MARK VICTOR HANSEN: Soul Nourishment
A few minutes on the phone with Mark Victor Hansen provides a clue to how Hansen manages to juggle the phenomenal Chicken Soup for the Soul book franchise with Jack Canfield, a book with personal finance author Robert G. Allen, a busy speaking and seminar schedule and myriad other projects.
Hansen whirls along with what he calls his "CD-ROM mind," making a cosmos of connections during an interview about the Chicken Soup for the Soul Bible (Piñon Press, May) from New York, where he was promoting the book he co-authored with Allen, The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth (Harmony Books, 2002).
With Hansen, it's impossible to capture direct quotes longer than, say, a sentence. But it's a ride packed with charm, and punctuated by his laughter and his frequent query, "Does that make sense?"
The Chicken Soup for the Soul Bible, in the New Living Translation, contains the same kind of emotion-tugging stories—half previously published and half newly contributed—familiar from the inspirational series that has sold 85 million books. But there's no mention on this cover of Hansen and Canfield. Hansen says while he knows some niche Bibles prominently carry people's names, he felt it smacked of pretense and potential blasphemy for him and his partner to do that.
And he does seem unaffected for someone billed as America's Leading Authority on Human Potential, even as he offers that he's co-writing a book with legendary television host Art Linkletter. Hansen describes himself as multi-faceted and mentally fast, but also says he's the guy who got Cs in high school and now finds smart partners. He writes for two hours every day. He's a Christian who goes to multiple churches and is active in several. He says he and Canfield tithe (give away 10% of the earnings) on each of the Chicken Soup books. Hansen came out of poverty, he notes, and he's "here to attack lack."
One thing Hansen thinks many people lack is fulfillment of what he calls "soul-ular" needs. He sees now as a time when people are asking spiritual questions and looking for a way to digest who God is, and he believes the only way to do it is through a story. The Chicken Soup stories in the new Bible are intended, Hansen says, to open the door to the Bigger Book. The Bible might be daunting for many, but they're not afraid of Chicken Soup. Didn't Jesus use simple stories to communicate?
The 70-plus other Chicken Soup books are published by Health Communications, but Hansen says that house didn't consider a Bible a fit with what it does. Though NavPress/Piñon doesn't normally publish Bibles, marketing director Amy Slivka tells PW the project suited NavPress's mission. "We see this as a very evangelical product. It's got the potential to be a great product for people to buy for friends and family members who wouldn't normally read the Bible but might be willing to take a look because of the Chicken Soup aspect."
Hansen would be a minister if he weren't a speaker or a writer, he says; he is "personally, profoundly interested" in the Bible. Ask the Bible to answer your questions and the stories take life for you, Hansen says. Because the Bible is so alive to him he wanted to make it alive to others.
Inspiration is the "key that turns on the engine called your life," he says. The Chicken Soup team is in the soul business, using an approach they have found works in all cultures. "We need to inspire just like you 'inspire' air," Hansen says. "Everyone has a soul and it's hungry to be lovingly caressed." Does that make sense? —Juli Cragg Hilliard
ORIAH MOUNTAIN DREAMER: Respecting Longings
Oriah Mountain Dreamer found it shocking enough to discover that her prose poem "The Invitation" had been passed around the globe and developed a life on the Internet, evident through thousands of hits.
But some of those Web mentions were "a little strange," she says. Some people edited her poem. Others erroneously described her as an Indian elder. She and her two sons tried tracking folks down and e-mailing explanations that she was a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, working-class woman from Canada, Mountain Dreamer says. But people would Web-post her disclaimer—without correcting the errors she was addressing.
"It became apparent very quickly that we couldn't control it," she says, from her home two hours north of Toronto. While she wasn't too happy about people changing the wording of the poem, its word-of-mouth popularity was a major reason why Harper San Francisco took a chance on publishing an expanded version in book form, also titled The Invitation, in 1999. It has sold more than 300,000 copies.
