FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS...
Your novel in ten words.
Kurt Vonnegut meets Stand by Me.
This is a coming-of-age story about a twelve-year-old boy. Is it a kid’s book?
There comes a year for everyone, where your life changes. You get faced with one of life’s big questions, death, bullying, tragedy. It’s the point where you realize life is not perfect. When you are a kid most things don’t matter much, until they do and when they do they will matter a lot, and your life will never be the same. That’s called growing up. It’s a sifting of priorities. This book deals with some deep life issues clothed in a story. The theme is good and evil, malice and responsibility. Those are kind of adult themes, theology light pressed within the events of life.
Why did you write this book?
Some memories from around age twelve came flooding back to me early one morning having coffee, and that is how it all started. I remembered my best friend and I were sitting on a bench, by the local cenotaph. Moses - I don’t know what his real name was but we called him that because of his big white beard - he came and sat down beside us. He was an eccentric from local farm clan that was known to be religious. Moses would come into town on the weekends and witness to people. He had those spiritual conversation starters like “Do you believe in Hell?”, you know, SUBTLE. Moses had all the answers. If you didn’t see him coming, you’d be stuck battling it out for your soul for an hour.
He put you on the spot, yes, but he also raised a basic question about good and evil, and how we are to respond, that might take a lifetime to answer.
What do you hope people will get out of the book?
I want people to understand that time is limited, what we do is important, and that a man must examine himself. Man was made for goodness, but he has to choose it. It’s the Garden of Eden. Every single day.
You took a chance putting a mentally challenged character in your book. Tell us about that.
The fool is an enduring figure in classic literature – a kind of truth-telling anti-hero. Because everyone thinks he is nuts, he can say anything. Books have a long tradition in that. Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird, Lenny from Mice and Men, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Don Quixote.
In my book, Roy acts as a mirror. A foil in literary terms. Because he is unconscious, he is innocent. He makes the conscious actions of those who should know better look bad by comparison.
Your title seems to suggest a problem that can’t be fixed.
On the contrary, the admission of this title is that men cannot escape their own humanity. That frees things up because the point of the Gospel is that the problem is solved for us on the Cross. Being perfected is a man ambition, but in the end, a God job.
You separate the idea of volitional and natural evil. Why did you break those down?
It comes down to choice. Bad things can happen. But you can also make them happen. If you ever end up on the receiving end of malice, you will discover very quickly that human beings can have a real talent for evil. There’s a bias on the part of sociologists, that evil springs from ignorance, or poverty but that doesn’t bear out with real life. Plenty of poor people and uneducated people are moral, and of course the opposite is true too. Malice is when bad things happen on purpose. If you come up against that with logic you won’t get far because malice enjoys evil for its own sake.
I know in the Bible there are mentions of the ‘unforgivable sin’ and I wonder, if malice is it. You can’t be sorry for what you did on purpose. There seems to be a wicked pleasure in the power of malice to destroy innocence, and therefore to destroy faith. That kind of evil can only be confronted.
Do you have a denominational bias?
I grew up Protestant and my wife grew up Catholic. I have great respect for liturgy, and there is a role for form - after all, we follow a long and great tradition, that great cloud of witnesses. I believe the Apostles’ creed which is deeply rooted in Scripture.
In your book though, you seem to be taking a poke at Christianity... are you being critical of the Church?
People are comical and there is a lot of truth in jest. You know the saying, “you couldn’t make this stuff up”.
Flawed characters interact with grace in real life, and the comedy does not make this less true.
This book functions like an inductive sermon because it takes you through the real paces of life. Dealing with false friends, having to make choices, the reality of human malice. Death as the ultimate adversary. We all face that. You may not go to Church, but you will end up in the church yard just the same. Human beings anticipate their own death, and they are the only ones who feel that their life must have meaning. Animals don’t think like that. That’s the imprint of God on us. It’s a divine clue that we are intended for a good purpose.
Why did you exclusively use the King James Bible throughout your book? It can be hard to understand. Why not use a more modern translation?
There’s a formality, and a poetry in the King James English that makes you sit up straight and pay attention. It is based on the original Wycliffe translation that is easy on the ear and meant to be read out loud in the days when people were largely illiterate. There’s a beautiful cadence to hearing it. You don’t get that in some of the other translations. The Message for example, by Eugene Peterson comes off to me as very flat. I was astonished to read an interview where he expressed that people had begun to find Scripture a little too boring and that was his fix. My own experience with Scripture has always been the opposite - something like the road to Emmaus. “Didn’t our hearts burn within us when he opened up the Scriptures? ”
Talk about the conflict in this book. It seems to operate on a few different levels.
