conference

The Long Song of Autumn

apollard7Leave a comment


Crimson fern leaves and nodding goldenrod; long hours of screen time revived by long readings in the Gospel of John; car repairs and apartment deep-cleaning; Zoom discussions of Tolkien’s stories and scholarship; blinking stop lights and noisy waiting rooms; hours spent curled up with adventure, fantasy, and fairy tale books as the dusk deepens. Autumn is passing slowly and swiftly, like the lingering end of a folk song.

Junius Johnson’s dragon course this summer was just as refreshing and joyful as I had hoped. Rereading old friends like The Hobbit, The Hero and the Crown, and The Neverending Story and discovering new treasures felt like inviting my childhood self to walk beside me and remind me of forgotten dreams. As the summer heat shimmers away and the tree canopy blazes gold and saffron, I have done my best to keep feeding my soul with tales of mystery and wonder-stories that remind me of the great and wild things underneath chores like brake replacements and insurance paperwork, like gold glinting through dead leaves. Some favorites included:

  • Emma Fox’s The Carver and the Queen
  • K.B. Hoyle’s Son of the Deep
  • Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting and This Rough Magic
  • Miriam Pittman’s Ancora: The Fog Banshee’s Curse

Much of my free time has gone into season 2 of the Leaf by Lantern podcast. Season 1 was a flurry of writing and rewriting, trying to temper perfectionism with common sense, reading and trying to give myself enough time to ponder before publishing any thoughts. I am trying to make Season 2 a series of richer, deeper episodes – a slow wander rather than a mad dash.

Here are some notes on recent episodes:

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Apparently, I can’t keep away from Search for the Lost Husband stories (ATU 425 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore index)*. I remember picking up a folklore anthology that bore this title from our childhood library and staring at the title printed on a pale blue background.

“Dad, what does this mean?” I asked him, showing him the book.

“Hmm,” he said. I have a vague memory of him gently explaining that compass directions don’t apply to things in space like the sun and moon. I never forgot this fairy tale, and loved it all the more when I read Jessica Day George’s gorgeous retelling, Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow. George’s retelling explores more of the background of the villain and makes the whole thing into an almost-gothic mystery, with a slow trickle of clues and revelations. This episode gave me a chance to explore the mystical, lonely, wistful Northerness of this variant and how an artist could create a rich atmosphere in a retelling.

* Every single time I read or type “Aarne-Thompson-Uther”, my mind jumps to Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur. There’s no actual relation. The “Uther” named in the index is Hans-Jörg Uther, a German scholar who refined the already-published work of Aarne and Thompson in 2004. He might appreciate the confusion. Then again, I don’t think Uther Pendragon is a very noble character, so maybe not.

The Little Mermaid with K.C. Ireton

Every overview of the history of fairy tales and folklore I’ve read takes a big breath and pause at Hans Christian Andersen. His renown is stunning; “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Nightingale,” and others are as well known as “Cinderella” (at least, in the Western world). I haven’t read much of his biography, but I’ve seen some scholars assign facts from his life to his stories, as if his personal history is the only way to understand his artwork. “He wrote [this tale] because [biographical fact]” – and nothing more. A person’s life certainly influences their fiction, but I don’t like the reductionism of a tidy “this = that” statement as an explanation for stories with such haunting images and structural intricacy.

My discussion with K.C. (Kimberlee) Ireton gave me hope for Andersen scholarship. Her joyful, thought-provoking theological reading of the tale helped me understand why it strikes such chords in my soul – especially as the ending of “The Little Mermaid” is not quite the happy ending you expect. I’ve been dreaming up merfolk stories ever since.

Fieldmoot Conference Presentation: “She is the Morning”

In between planning this podcast season in September, I wrote and recorded a video on another fairy tale for the online Fieldmoot conference, which is scheduled to go live starting Thursday, November 2 at 6:30 pm through Sunday, November 5. The conference’s theme is “Light and Darkness,” so I chose a fairy tale I thought had some interesting light/darkness images: “The Singing, Soaring Lark” from the Grimm collection. This tale is a variant of “Beauty and the Beast” that was new to me. It’s a lovely quest tale with a courageous, warmhearted heroine and beautiful images, including larks, lions, griffins, dragons, the sun and moon, and a mysterious nut-tree. I had a lot of fun investigating things like bird imagery in the Bible, the physics of green wood, and the theology of recognition, though I had to leave a lot of research paths untaken to keep within a reasonable time limit.

I didn’t have time to mention it in the recorded video, but if you like the fairy tale, there is a picture book adaptation called The Lady and the Lion by Jacqueline Ogburn and Laurel Long. The illustrations are some of the loveliest I’ve ever seen.

