Well, this is exciting! A whole community of creative Christian writers and artists? I'm pleased to meet you all!

About me--well, fortunately I have a whole page devoted to that interesting subject on my blog...



I think that says most of it, except that I am Australian, and blog at http://www.vintagenovels.com, where I seek to subject all my reading to the acid test of God's Word.

It also lets you know why I'm here, which is that I'm currently working on what I devoutly HOPE will be the final draft of a novel I've been working on for over eight years (my motto is Don't Rush It). I don't like to give too much away at this point, except that my current beta reader loves it to distraction, which is a good sign.

Between finishing the novel, blogging, cooking, teaching my little sister Latin, reading, trying to get my next article to the next magazine, formatting my next ebook release, and researching self-publishing, I'm looking forward to getting the chance to pop by and chat.

Soli Deo Gloria!
Suzannah Rowntree

Another Aussie!!! Welcome! who are your favorite authors?

Thanks! I have 6 favourite authors:

JRR Tolkien - for obvious reasons!
CS Lewis - also needs no explanation
John Buchan - Christian gentleman extraordinaire, who more or less invented the modern spy novel back during World War I
GK Chesterton - 'the Apostle of Common Sense', novelist, fantasist, apologist, journalist, poet, and Christian
PG Wodehouse - the greatest humourist in the English language
and
Edmund Spenser - Puritan allegorist, author of The Faerie Queene, a HUGE influence on CS Lewis (you could argue that Narnia is an updated FQ for children) an an AWESOME poet.

I also enjoy ND Wilson, Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen, Charles Williams, Christina Rossetti, St Augustine, Mary Stewart, Rider Haggard, and a bunch of others.

Welcome and g'day!! I've not had the chance to do more than bookmark your blog for future reading but the description sounds awesome. My own blog is exclusively non-fiction and my younger sister is studying latin for the sheer fun of it. Sadly she is not on the forum but Kiev Shawn is and Bushmaid is Australian.

Welcome to Holy Worlds, Suzannah! What's the synopsis for your novel? Do any theological subjects especially fascinate you?


I'm very interested in reading some of his books. Which are your favorites?

Legatus Christo, nice to meet someone from the UK! Hope you enjoy my blog, I hope it lives up to your first impressions. I read a lot of English lit all the way back to Beowulf and Dream of the Rood, and it's one of my dreams to afford Douglas Wilson's course on Anglo-Saxon one day.

Jonathan, I can't recommend John Buchan enough!!! I have many reviews of his novels on my blog under the John Buchan tag . If you're only going to read one John Buchan book to find out what he's passionate about, I would recommend Huntingtower. One of the awesome things about that book is that it's a very similar flavour to The Hobbit. However, if you are interested in reading several Buchan books, my all-time favourites are the Richard Hannay novels:

The Thirty-Nine Steps
Greenmantle
Mr Standfast
The Three Hostages
Island of Sheep

They are spy novels set during and after WWI. Absolutely fantastic adventure stories (the second and third are the best). Reading them is like giving your soul a bath; they are so clean, invigorating, and understatedly Christian with a major theme of Providence.

(This. This is why I am a book blogger.)

The synopsis of my novel...actually, I am really only just at the point where I am letting people outside my immediate family and beta readers know that I *am* writing one, let alone what it's about! OK, well...



Wow. That was really hard to write...

In theology, I love to meditate on the kingship of Christ over all of life, the City of God, the cultural/dominion mandate, the meaning and application of the law of God, and the doctrines of grace. Naturally I am also very keen on what Scripture has to say about beauty, art, culture, and storytelling.

Hey, I'm curious--did any of the Aussies here attend the Building a God-Centered Family conferences last June? I helped organise the Melbourne conference and moderated the ladies' panel.

Welcome, Suzannah! Yay, you love history, literature, and languages too! So glad to meet you!

Are there any particular languages you know or are interested in learning someday?

What's your favorite period in history?

Welcome to Holy Worlds, Suzannah!

Ooh, someone else who likes PG Wodehouse! I love his writing. Have you ever read any Saki? He writes more satirical humour, but I really enjoy his style as well.

