The Master's Artist

Two Books on Creating With Children

I consider myself a creative person. My wife and I have been thinking about how exactly we became creative people because we want to pass creativity down to our child.

Two books that have been really helpful in constructing a "Turner Manifesto for Creativity" have been The Rhythom of Family and The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule. Both of these books share how one family on a farm in Maine has woven creativity into every aspect of their lives, from making their own cough drops to sewing knapsacks for hikes.

In The Creative Family, Blake Soule lays down the foundation of her creative ethos. Children are to be engaged in creativity from the time they are born. What's more, she believes that children are naturally creative, and that part of parenting, for many of us, is re-learning the creativity we have lost when we became adults. That means making paper dolls, doodling for no reason and taking time to just be zany ideas and actions that we have been told are not "adult." There is a sub-conscious voice in adaults' heads that says "you shouldn't be playing with toy trains" or "it's weird for you to pretend you're a pirate" or "you look like an idiot dancing like Snoopy." This kind of thinking is simply not true, and Blake Soule suggests that if adults feel that they have outgrown creativity they should look to their children as teachers.

In The Rhythm of Family, Blake Soule takes creativity and places it into the rhythm of the seasons. What are creative things the family can do year round, from spring to winter? She includes relevant crafts and creative ideas for each month of the year, matched with reflections from her and her husband on weaving creativity into the changing seasons with their family. The ideas included are things like making an album to remember the year's garden harvest, walking barefoot in mud and easy sewing activities for children, like felting.

I encourage you, whether you have children or not, to pick these books up from your local bookstore or library and peruse them. Don't be afraid to be creative like a child!

Thomas Turner is the Senior Editor & Publisher of GENERATE Magazine and an adjunct lecturer at Nyack College.

Kipling and Empire

The 1880s and 1890s: It is the zenith of British power in the world. The sun literally never sets on the empire. Queen Victoria sits on the throne. It is the British Raj in India. Imperialism is becoming a widely accepted political philosophy and practice. 

If there is one writer, one author who is most associated with the high-water mark of British dominance, it would be Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Today he might be most remembered for being listed in the credits of the Disney movie “The Jungle Book,” or possibly as the author of the father-to-son poem “If.” But in his lifetime, he was one of the most popular writers in Britain, producing stories about India and British expansionism, children’s stories – and poems. He was even sounded out about becoming Britain’s poet laureate – and he turned it down. 

Growing up, I read Just So Stories, Kim, Captains Courageous, The Jungle Book and even some of his poems, like “Gunga Din” and “If.” These are stories and poems that appealed primarily to boys, with their excitement and mystery, celebration of manly virtues, and tales of war and battles, heroism and treachery. 

Recently, I (voluntarily, sort of) accompanied by wife to a furniture and decorating store in a neighboring community. While she looked at chairs, I wandered about the store, and discovered a small table with a small pile of old books on it. Included in the pile was a 1900 edition of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses. The introduction, a short biographical sketch of Kipling, was written in that breathless admiration common to a lot of criticism and biographies at the time. The ballads were exactly what you might find soldiers reciting and singing as they whiled away the hours stationed in remote parts of the empire – stories of lovers, heroic comrades, rather incompetent military leaders, thoughts of home and similar themes. 

The “other verses” of the volume were not ballads but they were poems with similar subjects, except perhaps for one, found near the end. In its own way, it is a kind a commentary on what would happen to the empire, as what happens with all empires, but it is also a prayer, with full knowledge of what is truly important in this life. 

Recessional, a Victorian Ode 

God of our fathers, known of old –
   Lord of our far-flung battle line –
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
   Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies –
   The Captains the Kings depart –
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
   An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away –
   On dune and headland sinks the fire –
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power we loose
   Wild tongues that have not thee in awe –
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
   Or lesser breeds without the Law –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
   In reeking tube and iron shard –
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
   And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
   Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

                                            Amen

Black History: Christian Literature Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy

"My dear child, I have not learned my Christianity from them [slave owners]. I have learned it at the foot of the cross, and from this book," she said, placing a New Testament in Iola's hands. "Some of the most beautiful lessons of faith and trust I have ever learned were from among our lowly people in their humble cabins."

