Ravenna is a city of about 150,000 near the eastern shore of Italy. Although the origins of Ravenna date back to the 5th century BC, the first artifacts are from the 5th century AD. For a time, it was the capital of the Western Roman Empire. This post from also describes the city.

What’s the point of visiting Ravenna? The city is known as the “capital of mosaics” due to the byzantine style of its mosaics with heavy influence from Roman art as well. The mosaics are also beautifully preserved, unlike the small fragments in other locations. So, art historians, theologians, and mosaic artists are all drawn to this late-ancient city.

The Basilica di Sant’Apollinare Nuovo was originally built for Arians, whose views about Christ’s divinity were later considered heretical.

However, it still has amazing mosaics, including one of my favorite images of the magi.

We also saw a church where, due to subsidence, the original floor of the chancel area has sunk. Instead of fighting the water that seeped into the building, monks added fish to it.

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We also saw a beautiful 8-sided baptistry where conservators are also struggling with water seepage due to subsidence. It was a bit difficult to photograph because it was small, but the dark blues and golds were beautiful.

Ravenna is also Dante Aligheri’s final resting place. I have been reading the Divine Comedy, so I’m appreciating Dante all the more. Thankfully, I got some photos:

The most breathtaking mosaics are found in the Basilica of San Vitale.

Truly spectacular!

Like I mentioned in my first post about Ravenna, traveling in other areas of the world has nurtured my faith in unexpected ways. Of course, I’d known before that Christianity is global; however, by traveling to far-flung places in the world—Istanbul, Athens, Malta, and even Ravenna—I feel it. I can stand where Christian believers have worshipped for 2,000 years. It’s humbling. And I’m very grateful.

I just finished an intriguing book, The Image by Steven Faulkner for my current MFA class (highly recommend!). One of the characters in the book mentioned the Ravenna mosaics, and I thought, dang, am I privileged to have been able to see those very images with my own eyes!

In July 2024, my husband and I traveled to Ravenna, Italy, to see the 5th to 8th-century mosaics. My husband knew of the place from teaching church history. Here’s an interesting link about them.

Getting to Ravenna was, let’s say, a trek. We left our Florence hotel, took a taxi to the train station, and waited and waited and waited for a train. Train strikes are somewhat common in Italy, but they are planned—a very polite way of striking. Even though they are planned, we had no idea it was happening. So this was how we spent most of the day—on the floor, waiting.

We, being entitled Americans, were not excited about having no chairs to sit in and having to pay for the bathroom. But everyone was in the same boat.

Finally, one of the trains to Bologna (our connecting city) was running, so we jumped on board. Once there, however, the regional trains going to Ravenna were canceled for the rest of the day. So, we made the tear-inducing decision to take a taxi for $300 to go about 80 miles. Alas, so it goes when adventuring on your own.

But was it worth the out-of-the-way detour? Heck, yeah!

This is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. It is a 5th-century Roman building with a plain, unexciting exterior. But look at the mosaics:

On my travels to Europe and Turkey, my most treasured gift is a broadened perspective. Now, I not only better appreciate how global the Christian church is, but how old it is. How Christians in Ravenna, even 1600 years ago, were finding beautiful ways to honor and celebrate our risen Lord and Savior.

Simply stunning.

Apparently, Frank Sinatra visited the site and wrote the song “Night and Day” afterward, inspired by the dark blues and starry sky of the mosaics.

There are actually 5 major monuments in Ravenna, all with incredible mosaics, but I’ll share more another time. For now, here’s a teaser of the most beautiful of them all — the Basilica of San Vitale. I took this picture because the third from the top is Jacobus. I always find the images of Jacob, also my son’s name, whenever I see them.

I’ll give you one more teaser. The series of the Ancient Christian Commentary has the main apse mosaic on its cover (which is an excellent resource!).

The lines below are especially moving when I consider annunciations I may have missed in my life. Those grand moments of divine calling that I ignored.

But then I remember that, like Mary, I can treasure the little Christ in my unworthy heart who makes His dwelling there. And that is an annunciation too.

https://www.stjames-cathedral.org/PoemoftheWeek/levertov-annunciation.aspx

We drove a little out of town to a long, straight, lonely highway where the speed limit is 55. That is the perfect speed for the road to sound in tune. It took all of 15 seconds or so, but what a hilarious 15 seconds! The vibrations sounded through the car while we held our breath and then fell into giggles afterward. We liked it so much, we turned around and did it again. That time, I wasn’t quite up to 55 mph when we started, so it sounded a bit wonky, but it was still just as hilarious.

