of logos and into the arena of liminality and mystery. Little by little, I found myself becoming more comfortable with doubt and ambiguity. I began to feel a sense of community with a long line of spiritual seekers who dove headfirst into the paradox that spiritual things, to use Armstrong’s phrase, “had in some sense happened” but also “happen all the time.” In other words: I got a life-saving dose of mythos.

Earlier I described the impulse to write poetry as a whisper. Although it feels like the truest way to tell that story, I’ve always hesitated to do so, mostly because of the discomfort I feel with implying that my act of writing was obedience to some sort of spiritual command or calling. However, the longer I’ve sat with it, the more I’ve come to understand that is exactly what happened there, but with two caveats: I was called to create and engage with art in a broad sense, and the same can be said for you as well.

Art does many things for us as humans, but its capacity to enrich spiritually by engaging our innate desire for mythos is maybe one of the most significant. Art, therefore, is not a luxury; it’s a necessity, especially in our hyper-rational age of logos. Perhaps no one better sums it up than Rod Dreher in his book Living in Wonder: “We are not going to argue ourselves back to enchantment, nor are we going to behave ourselves into true goodness. We need reason, and we need morality. But, above all, we need beauty.”

Happy creating, everyone.

Learn More About Matthew J. Andrews

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Here on the East Coast, the birds are returning after a long, bitter winter. Finally, the hills and fields are getting on with the business of spring. Everything is bright again, and though grass still glistens with frost every morning, light is staying and color is blooming.

For writers, spring offers generous wealth when it comes to description and imagery, metaphor and symbolism. Spring seems to carry a primal story in its bones, a narrative about dying and rising that’s Christologically echoed on Easter Sunday. For me, I feel this story most deeply when spring first invades winter, beginning with tentative hints until suddenly, the world is fully alive with green and gold.

Such a time is a treasure trove for writers, which makes it all the more unfortunate how writing about spring suffers most acutely from clichés. Adorned in the gaudy dress of stale writing, spring is often shallow. There’s no muscle or teeth or soul in it, only a sweetness that whiffs of clichéd sentiment.

Every writer knows that clichés are enemies, but I don’t think they’re as evil as they first appear. When I’m writing, using “light as a feather” or “calm before the storm” is usually a knee-jerk reaction to not knowing how to describe something. Used this way, clichés act as placeholders, which could be helpful so long as you revisit them during revision. Still, even if one slips through the cracks, they’re not proof that a writer is a terrible hack who doesn’t have skill or even love for what they do. More than anything, clichés most often signal a lack of purposeful attention.

As I said, I think clichés are so prevalent because describing things is hard, and plucking a well-known simile or trope from the annals of human language is much easier than sitting with something long enough to actually think of a nuanced way to express it. Whether conscious or not, clichés slither up when writers fail to fully engage with their writing, especially when it comes to describing the natural world. However, the remedy for this is quite simple: attention.

We must forgo the easeful path of describing only the surface of things and instead peer deeply into them. Doing so leads to unexpected enrichment, even from things we’ve seen or read thousands of times, like daffodils pushing up through snowmelt or the classic journey of a hero. In terms of beauty, the world is always gesturing toward a greater reality beyond ours; this is a well that never runs dry. Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says it much better than me in his poem “God’s Grandeur”:

“And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”1

Armed with a storyteller’s imagination, attending to the natural world is an unveiling activity, and it results in earned language. Such language enables us to craft images and write stories that jolt, that punch, that display truth so it may shine through words and awaken those who sleep.

Clichés, on the other hand, are not the deep down things. They smother heat from roaring fires and choke songs from the wind. Even more severely, they sever mystery from wildness and strip meaning from struggles. Everything is reduced to mere words, shallow words, since they lack the deep weight that anchors us in the fullness of language.

For this reason, more than any other, clichés must be avoided, but make no mistake: Attending, like describing things, is hard. A sustained gaze must be cultivated, exercised again and again, until real flowers can grow from our words. Such making is only possible by sitting with something for hours, days, even years, attending to it as a gardener attends to his roses. But the reward for doing so is substantial. Through loving attention and deep awareness, we earn the very words we wish to write. With this in mind, we invite you to attend well and Write This:

• After attending well to something, write an imaginative piece about the natural world. Challenge yourself to not use clichés or overused expressions.

