Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Blogging and poetry

By

Blogging and Poetry


Blogging and writing poetry require a faith in your own thoughts, faith and hope that they may be interesting, and the acquired habit of capturing your thoughts in words.

In Which Zoe Believes Money-Dollars Grows on Trees

By

Our toddler Zoe occasionally heard us talk about money when we lived in America.

She would prick up her ears, and say, “Money? Money-dollars? You want money? Here take!” and give us a handful of imaginary dollar bills.

We’d laugh.

But there was a truth to it.

It would be just as easy for God to resolve our dilemmas beautifully and effortlessly
if we had faith…
if we asked….
if it were in our best interests….

for sometimes our character has to develop too.

But we do need to believe that he can, he will, if we are to retain as light-hearted an approach to money as two year old Zoe.

The Best Way to Get Really Good at Writing

By

The Best Way to Get Really Good at Writing

I think there is a lot of wisdom in that old chestnut–that the best way to get really good at writing is to write a lot! And read a lot. Saturation reading, basically.

And if one has neither time or energy to do either.
Then, trust God from whom all creativity flows!
Now that I have a lot less time, I just plunge into writing when free slots slow up. I remember however the days when I had lots of time, and slowly “got into the mood” by a slow process of arousal, by reading poetry, or reading prose until the rhythms built up inside me, started thudding in my veins, and I felt a burning longing to write something as beautiful as what I had just been writing

Peace like a River by Leif Enger

By

I am reading this, in a manner of speaking, listening to on tape, while I do the dishes, more precisely. Though I have a hard copy with me, as I like to do when I listen to books on tape, to revel in the loveliest passages, or to find out what’s going to happen when the suspense is too much. (I’m the sort of reader, who reads the last chapter whenever suspense builds, and then I can read, revelling in the architecture of the piece without worrying over the characters!)

Leif Enger’s book is full of the sadness that lies like a river over the best American novels I’ve read recently. The Good Mother, The Book of Ruth (okay, not that good), The Delta Wedding, Gilead, Housekeeping. The song of the sadness at the heart of the Universe, no less than the joy at the self-same heart.

It’s a darn good story too. Enger succeeds in bringing faith into fiction–what we have not seen with our eyes, or touched with our hands, but what we none the less believe concerning the word of life. Here is a novel full of faith and wonder. Highly recommended.

And the way things pan out is Biblical–so far (I am still reading it). They are kind to uninvited guests, sharing their last meals with them, so to say–and one of these, many, mostly ungrateful, guests, remembers them in his will, leaving them an Airstream trailer, at just the moment that the most desperate cry goes up from Jeremiah Lande, for a way of escape.

 

Originality

By

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring tuppence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. C. S. Lewis

Getting into the Writing Mood

By

When I don’t have much time, I just plunge into writing when free slots slow up.

When I have lots of time, I slowly “got into the mood” by a slow process of arousal, by reading poetry, or reading prose until the rhythms build up inside me, started thudding in my veins, and I felt a burning longing to write something as beautiful as what I had just been writing