The Habit

Professor Diana Pavlac Glyer is an expert on Tolkien and Lewis, especially with regard to their collaboration in the Inklings group. She is also the editor of A Compass for Deep Heaven—a collection of essays about Lewis's Ransom Trilogy. This book is the fruit of Professor Glyer's practicing what she preaches in generous collaboration with emerging scholars.

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JJ Heller writes lullabies with her husband Dave and sings them for children, their parents, and the children inside the parents. Since 2017, the Hellers have released a new song on Spotify the first Friday of every month. One of those songs, "Hand to Hold," grew into a picture book by the same title, released a couple of weeks ago. In this episode, JJ and Dave talk with Jonathan Rogers about bedtime liturgies and the work of giving language to parents' deepest hopes for their children.

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For a decade and a half, Buddy Greene and Jeff Taylor have been making music together in a wide variety of venues and a wide variety of costumes. They are remarkable as performers, but even more remarkable is their friendship and good humor. As Jeff says, even a worst-case scenario performance is redeemed when it becomes a sad story told for laughs shared between friends.

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Doug McKelvey is best known as the author of Every Moment Holy, “new liturgies for daily life.” He has also been a songwriter and a screenwriter. In this episode, the Sad Stories Told for Laughs series continues with Doug’s stories of fan letters gone wrong, fostering misunderstanding for the sake of humor, and a finger puppet.

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Jessica Hooten Wilson is Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She’s a much sought-after speaker and the author of books about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Spring of 2022 will see the release of her new book, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints. The academic world is a rich source of Sad Stories Told for Laughs. In this episode, Jessica Hooten Wilson tells some of hers.

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Thomas McKenzie is an Anglican priest, the founding pastor of Church of the Redeemer in Nashville, and the author of The Anglican Way. Also, he once blew up a gas station.

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Singer-songwriter Ellie Holcomb has just released a new solo album called Canyon—which, she says, is about a deeper sorrow, a higher hope, and the brokenness that is integral to our humanity. Hopefully she will come back in a later episode to talk about that project.

But in this episode we’re going to talk about the times she and her husband Drew found themselves performing in community college cafeterias, the time they got kicked out of a community college cafeteria and instead had to play a study room, and other sad stories told for laughs.

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Andrew Osenga is a singer-songwriter, an artist & repertoire director, and the host of the podcast The Pivot: Stories of People Who Have Made a Change. In this installment of Sad Stories Told for Laughs, Andrew talks about performing to empty seats, losing a toe, and playing a music festival organized by a money launderer.

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The “Sad Stories Told for Laughs” series continues with Maryrose Wood, author of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place and Alice's Farm: A Rabbit's Tale. Before Maryrose Wood was a novelist, she was an actor. In this episode, she tells the story of her Broadway debut, in one of the most spectacular flops in Broadway history. It is a story of youthful naïveté, public chagrin, a brutal review in the New York Times, and, ultimately, perseverance and triumph.

(The documentary The Best Worst Thing That Could Have Happened tells the story of Merrily We Roll Along, the show that was Maryrose Wood's Broadway debut. You can find it on Netflix.)

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"Sad Stories Told for Laughs" is a special summer series of episodes in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. In this episode, memoirist Harrison Scott Key, author of The World's Largest Man and Congratulations, Who Are You Again? tells about the strange places he's done readings and the dream that wanted to eat him.

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