LITMIR.BIZ

Love in one form or another is the commanding force of this new collection of short fiction. The Servitude of Love holds the revelations of love in different manifestations–love of work, love of another, love of journey, love of mission, love of justice, of foolishness, of duty. These thirteen stories take place along the north/south corridor of the central plains of America, in Afghanistan and Spain. Fictional characters such as Noe in Brownsville, Texas in the first story, and actual historical characters such as Joanna the Mad in 16th century Spain in the last story, speak of the difficulties and demands of love. Noe, subsumed by love for his family and his art, imagines The Maker, El Senor, to be a workman like himself. Joanna, madly in love with her husband, finds she must live without him. Minneola Peavine, in a dull marriage in West Texas, dreams of nightly visits with Genghis Khan. The four daughters of a preacher travel the north shore in Minnesota in search of something other than the cold. A dyslectic boy reverses the letters, p and b. Another boy, Malchas, loses his ear in an accident involving fireworks, and begins to hear the faraway sea. There is an experimental story about land rights told in several voices in several versions. Two brothers serve in Afghanistan. Two other brothers deliver pizza in northwest Kansas once inhabited by Indians and cavalry troops. The historical, Sister Maria Jesus de Agreda, bilocates between 17th century Spain and the Jumano tribe in the American southwest. Most of them are awash in a river of circumstances that could drown them.

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A professor hears the voices of Biblical women. She begins writing. What was it like for Dorcas to die and be brought back to life? What was it like for Philip's daughters to live with the threat of persecution after Christ was crucified? What did Miriam feel when she sat in the leprosy tent? What did they all say as the professor wove her own story between their voices? It was Michal, David's first wife, who made a bolster of goat's hair for David's bed when Saul, her father, was trying to kill him. The bolster made it look as if David were there. Likewise, these women's voices are not their actual voices, because they were not recorded in Scripture, but a similitude of what such women might have said. The narrator struggles with their stories beneath Scripture. Michal is maligned because she scorned David when he danced before the ark, but after the death of her sister, she raised her sister's sons. David hanged them all when the Gibeonites told him that Saul had broken a covenant with them. They asked that Saul's male descendants be killed. What was it like for Michal to see her nephews hanged? What did she have to say?

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Many towns have their murderers, but are they also members of a church, a Boy Scout leader, or president of the congregation? Could they be trusted to bring a covered dish faithfully to church suppers? This novel takes the BTK murders in Wichita, Kansas, as inspiration to question issues of evil. How could a man commit murder and yet sit in church all those years until he was caught? What is a Christian? What is Christianity? Can a Christian murderer go to heaven? Mark Cabot and Ralph Gheary, minister and assistant minister of the church to which murderer Thomas Fout belonged, disagree as they face the shame, quandary, and confusion Fout leaves in his wake. How could they not have known? How can they face their congregation, the news reporters, fellow pastors, and the public? How long does it take to recover from the shock? Both men's wives, Grace Cabot and Zelda Gheary, are also left reeling in the upheaval. The questions remain: Can a man be good without God? Can a man be good with God?

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No Word for the Sea is built on several layers of questioning: What is language? What is memory? Where does the mind go when the circuits shut down? The novel covers seven years in the lives of Solome and Stephen Savard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Stephen is provost at Cobson College, and Solome has raised three children. The events alternate between Stephen's first-person narrative and Solome's third-person narrative in accord with the breaking text of their lives. «Once there was a common Indo-European language with words for winter and horse, but no word for the sea.» The history of the English language has an inland origin. As they find themselves stranded in the destructive effects of Stephen's Alzheimer's, there also is an exploration of resolution that comes from such an experience. Mark 8:36 asks, «What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?» No Word for the Sea asks, «What if a man gains his soul, but loses the world?»

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Crippled in childhood, Mary Wesley, sister of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, speaks of the Wesley household in first-person narrative built on the facts of her life. Mary lived in a strict Christian family, one of 19 children, 10 of whom survived. Her mother, Susanna Wesley, imposed a regiment where «not one child after a year old was heard to cry out.» Her father, Samuel Wesley, a minister at Epworth, could not provide for his family, and spent time in debtor's prison. The family taunted Mary's awkwardness and showed little sympathy for her affliction. At one point Mary addresses her family from the outside. «There go the ragged Wesley's. Beggars themselves. They are in a house so crowded love could not grow. Only survival. As plants overcrowded in a garden bend and twist their way toward sunlight, out of necessity smothering those closest to them.» Mary Queen of Bees is a study in hardship in early 18th century England. Through the rigors of despondency in the aftermath of her wounding, the brightness of Mary's spirit emerges. The novel of reactivated history pokes Mary's voice from childhood to her death in childbirth at the age of 37, when the bees leave.

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A 1994 trip to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency began the group of poems for The Collector of Bodies. The manuscript stayed in a file until the Civil War began in Syria, March 18, 2011, the author's 70th birthday. The poems were retrieved, and the manuscript continued.
Glancy wrote as an observer–as someone who had talked to the students in the universities–who had experienced a foreboding of what was ahead for Syria, especially after listening to the unrest of the students. In the bright sunlight, as they walked toward her, smiling, she felt an inexplicable point of grief. She heard the desire of the people to be free. Later, following the uprising of civil war on the news, she knew she was seeing the price the Syrians would pay for that desire.
A visit to a foreign country leaves part of oneself in that place. But something in return is taken. This collection of poems explores the «something that is taken» with implications for the Christian believer and the issues involved. What can be done in a world full of refugees? Is there anything to do other than stand back and watch?

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A minister's wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband's work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter's shed, where she makes different forms of ziggurats that she places in her kiln, a little symbol of hell. Though Eugena rejects Frank's insistence that there is a heaven and hell, she finds that she has worked with the shape of both and never knew it. In the end, she realizes that heaven and hell are in the shape of ziggurats, one rising and the other sinking. Her beloved ziggurats become the ironic witness of what her husband preached. Meanwhile, Frank and Eugena struggle to make sense of their lives after the death of their addict son, Daniel. When he is killed in a car accident, Frank and Eugena argue over whether Daniel's death was truly an accident, or whether his car may have been pushed off the road. The novel begins, «Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it.» When Eugena dies, she travels through hell to find her son, Daniel. Frank sends the last chapter from heaven. The novel was influenced by Dante's The Divine Comedy and begins with an epigraph from The Inferno, «What I was living, that I am dead.»

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