The Writing and the Spirit Podcast

You don't want to be seen as ridiculous? Then for heaven's sake, don't be a writer.

I was going to call this shut up, but I decided to be somewhat more polite.

Sometime, even the most self-sufficient among us, need a little help from our friends (or from somebody else).

In the world of inspiration and imagination, I am free.

The only way busy folks like us can stop to listen is to convince ourselves that the other chores on our agenda aren't as urgent as we've considered them.

All us writers need to ask for criticism, then to discriminate between the valid and the useless, and to make of the criticism what we want to, not what the critics want us to.

Some mighty important suggestions.

Less is more ought to be our slogan.

To read Olga Savitsky's poems, here's a good link. 

Follow these warnings, or awful stuff might happen, to you or even to the world. Creators hold the future in their hands, or brains.

I'm not sure who is wiser, Dostoyevski's Father Zossima or a Veggie Tales cucumber (Zoe says she is an asparagus).

If you can hang out with a seven year old and find out what your life means, you've done it all.

You need to get deprogrammed.

How to survive as an artist in this cruel world.

Here I will assign a couple more daunting tasks, asking you to get courageous and quit making excuses.

Three assignments, your response to each of which can determine whether or not your writing will reach the audience you hope for.

I could call this "no pain. no gain", except writing is much more fun than working out. 

In this podcast, I try to make some sense of freedom.

How Feodor Dostoyevski would prefer we behave, and how a wonderful editor taught me to write nicer.

In this short podcast, you'll find an argument between two of the greats,  Feodor Dostoyevski and Flannery O'Connor, refereed by novelist Fredrick Buechner. Also, I give a pitch for the Mount Hermon Christian Writers' Conference.