Rebecca Martin is Georgia-born and raised. Her New Englander husband convinced her to meet in the middle, and they now raise their daughter and walk their short-legged dog in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. Rebecca holds a Masters in English Lit from the University of Georgia, and has done some writing on C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. She has published in The Lamppost (the quarterly journal of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society) and has contributed a chapter to an edited collection of Narnia essays. She is currently working on her first novel. She blogs about mountain drives, local produce, overheard coffee shop conversation, and books at www.rebarit.blogspot.com.
It’s the experience I climbed those steps looking for. It’s the kind of authenticity I can’t get enough of.
It might be said that Dickens’s fiction – holiday and otherwise – plumbs the blackened, sooty depths of human depravity to ultimately offer hope in visions bright as a blazing hearth.
I sometimes cast a glance around our house and wonder what it means that some of our furniture was crafted by skilled Mennonite hands decades ago, and some of it comes from Grand Home Furnishings.
Can a quiet, neighborly life intersect with a desire to help the oppressed, the afflicted, the hungry? Is brotherly love sufficient if it starts small, inside the walls of my house, on our short street?
Yes, I may want to read The Catcher in the Rye sometime, but not right now, and not in December. Don’t you know December is for dark fantasy and Victorian novels?
Once I moved to Appalachia, and my soul, it has stayed there. Now the cracks in my heart seal up a little bit whenever I travel through.