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I guess it’s about time I announced the impending arrival of my newest child. The Captive Heart, book two in the Daughters of Caleb Bender series, is currently being printed and will be in bookstores in a few short weeks. If reader feedback is any indication, a lot of people are anxious to know what happens to Miriam and Domingo. The Captive Heart answers that question, but I won’t give away any more than that. I will say this: things happen in this book that I’m fairly certain have never happened in any Amish story before. The pace really picks up in this one; friends who have read it in manuscript form are telling me it’s a page turner. Imagine— an Amish page turner. It’s full of surprises, and goes in directions nobody expects.
The Captive Heart is scheduled to be in stores December 1, or you can pre-order a copy through online outlets like CBD or Amazon— which, by the way, is a really good thing to do if you’re interested in helping an author boost his sales...
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A couple days ago my friend Lori Patrick sent me the following excerpt of a Bill Moyers interview with Maurice Sendak, Caldecott winning author of the childrens’ classic, Where The Wild Things Are.
Bill Moyers (to Sendak): My friend Joseph Campbell once told me long before I met you that one of the great moments in literature is this scene in WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE: “And when he came to the place where the wild things are, they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said, ‘Be still’ and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once. And they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things.”
Joseph Campbell went and got that and read it to me. And he said, “That is a great moment because it’s only when a man tames his...
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“Each of us has his own private little idea of rightness, and almost by definition the utopian condition of which we all dream is that in which all people finally see the error of their ways and agree with us. And underlying nearly all our attempts to bring agreement is the assumption that agreement is brought about by changing people’s minds. Other people’s.”
S.I. Hayakawa
I read this little nugget about forty years ago in, of all places, a Readers Digest. I was just a strapling, but it stuck in my mind. Something in a murky corner of my seldom-used teenage brain reared its head, wiped the sleep from its eyes and said, “Keep this. You’re going to need it.” So I memorized the quote, word for word, and ever since then it has served as a kind of guard-rail to my thought processes.
For a...
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I apologize for being away from the blog for a while. The simple truth is, sometimes I can’t think of anything I really want to say. I finally thought of something I’ve wanted to say for a long time, but didn’t know quite how to go about it. It’s an odd truth, one that gets buried under piles of rubbish— the detritus of living every day, surviving, chopping wood and carrying water, working at a job we don’t like in order to pay for things we don’t need— but it’s important. The best I’ve ever heard it said was a little section in Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s not even in the body of the book, but in a preface that Frankl himself wrote for the 1992 reprint. He tells his students this:
“Don’t aim at success— the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of...
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I think I’m finally old enough to officially classify myself as a curmudgeon, if not a full-fledged geezer. I can’t get through a conversation anymore without using some variant of the phrase, “Back in my day…” Especially if I’m talking to one of my kids.
Back in my day, if you wanted a car you figured out how to get one. Yourself. I didn’t even think about asking my father to buy me a car; he would have injured himself laughing. That kind of foolishness only happened in rich families. Back then if a boy wanted a car he’d scrape together a couple hundred bucks any way he could— cutting grass, digging stumps, picking up Coke bottles (back in my day they were glass, returnable for 2 cents a bottle). You were lucky if there was a grocery store within walking distance where you could sack groceries for tips— usually a quarter. When you got enough money together you’d buy some old beater that you had to work on all the time just to keep it running, and you...
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