There is the obvious, that they are all battling the bully, Bart Wilson. But there is another level of subtle tension throughout the book between Jacob and his not so good friend Jimmy. By the end you realize that there is a third level of tension, Jacob versus himself. He has to confront the reality of evil as something he could choose to be party to.
Why did you include the chapter heading, of Jacob wrestling with God from the book of Genesis?
There are profound truths in that Bible story, whether you take them on the level of mankind grappling with God, or a boy wrestling with the image of his own father to extract a blessing before he will let go. Any man whose father has died, will get that.
A man judges his father’s past. But the father, judges your future because he has been your older self and he can see the things you haven’t arrived at yet. Once you’ve battled it out, there is only you, left to judge yourself. That’s a hard job. In the end, life itself will judge you. It’s what everybody does at a funeral, it’s a hearing with witnesses called.
You have overlaid the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Bible, with the issues of letting go a father. Why did you name your character Jacob? What is the connection?
The story of Jacob in the Bible is epic. It starts in Genesis 25 and goes all the way through to Genesis 49. In between he has quite a life, and as the angel points out, he is one who ‘strives with God’ and finds favour. A lot of people think that might translate to peace, power and plenty. What it actually comes to, is a lot of scrapping it out. In that way, he might be a pretty relatable character. He’s an everyman. The story of his life appropriately ends as a statement about grace and the agency of God in our affairs.
What rules the day, judgement or grace?
Modern society insists that it is a virtue to suspend all judgement. It’s the ongoing disease of our society that we must look the other way and pretend everything is ok. Can it be that both grace and judgement are necessary?
This book has religious undercurrents. The Gospel in the book. Where is it?
For any Bible readers, there is a sometimes not so subtle overlay of Biblical themes, Moses and the Law, the temptation in the Garden, the expulsion from the Garden, the Transfiguration, etc.
If there is bad news, it is that people likely assess themselves higher than they ought. (Romans 12:3) However, the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. That’s the Good News. It’s the Scandal of the Cross from Corinthians with which the story ends.
What is the meaning of your epilogue?
The epilogue was a way of tying the story together and letting things play out. It is left open-ended on purpose, with a slice of every day suburban life. It takes the themes of the story like a hot potato and passes them from the character to the reader.
Who are you in the book?
Most likely Moses. I have his tattoo. Moses might be my older self growling at my younger and dumber self.
What kind of books are on your own reading list?
Here are some of my all time favourites, books that were for me larger than life. Great literature speaks truth about the human condition almost in the same manner as Scripture.
1) Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256008.Lonesome_Dove
2) The Stone Mason by Cormac McCarthy.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/383602.The_Stonemason
3) A River Runs Through It, by Norman MacLean
https://www.amazon.com/River-Runs-Through-Other-Stories/dp/0226500578
4) True Grit by Charles Portis
https://www.amazon.ca/True-Grit-Novel-Charles-Portis/dp/1468306294
5) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4671.The_Great_Gatsby
6) The Adventure of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
https://www.amazon.ca/Adventures-Tom-Sawyer-Mark-Twain/dp/1503215679
7) Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
https://www.amazon.ca/Adventures-Pinocchio-Carlo-Collodi/dp/019955398X/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=pinocchio+book&qid=1616179479&refinements=p_n_binding_browse-bin%3A2366374011&rnid=2366372011&s=books&sr=1-4
8) Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
https://www.amazon.ca/Pilgrims-Progress-John-Bunyan/dp/0802456545/ref=pd_lpo_14_t_0/145-7232571-3404838?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0802456545&pd_rd_r=a94b4214-286d-490e-9d1d-4010f6156c66&pd_rd_w=Tc8Rp&pd_rd_wg=aYkkY&pf_rd_p=d9b5d6cf-d64c-42df-98b5-7e55c7a27fea&pf_rd_r=YBQWKV1095W0MSZPWTKS&psc=1&refRID=YBQWKV1095W0MSZPWTKS
9) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13227454-the-unlikely-pilgrimage-of-harold-fry
10) The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/968403.The_Descendants
11) The Optimists’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12585.The_Optimist_s_Daughter
12) Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57460.Jayber_Crow
Favourite movies?
The Apostle, with Robert Duvall
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118632/
They Live by John Carpenter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live
Favourite Painters?
Barry Moser, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargeant
Favourite cuss word?
H-e-double-hockey-sticks. It’s very Canadian. And it confuses the Hell out of people when you say it just like that.
Your last meal on earth would be?
Curried chicken.
Sugar or salt?
Definitely salt.
Pet Peeve?
People who stand at the checkout counter in a grocery store and price check EVERY item on the belt as it goes by, on their phones. It turns a five minute transaction into an hour if you are actually dumb enough to wait behind them hoping they will get done. (I have been)
Kurt Vonnegut meets Stand by Me.
