A Birth Announcement
a humble invitation
Welcome to my newest readers, fellow bibliophiles, and educators!
I wholeheartedly believe books are birthed.
C.S. Lewis describes this same urge, this process, through his character Orual. She says, “I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
In 2016 when I knew I simply had to write a companion for C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, it completely held true. When I was teaching it my first few years, there was nothing out there to help a non-scholar high school teacher wade into those deep waters. I had to do it. I knew I did. I wanted to.
I got an agent, polished the book proposal, and we jumped in. My agent and I reached out to contacts, Lewis scholars, small publishing houses.
Crickets. Time and again, we were told I had to have built-in buyers. I had to teach a university course where the companion was required reading. But Harper and Collins was issuing a new edition of Till We Have Faces the following year. Surely this was perfect timing.
I self-published in 2017. Birth was messy. It was public. Reviews made clear that I was an understudy. I asked for feedback and insight from Lewis scholars and republished in 2020 with Draft2Digital so that libraries could request it. 4,000 copies later, I am truly blessed that it has reached those who can use it.
In 2018, the urge reappeared. This time in fiction, a world in which I read, teach, and enjoy. I attended my first-ever writing conference in Nashville, Tennessee. I met with agents and fellow writers, ecstatic to finish the middle grade novel I had started. But boy, I had a lot to learn. Years of learning in fact.
Two novels and many rejections later, I remain a student. Maybe a second-year one.
In the meantime, another urge has risen. Two years ago I spoke on the spiritual meaning of the life of a sycamore fig at two summer conferences. The seed imbedded itself. Time has fertilized. Last fall, I thought I was experiencing Braxton-Hicks contractions, like it was almost time. I started to write a book proposal.
But I was afraid, uncomfortable.
Birth is painful, messy, loud, not exactly organized. But I do believe it is ordained.
And that is my invitation. I know birthing a book is imperfect. I know it needs help, but I have reached a spiritual place where I need help and insight to bring it to this earth.
Over the next few months, I will be sharing real pieces of my non-fiction book proposal about an unusual metaphor. Join me, if you will. Comment as I go. Answer polls. Email me. I invite you. Truly I do.
I leave you with the real introduction of my book proposal that will go out to agents in November. Hopefully.
Introduction
I came curious. Hoping to understand the book of Amos, I reread it several times one summer. Why did it begin with judgment upon the Israelites before blessing them and the land? I dug through commentaries on geography, agriculture, and the person of Amos, who claims, “I was no prophet, nor a prophet's son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs” (ESV). I learned about ancient Mediterranean horticulture. I uncovered an archaeological entry on petrified figs in Egyptian tombs. What type of fig would a common shepherd tend along with his sheep? Why would it be mentioned at all?
I found a treasure trove of botanical information about the third tree mentioned in Scripture. In ancient Palestine, the sycamore-fig tree was the same that Zaccheus would climb. To the Egyptians, it was “The Tree of Life.” King Sennacherib promised each Israelite his own fig tree. King David appointed Baal-Hanan to oversee his sycamore-figs. Jeremiah describes the Israelites as both good and bad figs while Jesus spoke of a fig tree whose budding showed the Kingdom of God was close at hand. The sycamore tree itself and its fruit are equally important in the Old and New Testaments. The tenacity of the sycamore fig tree and how its fruit comes to maturity parallels our life in Christ.
Do comment below or feel free to email me. And don't forget that the List Library at my website is always available to you, my readers.
Christine
Hello there, Christine. I've been meaning to write you. First of you, I wanted you to know that you are the reason why I am now on Substack, so thank you for publishing this newsletter. Second, your thoughts here of relating your writing your novel as birthing a child reminds me of Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “The Author to Her Book.” I am not saying that your work is an “ill-form’d offspring of [your] feeble brain,” but that I can appreciate the metaphor here as well as the concerns any writer can have of her work. I don't think that I can be of much critical help yet, but please know that your intro makes me want to read more. Third, your reference to figs points me to another poet, one of my favs: Naomi Shihab-Nye. You probably know that this poet was born in the United States of an American mother and a Palestinian father and often points back to the Middle East in her work, attempting reconciliatory moves amongst peoples. In 19 Varieties of Gazell: Poems of the Middle East, Naomi Shihab-Nye reminds us that her family lived in Old Jerusalem and got along with neighbors who were Palestinian, Jewish, Greek, or Armenian, but that changed in 1948. The family moved and settled in the United States and certain objects of the homeland—such as the fig and the olive-- became symbols in this poet’s work. The last stanza of her poem entitled “My Father and the Fig Tree” goes like this:
The last time he moved, I had a phone call,
my father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest figs in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
Plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
Emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.
Again, all that to say, your brief intro makes me want to read more and inspires me to also think of poets.
So very happy that you continue to carry the passion to birth the beauty inside of you and very excited that Amos is coming present, more fully!!! Introduction is so good!!