It was originally created for a Honda commercial in 2008. Later, they moved the location because, apparently, people were getting a little wild on the road in the residential part of town. From the videos, you can hear what it’s like.

From Atlas Obscura’s website: The music sounds out of tune because construction workers did not follow the designer’s instructions. A newer, better-sounding musical road is located nearby in Palmdale on R Lee Ermey Avenue east of the 14 freeway.

I wish I’d known about the better-sounding road, but alas, we headed back into LA traffic after that.

Other “musical” or “singing” roads are located in Japan, South Korea, and Holland. There is also https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/musical-highway (on Route 66/US-40) that plays “America the Beautiful.”

I love it when people do random artistic stuff in the name of art!

Ever since starting an MFA at the University of St. Thomas, I’ve been thinking more about my place in life, my age, and my career path, which has been anything but a straight line.

My dad had a middle-management position at Mountain Bell when it was still the telephone provider for landlines across the U.S. My mom worked a couple of part-time jobs, but it was mostly my dad’s income that supported the family. He worked at “Ma Bell” for 25 or 30 years, and that was the end of his career.

Since the 1950s-1980s when my dad worked, the job market and culture have changed. Instead of my dad’s “company man” job, we shift around now. We job hop. We make lateral moves. We work gigs and side jobs. And, of course, this is also related to whether families can survive on one income.

Publishing has changed somewhat as well. For example, Beatrix Potter had most of her Peter Rabbit books published by a single company, who would have been known as a “house author.” Dr. Seuss also fit this category after the success of The Cat in the Hat (Random House). Margaret Wise Brown, the famous author of Goodnight, Moon, worked with Harper & Brothers on some books but with Simon & Schuster on others (here’s an excellent biography about her by the way).

So, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule that writers in the past could find a single editor and stick with that person for the rest of their writing lives. But now it feels much more complicated: even children’s writers require an agent and shop manuscripts around to multiple houses to get a sale.

The Gen X part of me longs to go back to that one-job career because it would be so simple. A friend and colleague of mine has taught at our university for almost 30 years. I imagine her navigating the same sidewalks, going in and out of the same buildings, seeing the same trees grow…for 30 years. Part of me is a bit jealous because her path seems to have been so simple.

But another part of me embraces mid-course changes. Here I am in the mid-point of my life, and my writing journey is starting anew.

I love the opportunity to write children’s books. In fact, I’m going to a local third-grade class today to tell them about reading and being an author. That will be a joy.

Now I’m taking a slightly different turn. Instead of writing metrical verse for kids, I’m turning to other forms and types of poetry, mostly for adult readers. My hope is that by enrolling in my MFA program at the University of St. Thomas, I’ll be able to sharpen my skills and hone my poetry to enrich the latter part of my life.

Writing is about connecting with an audience; it’s also about exploring the interior life, finding words for wordless experiences, and hearing the click of a rhyme falling into place, like an errant puzzle piece finding its home.

This is, of course, why everyone should write, though many shy away from it. I hope, for those reading, that you may find some joy in putting words to paper today. You could write a list of three things:

• Three specific moments of beauty in nature

  • those wide-open daisies facing the sun along the path on my walk into work

• Three small things you loved today

  • my warm English breakfast tea this morning

• Three places where you feel at peace and ease

  • on the porch of my mom’s cabin in the Colorado mountains

Write a few sentences with no need to sound fancy. Enjoy your gift of literacy today. :)

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I had the privilege of traveling to Japan in both 2017 and 2018 with education students from my university where we served and worked in a Lutheran school. Our generous hosts took us on numerous outings to learn more about Japanese culture, and one such outing in 2017 was to visit a group of bonsai masters. This is their small greenhouse-type building with their bonsai, tools, and great camaraderie.

We had the opportunity to watch them snip and form their tiny trees. Here is an image showing the grooming process, before (on the left) and after (right). This particular plant already had tiny leaves, but the master kept trimming to make sure the plant would grow in a beautiful direction.

Their generosity even extended to us the opportunity to make a few snips ourselves. It was difficult to be guided by language since I spoke no Japanese, but I watched and tried to emulate their work.