The Fieldmoot conference uses Discord to keep a live chat as the recorded videos play. It was a cheerful, thoughtful, kind, and delightfully mischievous group of people last year commenting on the sessions and recommending books to each other. I hope we have the same friendly atmosphere this year. We’ll also have live Q&As after the recorded video sessions, so I’m curious to see what questions and comments people have.

Sign up here if you plan to attend! The organizers have done an unbelievably great job of strategizing, scheduling, innovating, and covering the multitude of details an event like this requires, and signing up helps them plan.

2023 became the year of fairy tales and fairy tale retellings for me. I have dreams of pursuing other research interests, including detective stories, travel adventures, light sci-fi, and maybe historical fiction, but I hope that the world of fairy tale images will illuminate all these future creative pursuits. Studying quests and towers, glass hills and magic wells, rescues and resurrections have helped me love the Great Story of the gospel all the more – the news that gives all our pursuits, from the highest delights to the most miserable chores, a meaning and a happy ending.

Poetry, Places, and Inklings

apollard72 Comments
Lancaster, PA in the snow

He sees no stars who does not see them first
to flame like flowers beneath the ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia” 

After a winter of long drives into the dusk, ice-puddles that sparkled in the sun, and bitter cold that cracked the skin on my hands, I sat in the Trust Performing Arts Center in Lancaster, PA, frantically typing notes. I was supposed to attend the Inklings Fellowship Conference, hosted by Square Halo Books, in April 2020, only to have it postponed due to COVID. As I made my travel plans for Lancaster, I kept thinking about how much has changed in me and in the world in these two years.

The conference was joyous. For the first time, I met writers and artists in the flesh who I had met in digital forums – online classes, creative collaborations, or Zoom office hours. I gave most of them big hugs. Somehow, talking about creativity, art, faith, and beauty over the Internet gave us a familiarity that made our in-person meetings comfortable and full of laughter.

It was enthralling. Lectures by scholars, artists, and Inklings-lovers on the wordsmithing of Tolkien, the myth-blending of Lewis, and the collaboration between them fill my mind and heart with wonder. The “Rabbit and Dragonfly” pub next door, with its miniature Shire landscape, huge map of Middle Earth, painting of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus at Lantern Waste, and shelves of old books felt like a home I’d always wanted but didn’t know was real. I scoured the conference bookstore and spent far more money on books than I budgeted for.

It was exhausting. I love conferences, but the rapid pace, overflow of information, and consistency of social interaction left me completely drained, though very happy. 

The power of poetry and language, of words and names, was one of the keynotes for me. I’m still pondering the fantastic lecture by professor and poet Christine Perrin on “The Poetry of Tolkien,” in which she argued that Tolkien was an epic poet equal to Dante, Milton, or the author of Beowulf, and understanding his poetry is fundamental to understanding his work. She outlined Tolkien’s love for language (apparently he felt that a new Grammar Primer was like finding a hidden wine cellar) and his understanding that to name something is to know it and possess it. She also explained Tolkien and Owen Barfield’s idea that our language is splintered and fragmented from its original wholeness, a tragedy that has splintered and fragmented our consciousness and understanding of the world. For instance, words like the Greek pneuma have a holistic meaning of wind, breath, or spirit, united so that the one word has multiple layers of meaning, while English has separate words for each concept. This separation has disrupted our ability to understand the unity of the cosmos. 

The theological importance of naming reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, one of my favorite books, in which Naming is linked with loving, understanding, communicating with, and rescuing others. It also made me think of my day-job as a technical writer, in which I try to teach, simplify, and convey complex ideas about software and cloud computing in clear, simple instructions. Language is one of the greatest challenges of my newest job. The terminology of cloud computing and networking was developed by engineers, scientists, military and government officials, and (I say this lovingly) computer geeks. I doubt any artists or poets were involved, and I wish they had been. As it is, software and computer engineering language is made of many displaced or complex, hard-to-remember, uninteresting words and phrases: 

  • Words transplanted from the physical, artistic, and even spiritual worlds into digital contexts: screen, page, icon, code, cloud, tunnel, gateway, walled garden, firewall, routes
  • Words that are abstracted and not linked with the physical world at all: data center, availability zone, encryption
  • Acronyms that are very hard to remember, at least at first: HTML, DNS, IPv4, ECMP, VPC

I don’t know if anything can be done now, as experts in these fields are familiar with this language, and to change it would be as difficult as changing a national currency or measurement system (but worse, since the Internet is international). But I wish a scientist/engineer/programmer with J.R.R. Tolkien’s love for words, C.S. Lewis’s clarity and skill with analogy, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s bluntness and common sense had been the one to choose the nouns, verbs, and adjectives we use for computing and networking. 