*For great examples of natural imagery that avoids clichés, check out “What Secret Purple Wisdom” by Luci Shaw or Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

Today’s piece is brought to you by Solum’s wonderful intern, Sarah Tate.

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This month’s Artist Chair features , a previous Solum contributor. As a bonus, please enjoy the audio recording of Bethany reading her piece below.

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Bethany F. Brengan is a freelance writer and editor who splits her time between the Olympic Peninsula and the internet. Her poetry has appeared in Clayjar Review, Seaside Gothic, The Indianapolis Review, and Ninth Letter. She can be found at https://medium.com/@bethanybrengan.

We invite you to pause and receive from Bethany’s words and the reading of her poem below.

“Beatitudes of Disability” — written and read by , published in Solum Journal Volume VI.

Personhood

Please tell us a bit about yourself! What places have formed you, how you would describe yourself as a writer, what your niches are, what enlivens you, and what you’re currently reading. 

I’m a freelance writer and editor living in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in western Kentucky and spent my childhood reading in trees and scribbling out prayers by our tiny creek. I have ME/CFS and fibromyalgia, and I’m often housebound. So I’ve been learning a lot about my backyard birds. (Birds are smarter and stranger than people give them credit for.)

I’ve recently loved the graphic novel Plain Jane and the Mermaid by Vera Brosgol. I’m in the middle of way too many books, but some I’m appreciating right now are The Ways of Water by Teresa H. Janssen (for my book club), Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell, and some poetry by Robert A. Davies (a local poet).

Piece

Tell us a bit about your piece in discussion today. What would you, as the author, want us to know as we approach reading it? How do you hope we connect with your piece? What are you inviting us to contemplate?

I definitely encourage readers to contemplate the Beatitudes before or after hearing this poem. The paradoxes contained there still confuse and comfort me. I hope you find yourself somewhere in this poem (even if you don’t have a disability). And I hope it also brings to mind someone else Jesus loves.

Process

What inspired this piece?

My own disability is usually invisible, but because of extreme sensitivities to scents, I can’t go into stores or doctors’ offices without a giant Darth-Vader-esque mask. I might cover my hair as well. I definitely get looks. Sometimes, I expend as much energy trying to project an aura of “I promise I’m not a threat” as I do completing my errands.

This is not the same as living with a constantly visible disability. And it is certainly not the same as being legislated out of public life. But it’s safe to say that even today, and even in the church, people with disabilities can be treated as an afterthought or an embarrassment.

I wanted to extrapolate from the Beatitudes and bless people with disabilities—especially the ones that make others uncomfortable. The language of the poem gets “uglier” and more wild as the poem continues. Until we end with the God who was maimed for us.

Bonus

What aspect of this piece seems to linger with you the most?

Until I wrote this poem, I hadn’t really grasped that even in His resurrected body, Christ came to the disciples “disabled.”

“He was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5) carries a different weight for me now.

With these authorial ponderings in mind, we invite you to listen once more to Bethany’s featured piece.

“Beatitudes of Disability” — written and read by , published in Solum Journal Volume VI.

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Monthly Book Giveaway

Every month, Solum will be giving away a reader-selected book or journal to one of our paid subscribers. For the month of March, is the winner of a free Solum publication. Congratulations, Holly! Check your inbox for more details.

New Patronage Opportunities

Besides the Monthly Book Giveaways, paid subscriptions also get you access to Featured Guest Essays and Paid Subscriber Workshops. Consider upgrading your subscription today to help continue the work of Solum Press!

Subscribe now

Preorder No Billboard Gospel by Emma Galloway Stephens

We have loved witnessing the excitement in response to our announcement of ’ coming poetry collection, No Billboard Gospel. This is a collection that we believe will resonate deeply with our audience of sincere people of faith who grapple with the paradoxes of corruption and beauty.

These are stunning poems of “Godhunger,” and doubt, flood and drought, praise and rage—no easy devotional exercises as the poet climbs “bloodykneed toward the Lord,” both bereft and filled with grace. Emma Galloway Stephens’ writes about holiness that is taxing and magnificent.

— Jill Peláz Baumgaertner, poetry editor, The Christian Century

Did you know that the preorder period is the most important timeframe of a book’s lifecycle? Please consider preordering this collection to support the ongoing work of Solum, and upcoming poets like Emma. Even one purchase goes a very long way!

