St. Basil News by Anna
Dear friends,
It occurred to me, as I was slithering under a thorny shrub into the foot-wide pass between my garden shed and fence trying to describe the smell of decaying leaves and feral rabbit so alluring to my dog, how strange are the things we writers sometimes do. But these strange things are the hallmark of curiosity and imagination.
There’s a famous study in which war veterans who experienced great trauma were shown a random blot of ink on a card. While most saw in that meaningless blot of ink a scene from the trauma they had witnessed, other veterans had an even more disturbing response: they said the ink blot was completely meaningless. In both cases, trauma debilitated a fundamental human organ—imagination. (Think of staring at clouds—you might see a sea dragon or a monkey or a mermaid, but rarely nothing.)
Much has been said about how imagination, the ability to step into someone else’s story, fosters empathy. And much has been said about how reading stories rehabilitates our imagination. From a writer’s perspective, my mind goes immediately to
’s class, Rewilding Your Words, in which students are encouraged not only to see through the eyes of another human, but also to see through the eyes of animals, trees, and stones.Some beautiful writing has come from this, and today I’d like to share it.
She Came from a Fire by Paul Kingsnorth
First, if you haven’t yet read or listened to Paul Kingsnorth’s story of St. Teodora of Sihla—narrated from the perspective of a bird!—you’re in for a treat! Better still, you can listen to Paul read it in his own voice. You may want to go outside as you listen.
What If We Look for God’s Glory. Right Here. Right Now? By St. Basil Student Katie Andraski
“Theokritoff shows how St. Basil said it was useful to meditate on ‘the great wisdom in small things. A single plant…is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in the contemplation of the skill that produced it’ (49).”
Enjoy this beautiful post by St. Basil student
, who shares both a reflection and a writing exercise born out of Paul’s class.Wright’s Sunken Cathedral
And now for some pure speculative fiction :). At
, we’re beginning to share short fiction (free for now!) in addition to the books we’re publishing.Please enjoy this delightful short story about parallel universes, the Mad Hatter, and the wrong cat by one of the St. Basil Writers' Workshop students!
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Happy listening, reading, and writing,