Christie Purifoy’s session on “Placemaking in Narnia” meant a lot to me after weeks of walking through concrete tunnels, gray parking garages, and tiny city parks with leafless trees and withered grass. But her talk was more than a reminder that beauty is important. She argued that even beautiful places can be place-less – lacking “aliveness” or a sense of “wholeness, spirit, or grace.” Frozen Narnia was beautiful, but it was disenchanted and lifeless under the reign of the witch. Place-making is the re-enchantment or reawakening of places.

I found this beautiful, hopeful idea of place-making inspiring and encouraging, though it brought back some frustrating memories. As a child, student, young professional, and just another human being in the world, I have not always had control over the environments in which I live, work, commute, and exercise. Location, the cost of living, spiritual calling, and bureaucratic requirements of different seasons of life (such as getting a driver’s license) have all shaped my options for places to dwell in. These shaping forces have put me in places with a tangible “aliveness” and places with a palpable “deadness” – beautiful and ugly, cozy and barren, spectacular and dingy. I’ve played in gardens full of rhododendrons and tulips; studied in school classrooms with blank white walls, and fluorescent lighting; worked in offices of gray cubicles and choking silence; read in libraries full of old books and stained glass windows. In “lifeless” places where I felt trapped, placemaking meant cultivating the little things I could control within the tiny spaces I owned (Spotify playlists, taped-up pictures from magazines, scented candles, fairy lights) and dreaming about the places I longed to make and inhabit.

I drove away from the conference into a snowy blue twilight. The wisdom I’d heard about language, beauty, and art came at a good time – late winter is my least favorite season, the doldrums of the year. As I’ve done in the past, I want to use art to fight the grumpiness I sink into amidst long, gray days of slushy snow and dirt-encrusted ice. In honor of the goodness of poetry and place-making, I’m doing a new creative collaboration for March with some fellow writers and artists, centered around the theme “Winter Eyrie” – the concept of a refuge, a haven, a fortress, a citadel, somewhere cozy and safe amidst chaos. More details to come. 🙂

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

Reflections on the STC Conference 2019

apollard7Leave a comment
Denver, Colorado in the rain.

In the gray days of February and March this year, I realized that the two conferences I wanted to go to in the spring were both in Colorado, both concerning writers, within a week of each other.

I returned home after the first one last week, the Imagination Redeemed conference. On Sunday, I flew out to Denver again for the Society for Technical Communication (STC) conference and returned late on Wednesday night.

The Imagination Redeemed conference was in Colorado Springs, that blooming valley in the mountains; the STC conference was in downtown Denver, where the brick-and-stone buildings were too short to block the rain-gray sky (unlike the dark skyscrapers of Manhattan – I couldn’t help comparing), and trees with bright green leaves or fresh blossoms dotted the sidewalks.

Though I didn’t plan to attend two conferences back-to-back, and my head spun with altitude sickness the first night and day, comparing the two gatherings was fascinating. Both organizations attract thoughtful, creative, and dedicated communicators who want to hone their craft and connect with people like them.

The STC is made of technical communicators, who help their coworkers or customers understand and use technical information: technical writers and editors, librarians, instructional designers, content strategists, and information architects from software, manufacturing, medicine, business and finance, and other industries.

As technical communicators (I’m a technical writer), we work with brilliant people – software developers, engineers, mechanics, architects, and others – to translate their complex knowledge into simple steps for audiences who benefit from their work. I attended sessions about integrating images and text, the power of story, career planning, best practices of knowledge management, and more.

The Imagination Redeemed conference focused on faith and beauty, imagination and worship; the STC conference focused on transforming the creations of geniuses into plain language and clear concepts. These gatherings represent two sides of my mind and heart that I’m cultivating in work and in play, united by a growing sense of yearning: I long to be a messenger, a world-maker, teacher, and healer through my writing, in my job and my own work.

Soon, I hope to write about how technical writing is so much more than the boring manual-writing I though it would be: how it’s as challenging, inspiring, and wonder-ful (in the old sense of the world) as studying English literature. For now, here are some resolutions as a technical writer to match the ones I made at the Anselm Society conference:

Tell stories for good – The STC conference reaffirmed what I already knew: that stories are powerful. From a technical writing perspective, stories help people understand complex concepts (think of how some people can remember all the plot threads in the Marvel universe) and remember important information. As a technical writer, I want to tell stories for good, to help people gain the knowledge they need to thrive.

Critical consumerism – One of the last speakers at the conference described how we can be critical consumers, thoughtfully examining the evidence to evaluate claims and rationales. Does the speaker’s conclusion exaggerate the evidence or ignore key findings? In the workplace and the rest of my life, training myself to examine evidence will guard me against misconceptions and manipulation.