"I didn't sit down to write a poem that was going to go all around the world," says Mountain Dreamer, who was given her name by Native American elders with whom she studied. "We need to let go of results. We can't predict what those results will be." After publishing two other books with HSF, The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self (2001) and The Call: Discovering Why You Are Here (2003), Mountain Dreamer reaches out for more readers with Opening the Invitation: The Poem That Has Touched Lives Around the World (Apr.; reviewed in this issue).
Mountain Dreamer says she knows from responses that "The Invitation" spoke to many people who don't consider themselves particularly spiritual, reminding them "to live with more joy, to remember what matters and let go of the rest." She hopes Opening the Invitation will find folks who might not usually peruse the "spirituality" or "inspiration" bookshelves. "The book is small and beautiful and offers the poem—along with stories of how it was written and the journey it took around the world—in a format that I think will make it available to this wider audience."
Marketing director Margery Buchanan describes Opening the Invitation—4¼"×5", 112 pages and priced at $9.95—as a "gifty book" that HSF expects will attract even more buyers than The Invitation. "Oriah is certainly one of our lead authors and someone who we were very lucky to cross paths with."
The best way to sell the books, Buchanan says, is to put Mountain Dreamer on the road, because the author has a "vast network of supporters" and can draw crowds at large venues. Mountain Dreamer is scheduled to speak at weekend retreats March 19—21 at the Inner Connection in Tucson, Ariz., and April 2—4 at the Omega Conference in New York City.
Buchanan says HSF works to change incorrect impressions that media outlets, such as women's magazines, have of Mountain Dreamer based on her "New Age-y" moniker. HSF is advertising in BookPage, Body & Soul and Spirituality & Health magazines but also marketing through Mountain Dreamer's enormous e-mail list and Harper's own "Take a Moment" e-mail list, described as containing "nuggets of inspiring, thoughtful and uplifting wisdom" for people with busy lives.
The challenge success poses for any writer—especially one like Mountain Dreamer, who calls for respect of inner longings—is balancing opportunities with the need for stillness. Mountain Dreamer turned 50 last fall and sent out a newsletter saying that after 33 years of teaching workshops, starting as a teen, she needs time to sit and think. She's finishing a book on creativity for HSF, then plans to start the quiet period in September. She does not know how to hear the divine without being silent. "My goal here is not to remove myself from the world, but to go more deeply into the world."—Juli Cragg Hilliard
PHYLLIS TICKLE: No Ordinary Time
According to Phyllis Tickle's husband, memoir is what poets write when they grow up. If that's true, then Tickle, at 70, has reached maturity. The sometime poet and playwright and contributing religion editor for PW has authored some two dozen books, most notably Rediscovering the Sacred (Crossroad, 1995), God-Talk in America (Crossroad, 1997) and the recent three-volume series of contemporary fixed-hour prayer from Doubleday (The Divine Hours).
Now she has turned her attention to chronicling her life in a series of spiritual memoirs. First was The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape (Doubleday, 2001) that covered the years up to and including her early adult life as a lay Benedictine. The companion volume, The Sharing of a Life: A Religious Landscape will cover the past dozen years as a commentator on American religion and publishing and is scheduled for release by Doubleday in 2005 or 2006.
But what about those in-between years when this physician's wife was busy rearing her six children on a 12-acre farm in Tennessee? They have been captured in a series of three small books dubbed Stories from the Farm in Lucy and published by Loyola Press. The books, like the Tickle family, follow the liturgical and seasonal year. "That's how life is metered at our house, even though we are no longer farmers," says Tickle, who is Episcopalian.
What the Land Already Knows: Winter's Sacred Days (Sept. 2002) tells stories about Advent, Christmas and Epiphany; Wisdom in the Waiting: Spring's Sacred Days (Feb.) has insights from Lent, Easter and Pentecost; and the final volume The Graces We Remember (Apr.; PW starred review Feb. 23) covers the rest of the liturgical year, known as Ordinary Time. Originally published 20 years ago by Upper Room Books, they have been completely revised.