Preorder on Amazon

Preorder on Bookshop

Preorder on Barnes & Noble

Preorder on Kindle

About the Author: Emma Galloway Stephens

Upcoming Events:

Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing (April 16th-18th, Grand Rapids, MI)

• We will have a table at the Festival with books and exciting new merchandise for sale. Come meet our team!

• Learn more here.

Cultivate Retreat (June 19th-21st, Greenville, SC)

• Our Managing Editor will be hosting a workshop at this collaborative retreat. Come connect with like-minded writers and be refreshed.

• Learn more here.

Solum Monthly Feature

Sadly, we don’t have a Solum Monthly Feature to share with you this month. Take this as a prompting to polish off some of your pieces to be featured in April!

Submit to the Next Solum Monthly Feature!

Solum is always accepting submissions for our future Solum Monthly Feature posts, such as the one you’re reading here. Each month there will be a new opportunity for one of your poems, short stories, essays, homilies, or visual art to be featured. Your piece will be followed by an artist statement, and if applicable, your Substack page will be invited to collaborate on the post.

The submission guidelines follow the same parameters as listed on our website here.

To be considered, please email emma.winchell@solumpress.com with your selected pieces, and include Solum Monthly Feature [Month] as the title of the email. We look forward to sharing your craft with our community!

Leave a comment

We are delighted to announce this month’s feature: .

works at the intersection of faith and fiction, driven by an insatiable curiosity about life and its many mysteries. Whereas most toddlers stop ceaselessly asking “why” at some point, Austin never kicked the habit. And as all roads lead to Rome, so too all “why” questions eventually find their way to God. In his theological and fictional work, Austin seeks to bring others along for life’s most exciting task of trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. His debut novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, comes out on November 17, 2026 from Monkfish Books. You can find his theological work on YouTube as Gospel Simplicity and on Substack as .

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In Praise of the Philomythos: On Stories, their Origin, and their Formative Power

When Socrates and his companions set out to construct the ideal city, one of the first tasks they take up is determining what makes a good story—which might come as a bit of a surprise. Most of us would place economic policy, housing, healthcare, and the like at the top of the agenda, but in Plato’s Republic, Socrates recognizes that one of the most formative powers in any society is the stories that we tell.

Of course, his prescription, which involves cutting out pretty much all the good parts of Homer, is dead wrong, but that’s an essay for another day. What matters is that for as long as people have been telling stories, they’ve recognized their uncanny ability to shape us. Today, I’d wager that most of our notions of “the good life” come from the movies we watch rather than some philosophical treatises we read. Like Socrates, parents fret over which bedtime stories to read to their children, recognizing that each story has the power to shape their kids in ways we still can’t fully understand. By the time we’re old enough to sit through lectures on ethics, politics, or religion, we already have deep-seated intuitions about these things that came to us, at least in part, through stories.

As Christian storytellers, then, we get to enter into Socrates’ conversation and ask, “what kind of stories will we tell?” Often, we approach this task from the end, rather than the beginning. We think about what kind of effect we want our stories to have on people. This isn’t bad per se–indeed, we bear some responsibility for the effects of our stories–but, this preoccupation with the “moral” of our stories can easily lead to, quite frankly, boring work. Tales are wily things. When we seek to tame them, we often end up with sermons disguised as stories. Characters become caricatures. They lose their life, and a story without life is one that will not impact lives.

So, to avoid this all-too-common error, I want to propose looking at the problem from the other end, from the beginning, because the origin of a story carries within it what it will eventually become. Rather than beginning with a lesson and then crafting a story to fit it, we can begin at a far deeper, far more generative well-spring: Wonder.

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I was in high school when I read Flannery O’Connor for the first time. It was her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and it still haunts me. By the end of it, there were a lot of dead bodies, and frankly, I found it disturbing. That’s just what O’Connor intended.

O’Connor is perhaps one of the most well-known Southern Gothic writers because her stories are so unnerving and strange. She isn’t known for cozy tales or sanitized allegories. She wrote about suffering and death in brutal, jarring ways. Her characters are some of the most despicable, self-righteous people you’ll ever meet, and her stories often end with gruesome, unsettling conclusions.