This is a coming-of-age story about a twelve-year-old boy. Is it a kid’s book?
There comes a year for everyone, where your life changes. You get faced with one of life’s big questions, death, bullying, tragedy. It’s the point where you realize life is not perfect. When you are a kid most things don’t matter much, until they do and when they do they will matter a lot, and your life will never be the same. That’s called growing up. It’s a sifting of priorities. This book deals with some deep life issues clothed in a story. The theme is good and evil, malice and responsibility. Those are kind of adult themes, theology light pressed within the events of life.
Why did you write this book?
Some memories from around age twelve came flooding back to me early one morning having coffee, and that is how it all started. I remembered my best friend and I were sitting on a bench, by the local cenotaph. Moses - I don’t know what his real name was but we called him that because of his big white beard - he came and sat down beside us. He was an eccentric from local farm clan that was known to be religious. Moses would come into town on the weekends and witness to people. He had those spiritual conversation starters like “Do you believe in Hell?”, you know, SUBTLE. Moses had all the answers. If you didn’t see him coming, you’d be stuck battling it out for your soul for an hour.
He put you on the spot, yes, but he also raised a basic question about good and evil, and how we are to respond, that might take a lifetime to answer.
What do you hope people will get out of the book?
I want people to understand that time is limited, what we do is important, and that a man must examine himself. Man was made for goodness, but he has to choose it. It’s the Garden of Eden. Every single day.
You took a chance putting a mentally challenged character in your book. Tell us about that.
The fool is an enduring figure in classic literature – a kind of truth-telling anti-hero. Because everyone thinks he is nuts, he can say anything. Books have a long tradition in that. Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird, Lenny from Mice and Men, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Don Quixote.
In my book, Roy acts as a mirror. A foil in literary terms. Because he is unconscious, he is innocent. He makes the conscious actions of those who should know better look bad by comparison.
Your title seems to suggest a problem that can’t be fixed.
On the contrary, the admission of this title is that men cannot escape their own humanity. That frees things up because the point of the Gospel is that the problem is solved for us on the Cross. Being perfected is a man ambition, but in the end, a God job.
You separate the idea of volitional and natural evil. Why did you break those down?
It comes down to choice. Bad things can happen. But you can also make them happen. If you ever end up on the receiving end of malice, you will discover very quickly that human beings can have a real talent for evil. There’s a bias on the part of sociologists, that evil springs from ignorance, or poverty but that doesn’t bear out with real life. Plenty of poor people and uneducated people are moral, and of course the opposite is true too. Malice is when bad things happen on purpose. If you come up against that with logic you won’t get far because malice enjoys evil for its own sake.
I know in the Bible there are mentions of the ‘unforgivable sin’ and I wonder, if malice is it. You can’t be sorry for what you did on purpose. There seems to be a wicked pleasure in the power of malice to destroy innocence, and therefore to destroy faith. That kind of evil can only be confronted.
Do you have a denominational bias?
I grew up Protestant and my wife grew up Catholic. I have great respect for liturgy, and there is a role for form - after all, we follow a long and great tradition, that great cloud of witnesses. I believe the Apostles’ creed which is deeply rooted in Scripture.
In your book though, you seem to be taking a poke at Christianity... are you being critical of the Church?
People are comical and there is a lot of truth in jest. You know the saying, “you couldn’t make this stuff up”.
Flawed characters interact with grace in real life, and the comedy does not make this less true.
This book functions like an inductive sermon because it takes you through the real paces of life. Dealing with false friends, having to make choices, the reality of human malice. Death as the ultimate adversary. We all face that. You may not go to Church, but you will end up in the church yard just the same. Human beings anticipate their own death, and they are the only ones who feel that their life must have meaning. Animals don’t think like that. That’s the imprint of God on us. It’s a divine clue that we are intended for a good purpose.
Why did you exclusively use the King James Bible throughout your book? It can be hard to understand. Why not use a more modern translation?
There’s a formality, and a poetry in the King James English that makes you sit up straight and pay attention. It is based on the original Wycliffe translation that is easy on the ear and meant to be read out loud in the days when people were largely illiterate. There’s a beautiful cadence to hearing it. You don’t get that in some of the other translations. The Message for example, by Eugene Peterson comes off to me as very flat. I was astonished to read an interview where he expressed that people had begun to find Scripture a little too boring and that was his fix. My own experience with Scripture has always been the opposite - something like the road to Emmaus. “Didn’t our hearts burn within us when he opened up the Scriptures? ”
Talk about the conflict in this book. It seems to operate on a few different levels.
