I was listening to a podcast (The Habit) where the host, Jonathan Rodgers, was interviewing Tish Harrison Warren and Doug McElvey about their writing on the ordinary. We can see that word as "boring, mundane, no impact" or as "daily, particular, real." Life is so daily; life is so ordinary. Doug McElvey said that he was raised in a "tradition" that had no tradition and that emphasized doing something big and influential and dramatic on the world stage for God. He seemed to say he had a personal crisis where he realized he didn't love--God or people. And that became his goal. I like that testimony. I am facing it now a bit. "I Came to Love You Late" would be my spiritual biography's title. It's actually the title of book from the '70s about Martha. I can relate.
Retirement means more time to read. One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...
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