The White Wolf Is Published

I am delighted to announce that I have just self-published my second book, The White Wolf. This novella is a retelling of a fairytale with the same name; it’s been a lot of fun over the last several months to dig into the fairytale, trying to figure out characters’ motivations, twisting and tweaking to make a unified, sensible story.

As I did with Genevieve of Alea, I’ve self-published The White Wolf through Amazon. On there, you can buy it for Kindle or in print. But if you want the book autographed—I’m getting some author copies of it, and you can order them on Etsy. As soon as they arrive, I’ll inscribe, sign, and ship them!

Here’s the blurb:

Her sisters want pearls and fine clothing, yet all Princess Brianna asks the King to bring her is a wreath of wildflowers. That way, he’ll remember not to stay away too long on his travels. But it’s late October before her father returns, and the only wildflowers he can find are those on the head of a human-voiced white wolf. One bargain later, the King has accidentally sold his youngest daughter to the wolf—and for Brianna, the adventure begins.

You can read the first chapter here. And as for the rest…

I think you or your daughter, granddaughter, or friend might enjoy The White Wolf, and I hope you’ll check it out. If you do get it, I’d appreciate a review or a word on social media—it really helps. Thanks for your attention!

Ten Things: College, Etsy, Boethius, and More

1. I’m sorry that I’ve been off here for so long!

2. The wildflowers are in bloom:

3. I’m going to college! If you haven’t heard already, I am delighted to inform you that this July I’ll be heading back to Wyoming Catholic College for the three-week backpacking trip all freshmen start their college career with there. WCC offers one degree in the liberal arts… far from being a useless study, this is the most useful study of all, for it is the study of how to be a human being. We’ll read and discuss the great books, keep learning and pushing our strengths and limitations in the outdoors, enjoy the community of two hundred like-minded young people, and do it all in an intensely, authentically Catholic environment. I can’t wait.

4. As a prerequisite to the above, I’m graduating from high school in two weeks. This one is scary.

5. I’ve just put a couple of illustrated quotes up on Etsy. I really enjoyed making and photographing these, so I hope you’ll take a look, and I’d appreciate it if you’d pass the word along to anyone you think might be interested by them. Pictured is a print of a quote from Charlotte Mason—the original was Mom’s Christmas present.

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Notre Dame

Thanks be to God: it was not all lost. But yes. Notre Dame burned yesterday; it was with a voice near tears that Mom told it to us over breakfast. After that, with the queer, helpless, sick feeling that one has about a tragedy one feels deeply but cannot do anything about, a tragedy furthermore which is developing, and which one can learn about the progress of, but cannot predict or affect, we read and looked and followed the news and tried to comprehend it. Before lunch, I think, the spire and roof fell. In the afternoon, we were warned that the cathedral might not be saved at all. One of the two great rectangular towers had caught fire. After dinner, we read with relief that the cathedral was saved. The fire is out now.

Yet it still does not seem real. It seems out of place, out of proportion. Notre Dame has seen so much, has been through so much. It seemed thirty-six hours ago as if Notre Dame had been around for ever so long, and would be around for ever so long: one, five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years from now, we or our children could simply go and see it. It would be there. But yesterday—yesterday we faced the very real possibility that it might not be there. That this beautiful work of man’s subcreation, raised to the glory and the worship of God, might no longer be more than a heap of blackened rubbish. It was a strange and horrifying thought, a reminder of our mortality and the mortality of all earthly things.

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Skiing and Freedom Only When Bound


Photo credit: Grandma Dianne

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

Today at least, these lines of Donne’s are profoundly countercultural. Our idea of freedom is to be ourselves; and quite rightly. But our idea of being ourselves is to eat, drink, play, live, and love however we want, no matter what anyone else or any of their rules tell us to do. We are to follow our hearts, which, too often, turns out to mean whatever impulse we are under at the moment. We are, in short, free to enslave ourselves however we want. But while wrong freedom means bondage, the right bondage means freedom.