Though what I find most haunting about O’Connor’s work is how she depicts grace. In her stories, grace isn’t the comfortable, feel-good word taught in Sunday school classes. For O’Connor, grace is shocking. It’s vicious, always lurking on the edges of catastrophes and tragedies. Her characters often experience grace at moments of metaphorical (or literal) gunpoint, which is exactly what happens in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

If you haven’t read the story (spoilers ahead), it follows a rather dysfunctional family on a road trip to Florida, which sounds safe enough. The trip, though, takes a somber turn when the family’s car crashes and they stumble upon three escaped convicts on the side of the road. It becomes a fatal encounter when, by story’s end, the family has all been shot to death by a notorious criminal named “The Misfit” and his two cronies.

It’s dark stuff. Really dark stuff, almost bleak to the point of hopelessness. But to dismiss the story as simply grotesque for the sake of shocking is to miss O’Connor’s meaningful appraisal of grace. To understand this, we must examine the character of the grandmother.

For most of the story, the grandmother is a hypocritical, bitter old woman. She’s much like the Pharisees in the New Testament1—a white-washed tomb, spiritually dead on the inside while presenting moral superiority on the outside. She’s deluded herself with her twisted sense of morality, but it’s violence that uncovers her hypocrisy and allows her to see her own desperate need for salvation. At the story’s end, The Misfit holds her at gunpoint. It’s here, while staring death in the face, that the grandmother experiences true grace, and it fills her with compassion for the man about to kill her:

“His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, ‘Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’”2

Violence yanks the grandmother out of her blind ignorance, opening her eyes to her soul’s true condition. As The Misfit says, the grandmother “‘would of been a good woman… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’”3 A moment of unthinkable brutality brings her to this revelation; nothing else could’ve shattered her pharisaical worldview. She comes to the end of her rope, and it’s here that grace may begin its work.

Approaching this story as writers gives us an interesting lesson on how conflict can function in our writing. Conflict—or violence in O’Connor’s case—doesn’t exist only for tension’s sake or to provide narrative propulsion. It can do those things, of course, but O’Connor shows us that conflict can be a profound grace when it catalyzes character transformation and growth.

We find out who we really are when we face loss and suffering, and our characters should be no different. We encourage you to keep O’Connor’s ideas about grace in mind as you tackle this month’s writing prompt.

Write This:

• Write an imaginative piece in which an acute source of conflict forces a character to change, grow, or recognize a truth about themselves or the world.

Today’s piece is brought to you by Solum’s wonderful intern, Sarah Tate.

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This month’s Artist Chair features , author of Solum’s upcoming poetry chapbook No Billboard Gospel. As a bonus, please enjoy the video below of our the author reading her piece aloud from the collection.

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is a poet and professor from the Appalachian Foothills of South Carolina. She writes poems for many reasons—instinct, impulse, joy—but ultimately sees her work as an outpouring of her faith in Christ. Her poems have appeared in The Windhover, The Christian Century, Door is a Jar, The MacGuffin, and many others. She lives with her spouse, Samuel, in Upstate South Carolina.

We invite you to pause and receive from Emma’s words and the reading of her poem below.

Preorder No Billboard Gospel

“No Billboard Gospel” — written and read by , from her upcoming Solum-published poetry collection, No Billboard Gospel.

Personhood

Please tell us a bit about yourself! What places have formed you, how you would describe yourself as a writer, what your niches are, what enlivens you, and what you’re currently reading. 

I am a poet from the American South. I have southern heritage up both branches of the family tree, though I am a first generation native of the southern Appalachian county I call home. I spent stretches of my childhood summers in Western North Carolina and Christmases in south Georgia. These landscapes compose my interior world.

My heritage is more spiritual than regional, however. My parents love good books and The Good Book, so they made sure I had a steady diet of both. They led me to personal faith in Christ at seven years old. Without this faith, I don’t think I would be writing poems. The Gospel’s enduring hope, its paradoxes, its persistence, and its restorative beauty are the engines that push poems into my head.

I write poems that prefer sound over sense. Most of them depend on a phrase that haunted me for a while, begging for a poem to call home. I’m not a formalist, but I’m a sucker for sonnets and rhyming couplets. I write in fits and stops —I wish I could say I’m disciplined or obsessive, but no, I’m just stubborn. I like writing poems and I won’t quit.