During those two trips I tried my hand at some haiku poetry. The goal of a haiku is not the traditional 5-7-5 syllables in three lines. A haiku actually has two main elements: a season word and a comparison of two things. The comparison helps to bring more meaning to each by placing them together. Here are a couple of mine:

Great Horned Owl

through gathering darkness

catches a shadow

wide maple trunk

etched with deep veins

stately old man

Each one of these has a comparison (although the “shadow” of the first one is not as strong as the second), but both lack season words. Maybe this could be better:

Great Horned Owl

soars through wind-chilled darkness

catching a shadow

That gives a hint at it being fall or winter, but could probably use more work. And perhaps this one could become:

frosty maple trunk

etched with deep veins

grizzled old man

I like the revision of “stately” to “grizzled” here because, at least in my mind, the bark is even more textured if it’s grizzled. “Frosty” adds a season word, but again, something else might be better.

There are many aspects of Japanese culture I could talk more about, but I’ll just say one more thing. One time when my husband, son, and I visited some Japanese American friends, the wife put together an elaborate authentic Japanese meal. Thinking I was doing the polite thing by asking to help in the kitchen, I rushed in and offered my assistance. The woman told me to put seven different items—a cucumber slice, carrot slice, radish—on individual plates. So, I started arranging the items on each plate.

But soon, she let me know that I was doing it wrong. I had been haphazardly placing the items in no particular order. She then showed me exactly how I was supposed to arrange them, with the cucumber to the left of the carrot, the radish at the top of the plate, and so forth.

That is just one of many moments in my life when I have assumed I know what I’m doing in terms of communicating with people with backgrounds different from mine. I had my own values in mind, first of all that I should be allowed to help, and also that I could toss things on the plate with no thought. She had a precise vision of the plate. Her positioning of the items had a beauty and proportion in mind that my system clearly did not.

The joy of traveling is learning what I don’t know about other cultures and having a-ha moments like this that can lend me more cultural humility.

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I’ve realized over the years that it’s important to be selective about receiving critique on early drafts of my work. The writing process can be a long, arduous, and joyful journey. And this is different for each writer. So, this is really a piece about knowing your own process and protecting it.

I’m going to focus on two things--the when and the who.

Ways This Could Go Sideways: Getting Feedback Too Soon

Once I produce a workable draft, I get excited and want to show it to someone early in the process. At this point, my vanity steps in, and my thoughts go something like this:

This took me only [insert brief amount of time] to write, and it’s already brilliant. I bet [insert person] will see that too! I’m the new [insert genius author].

Clearly, I need to calm down at this point in the writing process. I need to noodle on it more. I need to (literally) sleep on it.

Sharing work too soon may squelch the initial spark for the piece. Sometimes ideas don’t pan out. I can keep reworking a project for years and still find it lacking. That’s okay. But if I get only so-so feedback too early in the process, trashing the piece is almost certainly going to happen.

Here’s an example (an extreme example, but still). A poem I’m working on has been in my mind for years. It’s based on a recurring dream about a house where I once lived. Here’s the actual timeline:

1. I lived in the house for seven years.

2. I moved away from the house 25 years ago.

3. I had the dream for at least 10 years.

4. I finally questioned why I kept returning to this house in my dreams. Six more months went by.

5. One day, while writing in my journal, I started asking myself questions about the dream/house. Three more months went by.

6. I went on Google Earth to look at the house. Photos of it appeared incrementally--in 2007, 2012, 2021. That took about two hours.

7. I finally put pen to paper and compiled some images. That was two months ago.

8. Now, after about 15-20 drafts, I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere with it, so the next step may be receiving feedback.

Obviously, this is a dramatic example since the whole process started in 1999. Will the poem ever see the light of day? Who knows.

But in general, letting someone into my writing process too soon can steal the joy, diminish the spark, or drain my interest in the piece altogether. In other words, timing is key!

Ways This Could Go Sideways: Asking the Wrong Person

This one is tricky. In my heart of hearts, I want every single person I know--plus even strangers!--to love my work. Again, vain much?

But the truth is that almost every work has a limited audience. My board book for babies could be fun for a parent to read, but they are not really the intended audience.

My work won’t connect with everyone, so sharing it with the wrong person can be an issue in receiving feedback.

My ideal writing partner must:

• Be honest but kind,

• Be well-versed in the same genre,

• Say enough so I don’t think they secretly believe it’s garbage, and

• Be a friend but not a best friend

That last one is tricky because I’ve realized I can’t share my early drafts with those closest to me, though they support me thoroughly. The reason is because I value their opinions higher than most everyone else, so if I sense something off in body language or tone of voice, I might get discouraged and dump the piece too soon. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be dumped eventually.

However, for me, at the early stages of writing, I find it’s important to protect the writing process so ideas can grow over time. What do you think? What have you found works for you when receiving feedback? Feel free to comment on the why, how, or what you’ve found true.