Wonder in the ordinary – Several speakers emphasized the ancient roots of technical writing: from cairns marking paths in the mountains, to cave paintings, to medieval manuscripts, humans have been teaching each other to do complicated tasks since the beginning of time. I used to think technical writing was dull work, typing up thick manuals of small black text that no one wanted to read. Over this year, I’ve tasted the joy of learning how to uncover the creative genius of software developers and communicate it to non-experts: detective work as close to my childhood dreams of being Nancy Drew as I’ll probably get in real life.

It’s good to find wonder in your work; good to sit in awe of the mind of the Creator as you see the beauty of the human mind in lines of software code, or complex machinery, or the rhythm of a sonnet. In my technical and creative writing, I want to awaken that wonder in others.

My real vocation – A speaker on a podcast I listened to yesterday said that “you work to feed your dream, and then you work on your dream to feed your everyday work” (clumsy paraphrase). Am I a technical writer in the “real world,” to earn a living, or am I “really” a creative writer who has a day job so she can eat? Both – maybe not forever, but for this season, my real vocation is to become skilled at both types of writing.

But I’m back to New England again, at least for a few weeks. The cherry trees are blossoming in bright pink clusters; the rest of the leaves are peeking from the edges of tree-fingers; and I can walk along the beach at sunset with my sister and talk about life. Summer is stirring, and I have writing to do.

White blossoms on a branch.

Meditations on the Imagination Redeemed 2019

apollard71 Comment
Glen Eyrie, a castle in the mountains.
Glen Eyrie

On Monday morning, I flew back to New England from the Imagination Redeemed conference in Colorado Springs – exhausted, full, and inspired. The conference was hosted by the Anselm Society, which hopes to spark a “renaissance of the Christian imagination” – a new understanding between the Church and the arts of how we can glorify God through visual art, music, literature, poetry, theater, and dance.

The conference was a feast of wisdom and fellowship. Scholars, artists, teachers, and writers discussed re-enchanting the church, medieval cosmology, sacred art, the moral imagination, writing as image-bearing, and more. I had wonderful talks with fellow attendees – writers, artists, ballet teachers, graduate students, opera singers, and others – about their work.

I’m tired. The richness of ideas and insights was overwhelming, and the red-eye return left me barely holding onto consciousness (my first all-nighter ever). But I’m also encouraged and inspired to meet so many people who are doing what I want to do, or share my ambitions: to glorify God through my art, to create and cultivate beauty, to share wisdom and joy through retelling God’s story.

I’ll probably reference the conference many times in future blog posts, but for now, I’ll share some of the goals the conference inspired:

Write – Heidi White’s talk about creating art inspired me to pour out essays, short stories, and books with greater courage, even if my words are only read by a few, because I’m not writing for my own fame or glory, but God’s. Lanier Ivester’s sonnet-writing workshop encouraged me to capture the inexpressible with imagery and challenge myself to greater creativity with meter and rhyme. Lancia Smith’s discussion of writing as image-bearing motivated me to bear or “bring forth” transcendent truths in stories.

Explore how my doctrinal beliefs shape me and my art – Though all the speakers were Christians, many came from an Anglican or Catholic background and discussed doctrines or practices that are outside of my faith tradition, including sacramental theology, a division between the clergy and the laity, and liturgy. Though Christians are all united by the blood of Christ and the Holy Spirit, doctrinal differences like these do shape our thinking and behavior. I want to explore my own theological framework to ensure that it is Biblically grounded and see how it affects my imagination, writing, and life choices.

Connect with other artists – I had so much fun meeting people who spoke my language, who know and love the same stories, who have similar dreams and challenges. Though I can travel to connect with other artists and writers, I would love to engage in that community here in New England, where geographical closeness makes it easier to build relationships.

Study – The speakers introduced me to so many fascinating ideas: musica mundana (medieval cosmology – “the music of the spheres”), kairos vs. chronos time, and more. I want to relearn Latin, study New Testament Greek, and read dozens of books and articles – a huge task, but all things I can accomplish eventually.

Engage with the Word – Junius Johnson, one of the speakers, encouraged artists and theologians to intentionally connect with each other. Theology is one of the best sources of inspiration, and art is a beautiful way to worship. I want to study the Bible deeply, reverently, and joyfully to better express God’s love and wisdom in my writing.

After learning so much and meeting so many wonderful people at the conference, I got to enjoy the beauty of Colorado Springs: Pike’s Peak shining with snow above the dark ridges of other mountains; Glen Eyrie castle tucked in a green valley; the Garden of the Gods, huge red rocks towering over the hills.

But it’s good to come home. In New England, soft pink buds are opening in the cherry trees, and new leaves are coming out in Scottish green. I’m tired, but full – eager to learn, to study, and to write stories of yearning.