I grew up in a small farming and ranching community in the Texas Panhandle. As a young man, I was fascinated by cities and felt confident that I would end up living in one. During the tumult of the Sixties, I lived in cities and found them incomprehensible. They activated a warning light deep inside my mind. I had no compass there, no clear sense of direction. The missing ingredient, I think, was a network of family and social relationships that were grounded in a Christian worldview. That structure still existed in many small communities, a fossil remnant of what author H.R. Rookmaaker called “the consensus of biblical attitudes” that shaped Western art before the Enlightenment. In small towns, it had survived the implosion of art and the worst effects of postmodern entertainment culture

I had my fling with city life, moved back home and began burrowing into my small-town roots. I was also practicing the craft of writing. The people in my community not only became the subjects of my stories but also my customers. This was a radical departure from the conventional template I had encountered in college: angry writer leaves home, goes to a city and writes hateful books about his hometown.

One of the defining characteristics of modern and postmodern art is its sense of estrangement and alienation—belonging nowhere and to no one. Artists who are not rooted in a place risk becoming disembodied spirits, those whose words and images are jagged, out of focus, asymmetrical, dissonant and, ultimately, toxic to the human spirit. We might say that bad art tends to come from bad places, which means that sometimes bad art can be remedied if the artist changes his habits or location. If a city seems incomprehensible, leave the city.

I am not naïve enough to argue that moving to a small town will solve every problem for every writer, but I would suggest that urban centers, which were so hospitable to artists and writers in the past, might have reached a point of diminishing returns. In our time, noise and complexity sometimes make cities inhospitable to the creation of crafted products that nourish the spirit. We must bear in mind that no generation in human history has ever tried to cope with the kind of sensory deluge that occurs every day in metropolitan centers. This includes traffic, crime, high population density, instant communications, as well as advertising images and noise that never ceases. When laboratory rats are exposed to such conditions, they become neurotic and even resort to cannibalism. So far, Americans have resisted cannibalism, but tormented art might be a symptom that all is not well.

As a small-town author, I am very sensitive to the worldview messages embedded in books, movies and music, and I often respond in a visceral manner, with feelings of shock and horror: “Would the people who made that film allow their own children to see it? Do they have no sense of accountability to a community or a church? Don’t those people have mothers?” Perhaps writers who live in cities, university communities and art ghettos do not have to ask those questions, but a small-town author, who lives among his readers, does. If he writes books that are chaotic, profane and immoral, and if the plumber’s son gets caught reading one of them, the next time a pipe breaks on Saturday afternoon, the plumber might say, “Fix it yourself. The experience might give you something real and honest to put into your next book.”

Of course much of popular culture does not even recognize “immoral books” as a category in the real world, but many of us do. Deep instinct tells us that there is something twisted and (dare we use the word?) wrong about art forms that mock the customs and values that for 4,000 years have served as our torches in the darkness of human experience. This kind of instinctive response has managed to survive in small communities all over the United States, though it has taken a beating in recent decades. Small towns are no longer immune to divorce, flabby self-indulgence, drug use and the fashionable pantheism of popular culture; but some members of those communities still retain a memory of Mosaic Law and the teachings of Christ. In such places, it is still possible for artists to use their skill to reveal structure, coherence and meaning as well as produce cultural materials that can help ordinary folks hold their marriages together, raise the next generation of Americans and, maybe, figure out why God put us here.

One of the challenges of young writers and artists is to seek out the memory of “the consensus of biblical attitudes” and to trace it back to its source. A small community might be a good place to look. Every small town needs the redemptive power of art, and every artist needs a good home.

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“Heh. Your Statue Trick might have worked on some dogs, son, but it was your misfortune to be tracked down by the Head of Ranch Security.”

“Darn. What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I just wanted to, uh, look around and, you know, this place where you…” I glanced over both shoulders and lowered my voice. “Drover, may I confide in you? I mean, can we speak dog-to-dog?”

“Oh yeah, ’cause I’m a dog and so are you.”

“I know, but I’m talking about something more profoon than our mere dogness.”

“I don’t wear perfume.”

“I’m aware that you don’t wear perfume. If you did, you wouldn’t smell so bad.”

“Yeah, and I’d be sneezing my head off. Perfume really stirs up my allergies.” He sneezed. “See whad I beed? Just the bention of berfube bakes be sdeeze.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “Drover, let’s begin again. May I confide in you? May I tell you a tale of woe?”

“Oh sure ’cause I’ve got one too. They chopped it off when I was a pup.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“I don’t think so. There’s nothing funny about a stub tail.”

