A Prolific Author

 

Many churches celebrate October 31 (or the Sunday before) as Reformation Day—the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 93 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The church door was the town bulletin board, so he probably chose that spot for practical reasons rather than as an act of defiance.

Although October 31 is the day chosen to commemorate the start of the Protestant Reformation, that was just one day. Like most movements, the Reformation began gradually and gained momentum as it went along. And part of that momentum came through Luther’s writing.

Luther was a prolific author who wrote hundreds of books and articles during his lifetime, many of which are still in print. He also translated the Bible into German to make it accessible to the less-educated populace. You can read more about that in my June 27, 2016 post. 

And to repeat the ending from that post, Luther wouldn’t have taken any credit for his writings. He would have said, “Ad Dei gloiam” (Latin) or “Zu Gott die Ehre” (German).

To God be the glory.

__________

The photo shows the study at Wartburg Castle where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German. I took the photo during a 2016 trip to Germany.

The Missing Ingredient

 

Two weeks ago I attended a nephew’s wedding. We weren’t sure we were going to make it because the location could only be accessed by crossing a railroad track. A freight train was stopped at one of the two entrances, and we had no way of knowing whether the train was long enough to block the other entrance, too.

Fortunately, we were stuck behind other cars also headed to the wedding. Eventually the front one turned around, the next one followed, and so on. I assume that somebody in the front car heard via cell phone that the other entrance wasn’t blocked. In any event, we followed, too, and we made it with a few minutes to spare.

The bride is a geologist whose previous job involved environmental work on Lake Michigan, so she wanted to hold the ceremony in a gazebo overlooking it. The weather cooperated, and the traditional secular ceremony went well. But I was disappointed because it was missing what I consider to be the most important ingredient in any marriage. There was no mention of Christ.

Congratulations Mike and Amanda. I wish you a long and happy marriage. But even more, I wish you a Christ-centered one.

That’s what helps the best marriages survive.

__________

I didn’t get any photos of the ceremony itself because there were too many heads in the way, so the one at the top of this post was taken by my daughter, Caroline Camp Ill.

Travel Isn't Just for Fun

 

Actually, travel can be just for fun. That’s the purpose behind Roland’s and my international vacations, although they are educational, too. But when I’m researching a book, it is serious work. And I usually get the story idea first and then do the traveling for research. This time it may have worked the other way around.

I just returned from a trip to Pennsylvania for a cousins’ reunion. It was a good time, and we enjoyed each other’s company. But while there, I began to wonder whether it was fodder for a story. The battle itself has been worked to death, but there is less about the civilians who lived in town or on local farms and were caught up in those events. I have ideas for two other books to write first, but Gettysburg is on the list of settings to think about.

The second day of the reunion centered more on the Amish. We drove around an Amish area in the morning and saw several typically Amish sights, including two schools with children out playing. Then in the afternoon we went to a production of David at the Sight and Sound Theater.

I’m not tempted to write an Amish story, however. That was done well by Beverly Lewis and followed by a flood of other authors, some better than others. I don’t see a need to join them.

But I haven’t ruled out Gettysburg.

__________

The first photo shows a section of the Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama, which is a painting by Paul Phillippoteaux. It was painted in the 1880s to depict Pickett’s charge during the third day of the battle. The second picture is an Amish school during recess (or maybe physical education), taken from the window of the car I was riding in.

No Travel Logs, Please

 

Last week was filled with a cousins’ reunion and a nephew’s wedding. I will write about them in the next week or two, but for now I am reprinting a post I wrote for the Indiana Writers' Consortium blog on June 3, 2015. 

No Travel Logs, Please

In March, I attended IWC’s Paper Fields workshop and took two sessions on travel writing from Kenneth Tressler. One of the points he made was that travel magazines don’t want travel logs.

Consider these two opening paragraphs.

Our trip to Utah began on September 2, 2014 with a flight into McCarran International Airport at Las Vegas, Nevada.

or

As I stood in the middle of the Sevier Desert, I drowned in the bleakness and isolation of the parched terrain. How could 8,000 Japanese Americans live crammed together in this one square mile of desolate landscape without losing their sanity? Yet, somehow, they did just that.

Both openings are true, but I’d rather read—and write—the second one. Good travel writing is creative non-fiction and should tell a story. Yes, give pertinent information about the trip, including your favorite places to eat and stay along the route. But don’t bore your audience. Write the story you would want to read if it were written by someone else.

Good travel writing also proves the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. Consider this picture, which I took through the windshield while driving along U.S. 89 in Utah. (No, I wasn’t behind the wheel.)

I could have said that the blue sky accentuated the red rock formations striated with tans and browns. Or I could have used many more words in an attempt to describe the landscape. But the picture says it better than I ever could.

Travel magazines want photos to go along with the story. So if you want to sell an article about your trip, take along a good camera. For use on the Internet, a cell phone might do. But if you want to submit a feature article to a print magazine, you need a camera with high resolution and interchangeable lenses.