Okay, thanks. I saw The Thirty-Nine Steps movie, and that's what got me interested in him. I'm sure I'll enjoy browsing your reviews of his novels and others.



Yes, synopses are often a challenge to write, but you did well. When did you decide to be a writer?



All those subjects are important to me, too. Lately I've been especially focusing on studying the Biblical guidelines for art and storytelling to help me as I create and choose entertainment. The guidelines will also allow me to better address the rampant abuses of art and storytelling in our time, including the problems that are creeping into Christian fiction. Have you read any good Christian books about art and storytelling?

Idril, nice to meet you! I've been studying Latin at a leisurely pace for nearly half my life, and it's surprising how much you don't learn in that time. I'd love to learn Anglo-Saxon, because the Anglo-Saxons and their language are both awesome ("When Alfred could no longer hold off the enemy battle line, [...] he finally commanded the Christian troops to advance against the enemy army, acting manfully, like a wild boar").

Goodness, I have a lot of favourite periods in history. I'm a huge fan of everything from about 1 AD to 1660 A, with particular attention to the Reformation and the early medieval period--commonly (and erroneously) known as the "Dark Ages".



Lady Elanor, I did read one Saki short story once, and it was about--I've spoiler-tagged it in case you don't want to be scarred for life--a hyena eating a child. So, er, I never looked for any more of his stuff. Still, I might be persuaded...?

Jonathan, you saw the 39 Steps movie? Which one? If it's the latest BBC production, I haven't seen it, but fans of the book weren't impressed. If it was the Alfred Hitchcock classic, that's a fun movie but doesn't resemble the book all that much either! The movie was released a few years before Buchan died, and he and his wife went to see it. She got all indignant about the changes they made, but Buchan was cool with it, which was very typical of him. Still, it wound up not being quite the manly Christian tale of daring that I love. But it's a good movie, and it's a crying shame Hitchcock never got his chance to make Greenmantle--he wanted to.



After I finished the first draft of my first book as a young teen and realised that I was addicted to storytelling. And there are days I wish I wasn't...I find non-fiction much easier to turn out. But fiction is my first love.



YES. I can highly recommend ND Wilson's Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl. JRR Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories" and his poem "Mythopoeia" are both essential.

On art generally, my favourite book is a rather obscure little gem by Francis Nigel Lee, The Central Significance of Culture, which you can get off The Book Depository (free shipping anywhere in the world).

Sir Philip Sidney's essay "The Defence of Poesy" (which I summarised and critiqued here) is another excellent, classic text on Christian storytelling.

I'm not thinking of any others off the top of my head. Generally I just like to read great Christian fiction (Spenser, Bunyan, Austen, Lewis...) and learn what I can from their example. I've also read the occasional writer's book (James Scott Bell is good) and right now I'm reading through Clayton Hamilton's 1914 Manual of the Art of Fiction, but I usually disagree with a bunch of the stuff said in such books. I'm opinionated...

Welcome, Suzannah!

Welcome to Holy Worlds!

You've mentioned a lot of the authors I consider "mandatory reading" (I'm maintaining a list on my own blog, with occasional posts explaining why I think the next book really belongs on the list), including Charles Williams, Spenser, and Lewis.

And I'm delighted to see a mention of Latin. (Ave salveque!)

The summary of your novel-in-progress sounds fascinating. After discoering Charles Williams' Taliessin Through Llogres and The Region of the Summer Stars, I started my own cycle of "Arthurian poetry," with my own little literary conceit about major characters and time travel .


Those are all also topics I'm interested in ... though most are ones I first came across long after my planned fantasy series began to take shape, so I'm sort of scrambling to catch up.


No. Just ... no. The Faerie Queene is explicitly allegory; Narnia is very clearly not. I highly recommend Lewis's The Allegory of Love for its clear explanation of what allegory is and is not in the opening chapter; you will probably also be interested in its commentaries on major allegories, culminating in his thoughts on the Fairie Queene.

(Sorry; misconceptions about allegory are something of a pet peeve of mine.)

Anyway, welcome to Holy Worlds!

Welcome to HW, Suzannah! Huzzah, you be another Aussie! Glad to meet a fellow countryman - or make that, countrywoman.