“Please dry up and listen to my tale of woe. We can begin with a simple statement of fact. Drover I have a problem….”

“That’s what I thought.”

I gave him a steely glare. “Do you want to hear my story or not?”

“I already know. I heard ’em talking. They’re going to send you to Obedience School, and I guess you don’t want to go.”

“Of course I don’t want to go. Do you have any idea what happens at these so-called Obedience Schools?”

“Well, let me think. You have to be nice all the time? That wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Wouldn’t be so bad! Okay, pal, you want to know about Obedience School?”

He was silent for a moment. “Well, I’m not sure. It isn’t scary, is it?”

“You can decide that for yourself.”

“I hate scary stories.”

Just listen. Here’s the scoop on Doggie School.” In the gloom of Drover’s Secret Sanctuary, I began pacing back and forth. “First off, we can drop the business about it being a school. That’s a joke. People don’t send naughty dogs to a school. They send them to a DUNGEON. See, right in the middle of downtown Twitchell, there’s this old castle, built many years ago by a wicked king. It’s a huge brooding mountain of stone with towers and drawbridges and all that other stuff you find with castles. And it’s full of hooting owls and black cats and creatures that make terrible sounds in the night.

“That’s where they’re going to hold this so-called school. Angry dog owners drive up to the drawbridge with their naughty dogs, see, and this guy comes out of the castle to meet them. Description: eight feet tall, bulging muscles, menacing green eyes, crooked nose, and scars all over his face. When he laughs, birds fly away and snakes dive into holes, is how wicked his laugh is. Oh, and he carries a long whip…and he wears a dead squirrel on his head!”

I heard Drover gasp. “A dead squirrel!”

“Yes sir, because he has no hair, because it all fell out years ago. His heart is so wicked it poisoned all his hair roots.”

“Oh my gosh!”

I plunged on. “He collects all the naughty dogs and leads them into the castle, through long echoing hallways, and down a long flight of stairs. The deeper they go, the colder and darker it gets, until they reach…THE DUNGEON OF DOOM.”

Why is Hank in trouble this time? Will he go to Obedience School? Is it truly a Dungeon of Doom?

The post The Dungeon of Doom (Hank #44) appeared first on Texas Home School Coalition.

In the process of building an audience for my stories, I did thousands of author visits to public schools and for home school groups. After years of doing programs that gave kids an incentive to read, I began to realize that the educators who invited me into their schools were always Christians—and that they viewed my work as more than mere “literacy.”

Instinct might have told them that there is something deeply Christian about the act of reading. We were always intended to be People of the Book, and our fourth gospel even begins with the statement, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

When God chose to give us His law, He did not draw pictures. God’s law was written so that it could be read. When Paul and the apostles wanted to record the events they had witnessed, they wrote them down so that they could be read by future generations.

Gene Edward Veith, one of my favorite authors, points to the difference between our language-centeredness and the “electronic graven images” of mass culture.

The centrality of the Bible means that the very act of reading can have spiritual significance. Whereas other religions may stress visions, experiences, or even the silence of meditation as the way to achieve contact with the divine, Christianity insists on the role of language….

The priority of language for Christians must be absolute. As the rest of society abandons language-centeredness for image-centeredness, we can expect to feel the pressures and temptations to conform, but we must resist. One way to do this is simply to read. [Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature, pp. 17 and 25]

The point here is that the medium itself (words vs. images) might be more important than the content. Images appeal directly to the emotions and bypass the rational mind. Words engage the mind and help us develop such skills as logical reasoning and the postponement of gratification.

That is a very interesting concept, and it has sweeping implications for any discussion about “What is Christian entertainment?” Veith is saying that it is more Christian to read a book than to play a video game or watch a program on TV. Words are more Christian than images.

That is why Christians must read. The very act of reading binds us to a tradition that goes back to Mosaic law, three thousand years of rabbinic scholars, the written Gospels, the Pauline epistles, the church councils, Augustine, the King James Bible, Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation.

Hence, when a nine-year-old, non-reading boy falls in love with a Hank book and devours the whole series, he is being tutored in the Judeo-Christian tradition and does not even know it. When a family reads a book aloud at bedtime, they are recreating the forgotten memory of early Christians reading the Scriptures aloud in the sewers of Rome.

We hope that, after reading a good novel, they will want to read and study the Bible, but whether they do or not, reading in itself is a form of worship. We are exercising a discipline that God chose for communicating with His people—the absolutely stunning process through which scribbles on a page acquire meaning and become something more than scribbles on a page.