IOLA LEROY was originally published in 1892, during a time of black disenfranchisement, lynching, and Jim Crow laws. It is the story of a an American woman of mixed heritage raised to believe she's white until she and her mother are sold into slavery. Iola becomes an outspoken advocate for her people and a critic of race-mixing. Her story offers an important portrait of black life during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

It is the first published Christian novel written by an African American Woman. It does what few Christian novels do now. IOLA LEROY express in both theme and tone the issues that affected early 19th Century American life: Jim Crowism, slavery, women's suffrage, family responsibility, Reconstruction, and faith. Moreover the characters in this story are heavy and weighted in realism. Oftentimes I read newer faith based novels whereby the writer has watered down human reaction to a scene or a natural human response to a dilemma, in order to placate a general Christian audience. Other times, authors change historical elements (revisionist history) to make the story easy to take in .What Harper does is tell the world what she sees and feels and leaves the burden of how she will be perceived on the cross that Christ carried for us.

Dee Stewart is a Christian magazine editor, journalist, publisher or Christian Fiction Blog and owner DeeGospel PR. She is also Miranda Parker, novelist for Kensington Books. Her debut novel A GOOD EXCUSE TO BE BAD released July 2011. The sequel SOMEONE BAD AND SOMETHING BLUE releases July 2012.

Love Poetry After Death

Thomas Hardy is best known for his novels – The Return of the Native was at one time required reading in many high school or college English classes. His fiction has often been described as rather dark and brooding, and sometimes as depressing, but it was clearly part of the bridge that connected the Victorians to the Moderns. 

Hardy also wrote poetry, and a considerable amount of it. Some of his best known poems during his lifetime were about his wife Emma. Now, lots of poets write poems for their wives, girlfriends or lovers. What distinguishes these love poems of Hardy’s is that they were written after Emma died in 1912 – and the two were barely on speaking terms at the time of her death. She died shortly after her 72^nd birthday, which Hardy had ignored. He had not written love poetry to her before her death. He was already in love with another woman and would eventually marry her. And yet Emma’s death evoked a remarkable an outpouring of love. 

“No one could have predicted the effect Emma’s death had on Hardy,” writes Claire Tomalin in the introduction to Unexpected Elegies, Poem of 1912-13 and Other Poems About Emma. “He immediately began to mourn like a lover. He had her body brought down and placed in a coffin at the foot of his bed, where it remained for three days and three nights until the funeral. And he began almost at once to write, revisiting the early love between them in his mind with an intensity that expressed itself in a series of poems." 

It was almost as if he fell in love with her after she died. 

They had met in Wessex, Hardy’s “home turf” and the setting for so many of his novels. She came from a better class than he did, and both families opposed their marriage. They married anyway. Hardy published a romance novel in 1873, called A Pair of Blue Eyes, that is little known today but is partially based on their meeting and love affair. (I posted a review of it last week at my blog.) 

Over the years, Emma helped him enormously in his writing work, but they grew apart. For the last decade of her life, they lived together under the same roof but rarely spoke. 

And then she died, and Hardy seemed to fall in love with her again, or perhaps fell in love with the idea of her again. And the result was some 41 poems published form 1912 to 1920 (Hardy died in 1924). 

The poems are rather simple and beautiful, the simplicity arising from profound emotion that speaks for itself. These are not lines dashed off in a fit of mourning but worked and refined and hammered into something very fine indeed. As I read Unexpected Elegies, I felt a sense of regret that at least one of these might have been read to her while she still lived. But then, they wouldn’t have been the poems they were, and are. 

Here are two from the collection. 

She Opened the Door 

She opened the door of the West to me,
       With its loud sea-lashings,
       And cliff-side clashings
Of waters rife with revelry. 

She opened the door of Romance to me,
       The door from a cell
       I had know too well,
Too long, till then, and was fain to flee. 

She opened the door of a Love to me,
       That passed the wry
       World-welters by
As far as the arching blue the lea. 

She opens the door of the Past to me,
       Its magic lights,
       Its heavenly heights,
When forward little is to see! 

The Walk 

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
       By the gated ways,
       As in earlier days;
       You were weak and lame,
       So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind. 

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
       Surveyed around
       The familiar ground
       By myself again:
       What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.