I saw the Alfred Hitchcock version. You're making me even more curious about the book.



Do you have a favorite genre to write in?



Thank you for all the suggestions.

Hello again all . And thank you for the warm welcomes.

King Jon, oohh, it's so nice to meet someone who still knows about Spenser and Williams...especially Spenser; I'm trying to get everyone I know to read him.

I have Charles Williams's Logres poetry, thanks to a generous friend--but so far I've only read his Figure of Arthur and a few of the poems. They are brilliant, I go back and read one every now and then, but I want to sit down and read them properly one of these days, along with Lewis's commentary. In the meantime, reading his fiction is giving me a better and better idea of what his poems mean. Meanwhile, I was delighted to see him confirm my suspicion of how central the Grail legend is to the Matter of Britain--something reinforced by CS Lewis's essay on Le Morte D'Arthur.

And I must insist that there are a number of very interesting similarities between the Faerie Queene and Narnia. Of course they aren't both allegories--Peter doesn't represent anything in the same way that Arthegall or Redcrosse do, for example. And I don't want to push this too far...there are lots of ways in which they are nothing alike. But at the same time,

- they are set in the Forest--you know the one;
- they have many of the same inhabitants (animals, people, fauns/satyrs, centaurs, other Greek deities);
- and if you believe Michael Ward in Planet Narnia, both devote a book each to a different virtue/planetary influence.

For what that's worth .



That I be! I think I've seen your name around here and there actually, maybe at the All Authority blog? Anyway, 'tis lovely to meet you. What area are you from, if it's not too nosy? I'm from rural Victoria. Also, I am a fan of Mary Grant Bruce as well .



Oh, boy, I don't know. I've written fantasy, science fiction (a really bad idea, although it was really much more slanted toward planetary romance. Which possibly I could pull off). And historical fiction, and action/suspense. And these days I feel more inclined to write contemporary domestic fiction as well. I guess I'm still figuring out what my particular strangths are.

I found the poems much more penetrable than most of his novels (some of which take a few readings to, at some points, figure out even what's going on ...), but I know that others whose opinions I generally respect have found his poetry far more difficult going.


Indeed.


"Many similarities" I'll quite readily grant. But you said "an updated FQ for children," and the one essential thing about the FQ is that it's an allegory, while the one point it seems I have to belabor (e.g. in my post on the Holy Worlds blog last year) is that Narnia is not. At least I don't have to explain myself on that point again here.

By the way, my final project for the British Literature course in which I was first exposed to both the Fairie Queene and to Sidney was an attempt to cast the ideas in the Apology for Poetry into Spenserian allegory.




But I'm not sure Williams is entirely right in "the general case."


Spenser's explicit plan was to devote a book to each of the "public" and "private" virtues ... and while the medieval system made correspondences between those and the planets, I doubt Spenser had that in view.

While I haven't read Ward's book, I went to a lecture by him on it (about six or so years ago now), and found him generally unconvincing as to any correlation between the planets and the Narnia books being intentionally written or designed that way by Lewis. (When the two problems with this theory that leaped immediately to my mind, that it doesn't fit Lewis's own account of the genesis of Narnia and that if it were true it would be the only secret of this kind that Lewis ever kept, were brought up in the question period after the lecture, I remember them being brushed off rather than seriously considered.)

My favorite genre to write is thriller (or action/suspense), with fantasy and horror tied in second. I also enjoy historical and science fiction. Do you prefer to write for a particular age group, or does it vary?

Latin and Anglo-Saxon sound very epic! How do you study? Do you have books or do you do it online?

Cool! What do you like best about those time periods?

Welcome to Holy Worlds, Suzannah!

Welcome to Holy Worlds Miss Suzannah Rowntree! It is encouraging to see new people!

Welcome, welcome! Nice to meet you! It seems like you have good insights on various topics -I look forward to seeing your posts around the forums.

Welcome to HW, Suzannah!

Welcome to Holy Worlds! It's lovely to have another Aussie join! (Sadly, I am not Aussie, but I was Down Under last year for a visit). I hope you've been able to find fellowship and helpful resources so far. ^^

~Calen