I’m fascinated by southern gothic literature. I love most any book that blends gothic style with the secrets and simmering heat of southern stories. Gothic literature is honest about the costs of evil and redemption. The work of Flannery O’Connor demonstrates this tension: her characters are grotesque, often unforgivable, and yet cannot resist the relentless pursuit of Grace, which often arrives with a sudden violence that shocks and satisfies. This idea of relentless grace informs many of the poems in No Billboard Gospel.

I’m reading Where Dark Things Grow by Andrew K. Clark and Lullaby for the Grieving by Ashley M. Jones.

Piece

Tell us a bit about your piece in discussion today. What would you, as the author, want us to know as we approach reading it? How do you hope we connect with your piece? What are you inviting us to contemplate?

“No Billboard Gospel” is a murder ballad about killing the “old man” mentioned in Romans 6:6. The unredeemed self is this “old man,” one that must die and be replaced by a “new man.” The Gospels present sin as curse and a cancer that needs killing. This old self must die so a new self can live — “to live is Christ, to die is gain,” and “whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of [Christ] will find it.”

My poem takes this image and makes it literal. The speaker has murdered an old man that “martyred” her. Killing him has allowed her to “unmake [her] worst mistakes.” Murdering this embodiment of her sins brings freedom. He’s paid for his crimes and can no longer hurt her. It’s a “violent grace” —her redemption isn’t cheap or easy. Any gospel that might allow this sin to live, the kind of “broadcast or billboard gospel” that offers fortune at no real cost to the self, cannot satisfy or solve her need for redemption and justice. Her act has made a saint from a sinner, which is an alchemy that can’t happen without sacrifice.

Process

What inspired this piece?

Appalachian murder ballads. Many murder ballads are about a man killing a woman (often as a way to hide a pregnancy he caused or avoid the responsibilities of fatherhood —a way to bury his sins). I wanted to make a poem in the voice of a woman killing and burying a snake oil salesman who did her wrong. The idea of having the man embody her own sins followed soon after.

Bonus

What aspect of this piece seems to linger with you the most?

The line “the violent grace / that carves saints out of sinner’s chests” haunts me. The language suggests transformation, but it’s a messy one. The word “carve” signals both an act of slaughter and an act of creation. It was the violence of crucifixion that preceded the miracle of resurrection —a violence that makes Grace possible. My book is about the triumph of transformative Grace. Grace is not a “billboard gospel” —it is not a painless solution to human problems like what you’ll see advertised on billboards or elsewhere. Grace invites us to give up our lives to really live them.

With these authorial ponderings in mind, we invite you to listen once more to Emma’s featured piece.

“No Billboard Gospel” — written and read by , from her upcoming Solum-published poetry collection, No Billboard Gospel.

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Monthly Book Giveaway

Every month, Solum will be giving away a reader-selected book or journal to one of our paid subscribers. For the month of February, Mollie Osborne is the winner of a free Solum publication. Congratulations, Mollie! Check your inbox for more details.

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Announcing Solum’s New Publication

Readers, we are elated to announce our first book of the year. At Solum, one of the most important things we look for in our submissions is glistening sincerity. Our aim is to find the real amidst a swarm of gimmicks and imitations. This labor can feel fruitless at times, but it is books like this next one that keep us on our feet. With joy, we present you with the following poetry collection, available for preorder now:

No Billboard Gospel by Emma Galloway Stephens

No Billboard Gospel is a book of poems for every reader who has ever asked the question, "If God exists and if he is good, then how can he permit evil?” Its poems follow its speaker on a thorny red clay path through a season of severe doubt. Its Southern landscape of rivers, bogs, mountaintops, and kudzu-choked forests provide a gothic backdrop for her spiritual quest driven by an insatiable "Godhunger." The language of drought and storms reflect the all-consuming nature of following God. The speaker desires to drown in God, to crawl hand over fist toward him, hungry for truth and transformation. But even as the speaker reaches toward the Divine, anger holds her back: anger at the world's growing darkness, the crumbling of its once-trustworthy institutions, and its commodification of faith. No Billboard Gospel yearns for restoration: of personal faith, of community, and of the broken-but still beautiful-world.

About the Author: Emma Galloway Stephens

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Did you know that the preorder period is the most important timeframe of a book’s lifecycle? Preorder today to support growing authors like Emma Galloway Stephens, and the ongoing work of Solum.

