Christian Fiction: 09/01/2006

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Dirty Birds Bad Idea

Easy answers. Perfect, pious people. Storybook endings. These are just three of the things you won't find in the novel you are about to read.

Click here to learn more about Bad Idea and Why it's a Great Idea to read this book

(NavPress/Think Books, October, $12.99.)

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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie by Patricia Haley

You'll love this new novel from Patricia Haley!

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Next year I am convention captain for two inspirational writing workshop panels at the 2007 RT Booklover's Convention. If you are a published inspirational author, and interested in being a panelist on one of these workshops, please goto my site- Gospel Fiction for more information.

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Monday, September 04, 2006

To Be Fabulous

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."- An excerpt from Marianne Williamsons' A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

Continue reading "To be Fabulous" »

Friday, September 01, 2006

Puritan Morality in early Pan African Novelist Thought

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"As Iola finished, there was a ring of triumph in her voice, as if she were reviewing a path she had trodden with bleeding feet, and seen it change to lines of living light. Her soul seemed to be flashing through the rare loveliness of her face and etherealizing its beauty.

Everyone was spellbound. Dr. Latimer was entranced, and, turning to Hon. Dugdale, said, in a low voice and with deep-drawn breath," She is angelic!...She is strangely beautiful!...The tones of her voice are like benedictions of peace; her words a call to higher service and nobler life."

-Iola Leroy, written by Francis E.W. Harper 1892

When I was thirteen I fell in love with African American Women's Literature. The novel that done me in was Alice Walker's A Color Purple. In under grad I knew There Is a God when Agnes Scott College offered a course called Black Feminist Thought. What I didn't know was that my soul would leap for a stranger kind of fiction- Christian Fiction.

Once believed to be the first novel written by a Black author was Francis E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy. I return to this novel often as I write my own works both as a benchmark and as a warning. This month I want to share this novel with you, as it relates to early Black Christian Thought, sociodynamics between Black Women of the early nineteenth century, and what we can learn about storytelling, theme, and orthodoxy as new, liberated Christian writers.

You can pick up a copy of Iola Leroy at your local library or download the text version for free here. So there's no excuse. Ha. :) If you do, please let me know in the gospel fiction forum.