The Habit

In 2001, Henry Louis Gates announced the discovery of an unpublished novel called The Bondswoman’s Narrative, written in the 1850s by an enslaved woman named Hannah Crafts. If Gates had the authorship right, it would be the oldest known novel by an African-American woman. But many people doubted the book’s authorship. In 2013, however, Gregg Hecimovich produced evidence that The Bondswoman’s Narrative was indeed written by a black woman in the1850s. Hannah Crafts, he demonstrated, was the pen name of Hannah Bonds, who escaped from slavery in North Carolina. Dr. Hecimovich’s new book is The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. It’s a biography of Hannah Bonds. It’s also a detective story, telling how Gregg Hecimovich and many others uncovered the fascinating true story behind Hannah Bonds’s fictional story.

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Dr. Tiffany Eberle Kriner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. She is also a farmer. Her new collection of essays is In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm. In it, Dr. Kriner connects culture, ecology, faith, and literature, and invites readers to cultivate fruitful conversations between literature and the environments in which they live.

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Emma Fox is the author of The Carver and the Queen, an historical fantasy novel based on the folklore of Siberia. In this episode, Emma talks with Jonathan Rogers about piano lessons, teaching and mentoring young writers, and how she got interested in Slavic folklore. 

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Philip Yancey has written and published more than 25 books. He is known for his honesty, his willingness to wade into difficult questions–and, more to the point, his unwillingness to give easy answers to those difficult questions. In his latest book, published by Rabbit Room Press, Philip Yancey engages the seventeenth-century poet and preacher, John Donne. Undone is Philip Yancey’s modern rendering of John Donne’s Devotions, a collection of prose meditations that Donne wrote on his sickbed in 1623. Philip Yancey makes Donne’s gorgeous but often convoluted prose more accessible to 21st century readers.

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Diana Glyer teaches in the honors college at Azusa Pacific University. Her writing and research focus on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings. Her most recent book is The Major and the Missionary. Dr. Glyer edited this collection of letters between Warren Lewis, the brother of C.S. Lewis, and Dr. Blanche Biggs, a medical missionary in Papua New Guinea. Their conversation spans faith, literature, fear, doubt, tragedy, sickness, health, friendship, and life & death itself. 

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Carolyn Leiloglou’s new middle-grade novel is Beneath the Swirling Sky: Book 1 of the Restorationists Trilogy. It’s a book about art, creativity, and reclaiming the creative energy that comes so naturally to small children. It’s also about a family of people who can go into old paintings and walk around in them. Like her main character Vincent, Carolyn is the granddaughter of art collectors and the daughter of an art teacher. She is also the mother of four wildly creative children.

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Dr. Jennifer L. Holberg is professor and chair of the English department at Calvin University and codirector of the Calvin Center for Faith and Writing, the home of the Festival of Faith and Writing, which will be happening live and in person next April, for the first time since 2018. Her new book is Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith. In this episode, Dr. Holberg and Jonathan Rogers talk about the stories, true and false, that we believe ourselves to be living in–and how we might tell better stories for ourselves and others.

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Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist, a speaker, and the author of several books–most recently, The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope. In this episode, Curt and Jonathan Rogers talk about what it means to be hospitable to your own suffering, engaging suffering as the way of redemption, and the role of storytelling in mental and spiritual health.

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Harrison Scott Key's new memoir is How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told. It’s the story of how infidelity tore his marriage apart, and how he and his wife Lauren patched it back together. It is hilarious, and it’s wise, and it’s exceedingly hopeful. To quote the jacket copy, “How to stay Married is a comic romp unlike any in contemporary literature, a wild Pilgrim’s Progress through the hellscape of marriage and the mysteries of mercy.”

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In this, the final episode of the Hometown Stories summer series, writers from The Habit Membership tell stories about NEW hometowns. Hometowns change, and for a little while, at least, you can find yourself a stranger in your own hometown. 

• Loren Warnemuende: Michigan 
• Rachel Donahue: Spain
• Desi Ana Sartini: Southeast Asia
• Holly Schurter: Illinois

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