Solum Monthly Feature

Sadly, we don’t have a Solum Monthly Feature to share with you this month. Take this as a prompting to polish off some of your pieces to be featured in March!

Submit to the Next Solum Monthly Feature!

Solum is always accepting submissions for our future Solum Monthly Feature posts, such as the one you’re reading here. Each month there will be a new opportunity for one of your poems, short stories, essays, homilies, or visual art to be featured. Your piece will be followed by an artist statement, and if applicable, your Substack page will be invited to collaborate on the post.

The submission guidelines follow the same parameters as listed on our website here.

To be considered, please email emma.winchell@solumpress.com with your selected pieces, and include Solum Monthly Feature [Month] as the title of the email. We look forward to sharing your craft with our community!

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We are delighted to announce this month’s feature: .

As writer and editor, seeks to bring clarity to truth through the beauty of language and narrative. She currently edits the new literary imprint, Luminor, being launched through Word on Fire; her own novel As Earth Without Water and short story collection Fragile Objects can be found through Wiseblood Books. She writes essays in contemplative realism at the Substack Depth Perception; her other writing has appeared in outlets including America, Church Life Journal, Ekstasis, Evangelization & Culture, Fare Forward, National Review, Public Discourse, and World Literature Today, among others; and she serves as writer in residence at the University of St. Thomas--Houston.

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Three Rival Versions of Christian Narratology (with apologies to Alasdair MacIntyre)

Just in case the title doesn’t say it all, let me be clear. For the past several decades there have been, broadly speaking, three commonly held, but until recently quite often unexamined, ways of approaching storytelling as Christians. I describe them here in the order in which so many people seem to encounter them in the wild:

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Most of us have had them at some point in our lives: people we feel safe enough, bold enough, to call our friends. Maybe you have a whole gaggle, a seemingly endless list of phone numbers you call when you want to play soccer or start a book club. Maybe you have a core two or three, friends freely chosen to share your proudest joys and worst disasters.

Whatever the case may be, I think we can agree that friendship is an essential part of living a rich, abundant life. From the very beginning of time, God knew it wasn’t good for man to be alone.1 Enter Eve and marriage, but this divine truth also highlights man’s innate need for fellowship. We are social beings, and within us, no matter how deeply buried, is a ravenous hunger for companionship—for something deeper than the occasional hangout or quick chat in the hallway.

Like with any meaningful thing, friendship is also a bit dangerous. Opening yourself up to another human being, as genuine relationships require, carries the risk of hurt, rejection, and frustration. Even its absence can sting when a desire for friendship is not matched by a talent for finding—and keeping—it.

At the same time, friendship, in a sense, is a very casual thing. It begins because we live next to someone, sit at a certain table, have the same birthday month, share a vision or interest. Any number of simple circumstances can strike the match and spark a friendship that lasts a lifetime.

What we have, then, is a fun paradox. Friendship, like many of life’s particulars, is holy and simple, a wound and a balm, a risk and a reward. It’s the stuff of the deepest humanity, fraught with meaning and peril, which, of course, also makes it the stuff of great writing.

Some of the best stories I’ve read have the spirit of camaraderie as one of their central values. Frodo and Sam, plus the rest of the Fellowship.2 George and Lennie, albeit with a more somber conclusion.3 Even my favorite literary romance—that would be Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe in L.M. Montgomery’s delightful Anne of Green Gables series—begins with an honest, meaningful friendship after a few relational bumps and bruises (including a slate cracked over poor Gilbert’s head).

Though, there seems to be a slight lack of friendship in today’s literature. Perhaps I’ve simply not read widely enough, but it’s something C.S. Lewis bemoans in The Four Loves. Romance, he says, takes up ample space in modern literature while friendship is somewhat scarcer. This is especially unfortunate because Lewis also emphasizes its profound importance:

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (God did not need to create it). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”4

Like it gives value to our lives, friendship can surely give value to our writing, but only if we honestly engage with it. It’s more than a best-bud character who exists solely to provide comedic relief; conversely, it shouldn’t be treated too seriously lest it grow heavy and awkward. That said, we hope you enjoy navigating friendship’s paradoxical characteristics in this month’s writing prompt:

Write This:

• Write a piece in your preferred format about friendship (and its many nuances).

Today’s piece is brought to you by Solum’s wonderful intern, Sarah Tate.

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