A-Tumblin’ Down:
A Novel
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The year is 1988, and the Abney family is settled in at Mt. Moriah Lutheran Church in rural Shibboleth, New York.
Their life is not without its challenges. Pastor Donald is haunted by the probing, judging memory of his revivalist grandfather. His wife Carmichael struggles to feel at home, a task not made any easier by her parents’ inconvenient revelation of family secrets.
Eleven-year-old Kitty is equally averse to growing up and to insufferable classmate Megan. At least little Saul and Asher, born within a year of each other, are content as they explore the meadow on the steep hillside surrounding church and parsonage.
Then tragedy strikes, shattering family and faith. A faction in the congregation exploits the disaster, threatening to rob the Abneys of what little is left of their impoverished life.
A-Tumblin’ Down topples headlong into grief and explores the strong grace needed to survive. Yet the story is not only sad and serious; it’s also funny, joyful, and enchanted. Even a tragic world abounds in wonders beyond belief, as the Abney family comes to see by the novel’s triumphant and satisfying, but not simplistic, ending.
Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction
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Big Rosa rescues unhappy women of the Wild West to work in a helium mine; Georgie Appleseed rescues his failing diner with the help of neon. A silicon son tries to make his gold dad proud, while a scientist tries to make a new St. Francis from calcium bone fragments. Obadiah Toad gives away all his peace with a nickel, but Mamá finally gives away her heart on account of arsenic. These twenty stories explore twenty-two of the elemental forces that underpin all of life…
Pearly Gates: Parables from the Final Threshold
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Inspired by the line of jokes that begin, “St. Peter was standing at the pearly gates of heaven,” but put in a radical new light from discovering the source of the pearly gates imagery in Revelation 21 (spoiler alert: there are twelve gates, for each of the twelve apostles, and they stand open always!), these little stories intend to depict grace and judgment beyond both hellfire and harps.
A man arrives at the gates of heaven holding a faith that’s not his own; another clutches a suitcase he’s unwilling to give up. One woman demands to be sent back, while another asks for a new name. Hands empty or full, hearts joyful or disappointed or appalled, these people and others approach the twelve open gates of heaven, only to discover the truth about their loves…