C.S. Lewis said that the best kind Christian message is one that contains the beauty and truth of our faith, without announcing it to the blare of trumpets and the roll of drums. A written story that seeks beauty and discovers justice contains a powerful Christian message, without ever quoting Scripture or revealing from where it came.

If reading is a form of worship, then it is hard to escape the conclusion that writing is a form of ministry, or should be. I never dreamed that writing funny stories about a ranch dog in Texas would acquire a spiritual dimension, but it has turned out that way.

It took me about thirty years to absorb this truth. Teachers and home school parents figured it out long before I did.

The post Why Christians Must Read appeared first on Texas Home School Coalition.

I write about what I know (ranch life), but beyond that, the creative process remains a mystery to me, even though I am involved with it every day. What I have learned over a long career is that if I follow certain patterns of behavior, I am able to write at least two good books per year. For twenty-five years I have knocked on Hank’s door, and so far, he has always appeared.

Discipline is an important part of the process. I write every morning, rain or shine, summer or winter, for no more than four and a half hours. I have learned that if I go beyond four and a half hours, my writing shows fatigue. For me, writing is a long-distance race, not a sprint, so endurance is a quality I cultivate.

This practice puts me at odds with the popular notion that the artist is supposed to be a tormented genius—a Strindberg, Nietzsche, or Ezra Pound–who goes mad for his art. American popular music has produced an entire pantheon of artists who used artificial means to sustain their creativity and went to dark places to find inspiration. I never saw the appeal of dying young nor thought that art was worth such a sacrifice.

My approach to writing has not been dramatic or romantic. It draws upon examples from ranching: do not pump your water well so hard that it goes dry; do not overgraze your pastures; do not milk your cow so often that she drops dead.

The template I use is not the tormented genius, but a mule pulling a plow, around and around, hour after hour and day after day. Pulling a plow is a mule’s vocation. Mine is writing good stories for people who need good stories.

Writing is only one of several vocations that define who I am and that give meaning to my life. I am also a husband to my wife, a father to my children, a rancher in a small community of ranchers, a member of a church, and a citizen of the United States. Each of those roles is a vocation, and a vocation is more than a job. Gene Edward Veith, one of my literary heroes, has written an excellent book on the subject, God At Work:  Your Christian Vocation in All of Life.

A tormented genius sees himself as an isolated individual. I look at myself as a part of several communities, the most important being my own family. All those relationships contribute to my work as an author, and if I fail at one of them, it is difficult or impossible for me to succeed in my vocation as an author.

This “vocational model” requires that I go through certain rituals to prepare my mind and spirit for the task of telling stories. I follow a regular pattern that includes eating nourishing meals (my wife is an excellent cook and nutritionist), doing physical labor on my ranch, getting adequate rest, and maintaining harmonious relationships with my wife and family. I spend time in solitude, attend worship services at our church, sing in the church choir, play my banjo, listen to certain types of music, read and study the Bible, participate in the life of my hometown (a lot of weddings and funerals), and observe the behavior of animals, especially dogs.

There are also things I try to avoid: fast food, meetings, cocktail parties, television, movie theaters, advertising, and music that is loud, dissonant, or depressing. I try to control my daily intake of what we refer to as “information.”

Conventional wisdom holds that we need more information, but I do not agree. The electronic age can overwhelm us with images. Some of it might pass as information, but much of it is noise. It appears to me that the average one-hour news broadcast contains about six minutes of information and fifty-four minutes of noise. Screening out the noise of popular culture is an important part of my preparation as an author. We do not have a television in our home, and that helps a lot.

I try to avoid any substance or stimulus that raises my blood pressure, gives me a headache, interrupts my sleep, causes me to want things I should not want, or allows me to forget that I am part of God’s creation.

We might compare my efforts to cultivate the creative process to a gardener’s management of a compost heap. Composting is a process that turns organic waste products into fertile soil. Over a period of months, the gardener tosses grass cuttings, dried leaves, and the peelings of potatoes, carrots, apples, and oranges into a pit. There it remains and decomposes until the individual parts dissolve and blend into a rich mixture that can be applied on a garden plot, where it nourishes plants that produce vegetables that nourish the family of the gardener.

People who tend compost heaps are fanatical about what goes into them. It must be organic material, never garbage that might include solvents, plastic, paper with ink or dye, or inorganic substances that might be harmful. What you put into your compost heap is what you eat. This is chemistry at its most basic level, also known as nutrition. If you give your compost heap garbage, it gives you garbage back.

