WORDS CREATE WORLDS
The first world I entered through a book with all my imagination was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. I was in the third grade. Miss Dougherty was my teacher, and she had the delightful custom of reading to class after lunch when we, her students, were probably too worn out from our meal and recess to do much learning.
“Tom!”
No answer.
“Tom!”
No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”
No answer.
I was hooked. From that day on, I looked forward not to recess, but to Miss Dougherty’s reading about Tom and Becky and Huck and Jim and all their, well, adventures. Before she had even finished reading the book, I had obtained my own copy and was reading along side her. Since third grade, I have re-read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at least a half-dozen times.
Words create worlds, and for this eight year old boy, the world created by Mark Twain was a genuine land of wonder.
As an adult, I have been transported by hundreds of other authors into worlds of their creation. Austen, Asimov, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Lionel Shriver, Percival Everett, and on and on. You get the idea, and you have your own list of favorites. [Sidebar: I hope you make a record of the books you read with notes to yourself of what you thought and how you were changed. I started out using 3x5 cards, storing them in a little box (that tells you how old I am!), but have since moved to both a spreadsheet and the Goodreads app.]
My adult work life involved a lot of writing. Reports. Presentations. Sermons. Letters. Emails. People said I wrote well, and while I appreciated these compliments, to me, they rang hollow. Why? Because all of these reports, presentations, etc. were for other people. They were required. They were transactional. They weren’t by me, for me.
That changed about fifteen years ago when I took a class in creative writing from a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Jamie Fueglein balanced the coursework nicely with a combination of reading “good stuff” (by Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, George Saunders, and others) and having us write from prompts. I was amazed at what came out of my pen, indeed what came out of the pens of the eight of us students at the prompt: “On the morning that. . .”
I am a retired local church pastor. Some folks — mostly folks who don’t attend church — think that sermons are filled with Moses-like “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots.” That’s not my thing. My tradition and my preference is to preach about a world different from the one in which we live, a world Jesus talked about. “The realm of God is like. . .” One Sunday when I was readying a sermon about a difficult situation that needed the congregation’s attention, I got to thinking, I wish there was another congregation dealing with this issue. I could share their experiences with my people, and maybe the fact that others had addressed and resolved an issue would give hope that our church could do the same.
That thinking led me to create a fictional world of Herb Weiss, his wife Emma, and their church in Osceola, Iowa. Over the course of fifteen years, I would periodically “receive a letter” from Herb or Emma or Pastor Bob. You know that issue we’re dealing with here, I asked my congregation? Well, I have a friend in Osceola, Iowa, and their church is dealing with the same difficulty. Let me share a letter I just received from. . . I would do that once or twice a year, and with time, crafted about twenty such “letters.”
At the time of my retirement, people approached me to collect these letters and publish them in a book. It took several years because I wanted to convert the letters from sermons to short story form. The end result was Hawks Nest Chronicles — Good News from Osceola, Iowa [link] published in 2020 by Faithfullpress and available in print and Kindle editions from Amazon.
Sometimes when things are difficult in one’s own world, one needs a vision of what would be possible in a different world. Sometimes one wonders what it would be like to live in another time, past or present. Sometimes one wonders what it would be like to live in outer space or in another country or culture. Sometimes one wonders about falling into or out of love. Sometimes one wonders what it would be like to. . . That’s where words create worlds.
To date, I have crafted two worlds that you are welcome to enter: Osceola, Iowa and Apple Glen, Ohio. Please, come in. Choose a character with whom you identify. Or sit on the sidelines and just enjoy watching all that goes on.
Maybe you’ll be entertained. Maybe you’ll be disheartened. Maybe you’ll take away a lesson or two. Maybe you’ll laugh or cry or wonder ‘what if?’
If you’re a reader, do you have certain worlds that you enjoy immersing yourself into? Or do you prefer to explore and go “where no [wo]man has gone before?” Why don’t you drop me a line a let me know.
Then again, maybe you have your own world that you want to write into being. One that explores the inner spaces of the human heart and mind, or one that goes beyond the reaches of our galaxy.
Whichever you are and whichever you do, you’ll join a tradition thousands of years old of imagining what it would be like if only. . .