I recently started the MFA program in creative writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. I’m finding my first class to be enriching, stimulating, and a tremendous blessing. My professor, Joshua Hren, at Beatific Visions, is a teacher with the perfect balance of challenging while also affirming students’ work. He gets very excited when we raise our hands (exclaiming “good!” or “excellent!”) and has a great sense of humor. I’m also learning how little I know about philosophy! Anyway, more about the MFA later.

For the class, I am preparing a presentation on the poet Denise Levertov and ran across this quote from an old interview with her in Image:

I work with graduate students, mentoring them on their writing, editing dissertations, and supporting faculty. In the last two weeks, I’ve had four spontaneous conversations with faculty members who are concerned about their students' heavy reliance on AI in their work. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that AI technology is affecting everyone, on some level, across every sector of society.

Then I came across this quote from Levertov about poets preserving language. As a writing teacher, I sometimes see myself “holding the line” against shoddy writing. With the advent of LLMs, that vague, mediocre, generalized writing tone is threatening to take over as well. So, holding the line seems an appropriate metaphor. Or perhaps it might look more like the little Dutch boy holding his finger in the dike to prevent a flood. So, how does a writer hold the line or plug the leak (or whatever other metaphor you’d like ) to preserve language?

Of course, as a writing teacher, I’d better be able to share with students how to avoid comma splices or unnecessary quotation marks (this site always cracks me up).

But even more, writers are those who revel in language, luxuriating in its bounty, a bit like a Labrador retriever rolling in autumn leaves, a tumble of fur and delight, tongue lolling, paws everywhere. What a tremendous gift God has given us: the ability to share a bit of ourselves with others through this beautiful thing called language. Levertov goes on to say that

…language is going to be more and more under attack—people’s vocabulary is already shrinking—I mean, it may be increasing in jargon, but it is shrinking in real, very definitely negative ways. I’ve always acknowledged that, as a living thing, language continually changes, but I consider that there are healthy changes and unhealthy changes. And an unhealthy change is exemplified by the loss of any precision or nuance, as our grammar is getting so eroded.

Almost 30 years have passed since this interview, and today it feels as if, as a writer and writing teacher, I must continually defend the praiseworthy benefits of writing. E.M. Forster’s question has stayed with me all of my writing life:

In other words, an important reason for me to write is to know what I think. Only by writing can I fully explore my own thought patterns and conclusions. But it’s also to play and delight in the rich, abundant, lovely ways that words work together. And what a blessing that is!

Archer, Emily. “A Conversation with Denise Levertov,” Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, no. 18, 1998. https://imagejournal.org/article/a-conversation-with-denise-levertov/

Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the novel. Mariner Books.

…I’ve found that there is always some beauty left—in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again, and God, and then you regain your balance. ~Anne Frank

This week I’m celebrating all things Anne Frank. I finished her diary in preparation for what looks to be an amazing theater experience tonight. A senior from Concordia University Irvine is presenting a one-woman show, reading selections from Anne’s diary with musical interludes by the Concordia Sinfonietta.

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Anne’s diary has been on my to-read list my whole life. I knew it would be poignant simply because it recorded the experiences of a young Jewish woman hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam—and who would eventually be caught. What I didn’t expect was Anne’s perceptiveness and, really, the gift she gave to the world by chronicling the daily experiences of living in the “Secret Annex.”

In my limited conception of the story, I pictured her cramped in a closet by herself for a couple of weeks. I had no idea that she actually lived with seven other people—only three of which were family members—for two years.

The mental and emotional strain she reports emerges in family squabbles, outbursts, close calls, and extreme distress. She also shares joy at watching the spring arrive outside their window and even budding teenage love.

When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived!

Her insistence on finding beauty amid disappointment and loss puts my petty complaining to shame and reminds me yet again about the power of connection through literature.

This summer, my husband and I are visiting Amsterdam and plan to tour the Anne Frank “house” (which is actually an office building). She shared in her diary that she wanted her writing to live on, that she wanted to become a journalist one day. Of course, she could not imagine the impact of her words even 80 years later. About her writing she said:

I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!

As one of my opening posts on my Substack, I’d like to share what brought me to this point as a writer. It’s an unfinished story, of course, but here is a start.

What Worked

I still credit my first poem to one I wrote in fourth grade. My parents helped me burn the edges of the paper, glue it to a wood plaque, and shellac it. It hung in my parents’ basement for 45 years. That’s my first attempt at calligraphy too (I’m not much better now).