There is the obvious, that they are all battling the bully, Bart Wilson. But there is another level of subtle tension throughout the book between Jacob and his not so good friend Jimmy. By the end you realize that there is a third level of tension, Jacob versus himself. He has to confront the reality of evil as something he could choose to be party to.
Why did you include the chapter heading, of Jacob wrestling with God from the book of Genesis?
There are profound truths in that Bible story, whether you take them on the level of mankind grappling with God, or a boy wrestling with the image of his own father to extract a blessing before he will let go. Any man whose father has died, will get that.
A man judges his father’s past. But the father, judges your future because he has been your older self and he can see the things you haven’t arrived at yet. Once you’ve battled it out, there is only you, left to judge yourself. That’s a hard job. In the end, life itself will judge you. It’s what everybody does at a funeral, it’s a hearing with witnesses called.
You have overlaid the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Bible, with the issues of letting go a father. Why did you name your character Jacob? What is the connection?
The story of Jacob in the Bible is epic. It starts in Genesis 25 and goes all the way through to Genesis 49. In between he has quite a life, and as the angel points out, he is one who ‘strives with God’ and finds favour. A lot of people think that might translate to peace, power and plenty. What it actually comes to, is a lot of scrapping it out. In that way, he might be a pretty relatable character. He’s an everyman. The story of his life appropriately ends as a statement about grace and the agency of God in our affairs.
What rules the day, judgement or grace?
Modern society insists that it is a virtue to suspend all judgement. It’s the ongoing disease of our society that we must look the other way and pretend everything is ok. Can it be that both grace and judgement are necessary?
This book has religious undercurrents. The Gospel in the book. Where is it?
For any Bible readers, there is a sometimes not so subtle overlay of Biblical themes, Moses and the Law, the temptation in the Garden, the expulsion from the Garden, the Transfiguration, etc.
If there is bad news, it is that people likely assess themselves higher than they ought. (Romans 12:3) However, the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. That’s the Good News. It’s the Scandal of the Cross from Corinthians with which the story ends.
What is the meaning of your epilogue?
The epilogue was a way of tying the story together and letting things play out. It is left open-ended on purpose, with a slice of every day suburban life. It takes the themes of the story like a hot potato and passes them from the character to the reader.
Who are you in the book?
Most likely Moses. I have his tattoo. Moses might be my older self growling at my younger and dumber self.
What kind of books are on your own reading list?
Here are some of my all time favourites, books that were for me larger than life. Great literature speaks truth about the human condition almost in the same manner as Scripture.
1) Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256008.Lonesome_Dove
2) The Stone Mason by Cormac McCarthy.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/383602.The_Stonemason
3) A River Runs Through It, by Norman MacLean
https://www.amazon.com/River-Runs-Through-Other-Stories/dp/0226500578
4) True Grit by Charles Portis
https://www.amazon.ca/True-Grit-Novel-Charles-Portis/dp/1468306294
5) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4671.The_Great_Gatsby
6) The Adventure of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
https://www.amazon.ca/Adventures-Tom-Sawyer-Mark-Twain/dp/1503215679
7) Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
https://www.amazon.ca/Adventures-Pinocchio-Carlo-Collodi/dp/019955398X/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=pinocchio+book&qid=1616179479&refinements=p_n_binding_browse-bin%3A2366374011&rnid=2366372011&s=books&sr=1-4
8) Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
https://www.amazon.ca/Pilgrims-Progress-John-Bunyan/dp/0802456545/ref=pd_lpo_14_t_0/145-7232571-3404838?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0802456545&pd_rd_r=a94b4214-286d-490e-9d1d-4010f6156c66&pd_rd_w=Tc8Rp&pd_rd_wg=aYkkY&pf_rd_p=d9b5d6cf-d64c-42df-98b5-7e55c7a27fea&pf_rd_r=YBQWKV1095W0MSZPWTKS&psc=1&refRID=YBQWKV1095W0MSZPWTKS
9) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13227454-the-unlikely-pilgrimage-of-harold-fry
10) The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/968403.The_Descendants
11) The Optimists’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12585.The_Optimist_s_Daughter
12) Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57460.Jayber_Crow
Favourite movies?
The Apostle, with Robert Duvall
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118632/
They Live by John Carpenter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live
Favourite Painters?
Barry Moser, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargeant
Favourite cuss word?
H-e-double-hockey-sticks. It’s very Canadian. And it confuses the Hell out of people when you say it just like that.
Your last meal on earth would be?
Curried chicken.
Sugar or salt?
Definitely salt.
Pet Peeve?
People who stand at the checkout counter in a grocery store and price check EVERY item on the belt as it goes by, on their phones. It turns a five minute transaction into an hour if you are actually dumb enough to wait behind them hoping they will get done. (I have been)