The same principle applies to the creative process. I never know exactly what will come out of my mental/spiritual compost heap. The characters, dialogue, and plot lines that end up in my stories bear some resemblance to the experiences I have had, yet they have been transformed in mysterious ways into something else. But the important thing is that they do not become toxic.

I am not alone in thinking that a great deal of popular entertainment in modern America is toxic. Does it matter? Should a writer care whether his stories make readers better or worse, strong or weak, sick or healthy? I think it matters. That is why, for me, writing is a vocation, not a job.

The post Where Do the Stories Come From? appeared first on Texas Home School Coalition.

In May of 1985 CBS Television ran a thirty-minute, animated version of my first Hank the Cowdog book. I was excited. At that time, I was self-publishing theHank books on borrowed money and needed all the help I could get.

Hank was to be one of thirteen episodes, each based on an outstanding children’s book, in a series called “CBS Storybreak.” The series was hosted by a trusted name in children’s broadcasting, Bob Keeshan, better known as Captain Kangaroo.

My first impression was that the TV version stayed pretty close to my book, but after watching it three times, I realized that they had taken the family out of my story! Sally May had become the ranch boss. Loper and Slim worked for her, and it appeared that they all lived together in the bunkhouse. Little Alfred, the child in my book, had vanished into thin air.

I was stunned. They had removed all traces of the kind of home life that had been a source of strength to me, my parents, my grandparents, and back as far as we could trace our family history.

At first I thought it must have been an accident. (We were more trusting of the media back then.) It was not an accident. Someone at the network had decided to use a Saturday morning cartoon series, and my Hank book, as a platform for a secular ideology that viewed women as an oppressed minority, men as brutes, marriage as slavery, and motherhood as an insignificant waste of time.

They bought the rights to my book, which was trusted by parents, teachers, and librarians, and injected it with their social viruses. I was particularly outraged because the Hank stories were always meant to be read aloud by families.

At the time the Hank story aired on national television, I had never heard the term “worldview” and did not even realize that I had one. Or that the television people had one. Or that our worldviews might be very different.

Mine is Christian and traces back to the small town in rural West Texas where I grew up. It contains the values of a group of people who work the soil, tend livestock, and operate small businesses. We believe in thrift, personal honesty, fidelity in marriage, hard work, and the importance of being good parents.

Our lives center around work, school, family, and church, and our system of values derives from the book that William Tyndale and others translated into English in the sixteenth century: the Bible.

In the first chapter of that Book, we find two extraordinary statements: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) and “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). Those two statements lay the foundation for a Christian worldview and have profound implications for anyone who is involved in the creation or production of cultural materials.

Last December my wife Kris and I participated in an event that might serve as a model of what can happen when a Christian worldview expresses itself through an artistic medium. The small community in which I grew up, and to which I now belong, is remarkable in that every December for the past fifty years we have performed the Christmas portion of Handel’s “Messiah.”

This evening service was held in the sanctuary of the First United Methodist church, where Kris and I have been members for thirty years. Ours is a beautiful church, whose architecture invokes an attitude of worship. It has been called “Cathedral of the Plains” because of its vaulted ceiling and splendid, stained-glass windows. For decades we have had a strong music program (choir, piano, and pipe organ) that adds the harmony of sound to the harmony of space, affirming a God who created structures of beauty in the very texture of the universe.

By six o’clock that evening the sanctuary was filled, and a hush spread through the crowd as the string ensemble from the Amarillo Symphony took their places and began to play. Looking out at the crowd, I recognized people I had known over a lifetime. I saw Methodists, Nazarenes, Mennonites, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterians, Catholics, Campbellites, members of small non-denominational churches, and five varieties of Baptists. I saw farmers, ranchers, truck drivers, lawyers, teachers, merchants, and a large contingent of home schoolers, all dressed in their finest clothes. They had come to hear fifty local musicians, most of us of average talent, perform a composition written in 1741 by a German Lutheran living in England. When we left the church that night, our thoughts had been elevated, and our spirits had been nourished.

I found myself thinking, “This is art! This is where it begins and what it should do.” Art and worship are not the same, but they do come from the same source, and art functions best when it reflects the structure, sound, texture, rhythm, and beauty that God has built into our world. And even the humor.

When art is done well, it can approach an act of worship, as it does every time our community chorus sings Handel’s masterpiece. It is a model I would recommend to any home schooler who wants to write, sing, act, paint, sculpt, play an instrument, conduct an orchestra, or direct a movie.

That is a sentiment that most of the people in my hometown can understand. The people who made “CBS Storybreak” do not understand it at all. And that is the problem.

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