Fast forward a few years…after completing my BA and MA, both in English education, I attended a workshop on writing for children. During that workshop, I wrote a version of my first board book (for 0-2 year olds) called Things I See in Church (Concordia Publishing House, 1996). The goal was to help even the youngest readers, including my own baby, understand how Jesus comes to them in church.

The board book turned into a series: Colors I See in Church (about the church year), Things I Hear in Church, etc. I think there were about five in total. One of my friends said I should keep going with the series, including Things I Shouldn’t Do in Church (eat cheetos, burp, etc.).

I then started writing picture books for older readers and had several published. My bestsellers were Saint Nicholas: The Real Story of the Christmas Legend (Concordia Publishing House, 2003--and it’s still in print!), and Gobble-Gobble-Crash: A Barnyard Counting Bash (Dutton, 2008). The latter was picked up by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a wonderful program that sends free books to preschoolers across the U.S. They purchased 100,000 copies of that book, if you can imagine!

Another amazing project was working with my brilliant friend and illustrator, Carol Baicker-McKee. Carol and I met in a writing critique group in Pittsburgh (which, by the way, was formative in my early writing years). One day at the kitchen table, I wondered how minimal I could get the text and still create a story. We produced Cheep! Cheep!, a book of only about 8 words, all rhyming with “eep” (Bloomsbury, 2006). The narrative shows a family of chicks welcoming a new baby.

Carol created incredible 3D chicks, eggs, and decorative materials from paper and other materials. This likely would not have come to see the light of day had we not had the same agent (at the time) who could sell our work together. And what a rare and gracious gift my illustrator shared with me—an original spread from the book.

Another book was Seven Little Bunnies (Marshall Cavendish--now Amazon, 2012). It started out with 10 mice, but ended up with seven bunnies because a) the editor wanted it released in the spring (hence the rabbits), and b) stopping with seven worked better in a picture-book format with 28 pages. The fun thing about this book is that it has recently been republished by Amazon in Chinese.

To learn more about my books and work, please see my website.

Then, What Didn’t Work

It’s hard to try to rely on freelance writing as a full-time gig, so after that, I did more teaching. Also, my husband and I had moved to California (with a higher cost of living), so steadier full-time work was crucial.

But to be honest, by then the creative spark had fizzled. I had had such success with steady deals and books, and then, I couldn’t make much headway. So I taught and worked.

And then in 2018, my agent dropped me. That was a huge blow, though we came from very different worldviews, and the move, overall, didn’t surprise me. But he sensed that I wasn’t producing much, and what I did send him he highly critiqued and edited, which was frustrating.

Where I Am Today

For the last few years, I hid from my writing and avoided thinking about that essential part of my identity. When people asked what I was working on, it was hard to answer. I wrote children’s devotions and smaller pieces, but nothing that felt satisfying.

That’s not to say that being published defines me. I am first and foremost a loved child of the Father, saved by Jesus, and upheld in faith by the Holy Spirit. Still, writing had become so integral to my experience of the world that its absence left a real hole. I missed the joy of inspiration, the careful placement of words, the thrill of seeing a piece in print. Writing is meant for readers, and without that connection, I felt exposed and, honestly, a little lost.

Of course, my work always includes writing. Training manuals, emails, reports, and lots and lots of feedback on student work. But in my heart, I want to create something original, something meaningful, and something true.

Recently, I read a post by a writer who described her publishing success as evidence of God’s goodness. And God is good. But He’s also good when inspiration dries up, rejections pour in, time gets scarce, and discouragement sets in. We have to be careful not to measure God’s goodness and blessing by publishing success.

When I moved to California, I started teaching as an adjunct--literature, composition, writing for children, and English for language learners. Still, I felt like an artist who could no longer create.

Now I feel I’m easing out of that dry, sad period of non-writing, but I’m not there yet. Perhaps on the cusp. I’ve been writing poetry steadily for the last year or so, not primarily for children, but for an adult audience. I’m still protecting myself from rejection and feeling moments of imposter syndrome, but I’m beginning to see a way out.

The steady heartbeat of God’s love has companioned me through ups and downs, losses and gains, and joys and sorrows. I’m not sure where this new chapter in my life will take me, but I’m so grateful to feel the spark returning as I put pen to paper.

So now I’m experimenting with Substack

I’m new to this platform, and while I am figuring it out, I hope to post about 3-4 times a month. I’ll share things I’ve learned about the publishing journey, having an agent, not having an agent, things that inspire me, and things I’m learning as I go. I hope you’ll join me!