As you vacation this summer, go ahead and take the logbook along. It’s good for notes that aid your memory.

But it makes a terrible travel article.

Workshop Poetry

 

I was going through some old papers and found a haiku and a tanka that I wrote at an Indiana Writers’ Consortium workshop held at Gabis Arboretum on June 8, 2018. Since they were just on a handwritten sheet, I thought I’d preserve them here.

Haiku:

Blue heron flying
Green stagnant waters below
Blue heron swimming

Tanka:

Fairies dance about
Unseen among their houses
Hiding from the eyes
Of curious school children
Who still believe in fairies

__________

I don’t have a photo of a blue heron, but the one at the top of this post shows a juvenile yellow-crowned heron that I saw in Costa Rica earlier this year.

The Best Laid Plans . . .

 

As Robert Burns said, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men gang aft agley” (often go awry),¹ and last week’s blog post reminded us that we can’t predict the future. Put those two together, and you have a roadmap for our latest international travel adventure.

The plan was to spend six days traveling on our own in Iceland and then fly to Ireland for a two-week tour. After doing our sightseeing in Iceland, we headed for the airport hotel for our next-day flight to Ireland. The tour company wanted a COVID test before joining the group, so we took that when we got to the hotel. Unfortunately, Roland tested positive. (I never did.) We ended up cancelling the tour (which we have since rescheduled) and spending six days living in the airport hotel before coming home.

Fortunately, while life calls for constant adjustments to our plans, the changes don’t always have to be devastating. The hotel was relatively comfortable, the food was decent, we had plenty of reading material, and both the airline and the tour company rolled over our payments so that all we were out was the hotel bill and meals while living at the airport. More importantly for me, I had several manuscripts in the cloud and managed to get quite of bit of work done.

And we did get Iceland in. Here are a few photos. The one at the top of this post is the Northern Lights from Hotel Anna in the countryside. The next one was taken flying over Greenland, and the following two are Hallgrims Church in Reykjavik and a view of Reykjavik from the tower of Hallgrims Church.

These photos were taken at the Arbaejarsafn Open Air Museum. The first is a church, and the second shows Roland standing in front of a separate vestry building.

The next two are scenic pictures taken while traveling through the countryside following a route called “The Golden Circle.”

These three were taken at Thingvellir National Park. (Actually, the Th is a funny-looking P.) The first shows the Almannagja, where North America and Europe meet, the second is Oxararfoss (foss means waterfall), and the third is the foot of Oxararfoss, which you can’t see from the top.

Our second day on The Golden Circle was a water day. Not water sports, but natural water features. The first is Stokkur Geysir, which was across the street from our hotel. The others are all waterfalls: Gullfoss, Seljalandsfoss, and two of Skogafoss. You can see the long walk to the top of Skogafoss, which neither Roland nor I took.

We saw the sunset and the Northern Lights from the grounds of the Hotel Anna on The Golden Circle near those last two waterfalls.

The next two photos show buildings at the Skogar Folk Museum and a nearby cave house, which does extend back under the mountain. It was probably used for storage rather than living in, but the early Icelanders took advantage of the caves and built entrances on them.

Finally, I must close with a photo from our airport home. This art is called “The Nest” and shows a jet being born from an egg.

__________

¹ From “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns.

Predicting the Future

 

Several things have happened lately to remind me how hard it is to predict the future.

I recently watched a 2013 rerun of Shark Tank where an entrepreneur pitched a cell phone app that interacted with bar codes and QR codes. Mark Cuban passed on it partly because, as he put it, “QR codes are on their way out.” Fast forward nine years, and he was so wrong.

This past September I received an assignment to write the February 2025 devotions for a devotional magazine called Portals of Prayer. Yes, you read the date correctly. I submitted an outline earlier this year, and the devotions themselves are due in January 2023—two years before they will be published. Scripture doesn’t change and a good devotion should be timeless, so that part is okay.

Unfortunately, writers are not as timeless. I was asked to submit a short biography with the devotions, and who knows how much will change before the publication date. I could even be dead by then. So I assume they ask for an update shortly before the devotions are published.

Knowing how far in advance the devotions are normally assigned, I was surprised in July to notice references to COVID-19 and its aftermath. My best guess is that the person who was originally assigned those devotions didn’t meet his or her deadline for some reason so the publishers had to look elsewhere—either by making a rush assignment or by moving up devotions that had already been submitted. Regardless, it appears that something happened that the publishers hadn’t predicted.

In this world, there is very little we can count on. Even death and taxes have their uncertainties.

But one thing is predictable. This world will end and then the judgment. Those who know God will go to heaven, and everyone else will go to hell.

I’m glad I’ll be in the first group.

__________

The image at the top of this post is Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment.”  I took the photo on a 2018 trip to Rome. The original is in the Sistine Chapel, and no photography is allowed inside. I didn’t have to violate the rules to get this picture, however. The Vatican had placed a reproduction in the courtyard for visitors to photograph, instead.