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Fireworks Proclamation: Genevieve of Alea is Published!

Dear friends and family:

Maybe, in the last two and a half years, you’ve asked me “What are you working on?” or “What do you like to do?”

If you have, I’ve probably said something like “Well, I’m trying to write a book…” after which which I would try to explain what it was about with varying levels of detail, clarity, and awkwardness.

But now, I get to tell you: it’s done!  After two and a half years, four grades, two drafts, something over 150,000 words,  and much writing growth, it’s done.  (About the 150,000—don’t worry, the final book is under 67,000 words)

It’s done, and it’s published—I chose to self-publish through Amazon, so now you can get Genevieve of Alea either for Kindle or in paperback.

Here’s the official blurb:

She would rather read than sew, ride a horse than look in a mirror, and quote old poetry than new gossip.  Jenny is a princess who loves the idea of adventure—and adventure, it seems, just might be the present she gets for her seventeenth birthday.

Forty ells of black scales
Cut men off from telling tales.
Wings of iron, claws of steel,
Make wounds none can heal.
Eyes of fire full of ire,
A snake’s tongue with poison hung,
A heart of hate that governs fate,
Spines of horn, laugh of scorn,
Fire breath and iron teeth,
The dragon will be brought by Death.

Jenny has always longed for adventure—but can she handle as much adventure as the mysterious message will bring her?

Thank you all so much for all your love and encouragement throughout this long adventure!  Whether you’ve given me a few encouraging words or read one of the story’s iterations, all of your kindness has really helped me reach this point.

Arius, Smoke, and The Cave

On Thursday morning, there was a great deal of smoke in the air—so much smoke that when the sun rose, we could look at it. Not just when the sun’s edge was a golden gem on the horizon, glittering through the trees: when it was half an hour up, we could still look at it, like a dull red light in the grey sky. It was small, strangely and almost frighteningly small, when it was revealed to be only the apparent size of the moon.

But it reminded me of the physiological impossibility Plato describes in the Allegory of the Cave. In this allegory, Plato tells of a people trapped inside a cave, able to see only shadows on the cave’s wall. One of these prisoners is freed, and forced to turn so that he can see the fire and puppets which were making the shadows. At first, though, he is dazzled by the fire, and does not believe that the puppets are half so real as the shadows he has known all his life. Yet despite his resistance, he is brought up out of the cave and into the daylight. Gradually, he is able to see the things of the upper world; shadows first, later things in moonlight, and at last the sunlit world. Then, says Plato,

Last of all, he would be able to look at the Sun and contemplate its nature, not as it appears when reflected in water or any alien medium, but as it is itself in its own domain.

Plato, The Republic, Book VII, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford
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Anniversary of an Amusingly Traumatic Incident

An excerpt from the journal of Emma Vanderpol on September 29th, 2017.

So. I splashed beef stock on my keyboard today. It has mostly revived, so matters could be worse, but the experience was a somewhat traumatic one for both me and the keyboard.

To set up the story, Mom is not currently here, being gone with Charlotte for a CM conference in Seattle; and Friday is the evening for Theology of the Body. I mean, for the Theology of the Body Class. Anyways, most of the time one parent takes me and the other stays behind, so everything is fine. But now, this leaves no one at home old enough to watch the younger kids successfully. The answer, of course, is fairly obvious: Grandma and Grandpa helpfully came down for dinner so they could watch the kids afterward and Dad could take me to class.

That’s great. A good opportunity for Hannah and Justin to get extra books read to them, a good opportunity for me to show off my cooking skills. But I guess I was feeling a little extra-stressed or wanted to look extra good, because for some reason I decided that I should pull stock out of the freezer and thaw it to use in the pilaf Mom had scheduled along with salmon patties and roasted broccoli and cauliflower.

So far, so good.

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In Which I Visit a Farm and Feel Superfluous

‘Do you ever visit a farm,’ I asked Mom, ‘and get the feeling that you know how to do nothing of any use whatsoever?’

‘I was just thinking about that,’ she said. ‘I’ve read Wendell Berry, and that counts for—exactly nothing.’

We were in the car on Lazy Valley Ranch, in between the barn where you got registered and directed and the u-pick blueberry patch. I don’t know what parts of the surroundings went together, but it was the overall effect that was important to us. The blue-and-white buildings looked practical and aged. A large open shed overflowed with rusty pieces of what, perhaps not having eyes to see with at a brief glance, I can only call junk. More-or-less dry fields held horses, cows, a donkey, and an emu. Another field had several large pieces of equipment in it and hay bales scattered through it. The vehicles looked long and well used. And we felt like unnecessary and inferior city mice.

I’m reading Hannah Coulter right now, Mom just reread it and is reading some of Wendell Berry’s essays, and we’ve both recently read an interview with Berry in the CiRCE Institute’s FORMA magazine. Part of the message we’re getting is about the value and usefulness of small farms, and—in some ways—the unnecessariness or less-wholeness of sophisticated modern ways of life. Going to Lazy Valley Ranch, this farm which looked like something out of Wendell Berry, brought our reading and considering into a new proximity. I at least felt ashamed of being in the Tahoe there among those rusty vehicles, as if it were a faux pas of some sort (though Mom pointed out that that’s rather funny, as many Americans would look distinctly down at our chunky 2005 eight-seater).

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A Saturday Evening Flood

Now all we need are Fire and Earthquake: yesterday evening the washer leaked all through the mudroom and out into the entry and around to the game table, making for Flood, and we have already had Plague: perhaps we can get a complete collection this month. “The May of the Cataclysms.” Mom says she hopes not. Well, still, “sluttishness may come hereafter…”

However that may be, we got to have an adventure this evening—our drawing lesson was adjourned, without formality, by wordless mutual consent, when Hannah pointed out the puddle creeping around the corner. Then we got to spend a while cleaning it up: moving a table and a cabinet, setting things out to dry, laying towels down so we could traverse the flooded rooms, and getting over half a gallon of water off the mudroom floor by sponge and wetted-and-wrung-out towel.‘If I were Pollyanna,’ I said, ‘I’d say that at least the floor was getting well cleaned.’ ‘I was thinking about the same thing,’ Mom said, though she didn’t detail if that included Pollyanna. A good deal of gunk got cleaned out of corners, and the whole mudroom floor got meticulously hand-sponged; none o’ yer in-and-out speed-mopping jobs. The water in the tubs which we wrung sponges and towels into was of the color that water used to become when my siblings and I were in outdoor play-kitchens and wanted to make hot chocolate—though I’ll guess that we tried to keep bits of twig and bark out of our beverages.

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Sunset State Beach, 5/7/18

From our campsite to the sea there are two dunes. The first is high, dirt mixed into its sand, covered in brush and wildflowers: yellow and blue and white lupins, orange-hearted, yellow-edged California poppies, ice-plant like pink sea anemones, blue on a bush reminiscent of rosemary, majestic deep-red thistles, light purple on a low, spreading plant growing at the dune’s seaward base. The second dune, much smaller and gentler, is all of sand, fewer plants growing there, but the lavender-flowered plant is happy. So is one with succulent-like leaves and blooms like small, flat, yellow poppies. They hug the sand closely, but are cheerily bright.

As we come up to the top of each dune, all we can see over its edge is sky and clouds and layered, cris-crossing contrails. It is like walking up to the edge of the world. Then we come up over the sandy crest, and see another blue, a darker one, in the trail’s sand-floored hollow between the bush-topped hillocks covering the dune. A few steps higher, and the edge between the sand and the blue is seamed with white. A little higher still, and there is a broad band of brown between the sea and us. The sea: we can see the real edge of the world now, inasmuch as it has an edge.

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