"Religion has always kept earth time," Tickle writes, and her stories find meaning in such earthy events as haying and harvesting, rescuing a newborn calf from the cold and planting great-great-grandmother's hyacinth bulbs. "I suspect that the farm was as necessary to who I am as was the having of children," says Tickle. "In the city there's no immediate relationship between what you're using and its production, the source of supply—God, if you will. And nature, being greater than we, is our most tangible experience of the enormity of what God is."
Writing memoir was a challenge, even for an admittedly contemplative journalist. "I really learned things about what mattered and what was significant," she says. "Autobiography doesn't let you lie. There's a self-correcting mechanism when your story is deeply intertwined with other people. You have to test your own memory of those events."
Her memory also was tested with a brief memoir of World War II that Tickle wrote when the war with Iraq began. A Stitch and a Prayer: A Memoir of Faith Amidst War was published by Paraclete last October. But now that her entire life has been covered, Tickle says she's done with memoir. "I've got to find a new horse to ride," she says. Her next project is a history of the Community of Jesus in Massachusetts, of which she is a member.
She also contributed to the Oxford University Press series on the Seven Deadly Sins, based on lectures at the New York Public Library. Tickle originally requested lust, but it had been taken. "My second choice was greed, and now I'm so glad I got that one because greed is the matriarch of all sins," she says. The books are being released on related holidays; Greed comes out on tax day, April 15.
Joe Durepos, Tickle's agent and often her editor at Loyola Press, says her books fit perfectly with the Catholic publishing house's mission of doing books about a lived faith. Marketing efforts for the Farm in Lucy books will intensify when the entire series is out, he says, and Loyola is hoping to attract the broader "seeker" audience as well as Tickle fans. "I hope these books introduce Phyllis to a wider audience," he says. "She really has a wonderful story to tell and a deep faith to share." —Heidi Schlumpf
GREGORY BOYD: Eyes of Faith
Gregory Boyd saw and liked the movie The Passion of the Christ, but it didn't numb him or reduce him to tears as it did many Christians. That's because he felt as though he had "seen" Christ's Passion, in his mind's eye, many times before.
"I've run movies like that in my head for a long time," says the author of Seeing Is Believing: Experience Jesus Through Imaginative Prayer (Baker Books, Apr.). "The value of the movie, like all Christian art, is that it incarnates truth. That's really the main thesis of my book: Beliefs only have as much transforming power as they're experienced concretely."
Like much of what Boyd has written in his other 15 books, Seeing Is Believing challenges conventional thinking. It posits that Christians need to stop trying so hard, on their own, to manifest the joy and love that are theirs in Christ and instead simply to let it flow from what the Holy Spirit does through them.
Much of this transformation, he tells PW, can be accomplished in prayer that "you can run like a virtual-reality movie. Slow it down and experience it from the inside, and when you pray ask the Lord to inspire you." Or, when reading the Bible, for example, imagine yourself as the prodigal son, "hearing the birds and feeling the wind on your face." But Boyd concedes that many evangelicals in particular are uncomfortable with any kind of visualization exercises because they smack of New Age practice.
As an author, Boyd is best known as a creator and proponent of "open-view theism," a controversial notion which holds that the future exists partly as "actualities" (future events that God determines to bring about) and partly as "possibilities" (aspects of the future that God allows his creatures to bring about). Critics say that the theory heretically limits God. While not directly linked to this philosophy, Boyd says, the thesis of Seeing Is Believing "addresses what is our picture of God; and that always has been kind of a driver for me."
In some ways, it's a wonder that Boyd has the time to think deep thoughts at all. In addition to being a prolific writer, the 46-year-old is senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, a mega-church of about 5,000 members that he co-founded in 1992. He still preaches nearly every Sunday. "But I really believe in delegating authority, so I don't in any sense micromanage the church," he explains. "My job is to surround myself with people who are more competent than me in my areas of incompetence."
When a concept for a book "really starts to brew inside me," Boyd says, he enters what he calls a "manic phase" where he does most of his writing between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., getting by on three to four hours of sleep a night and catching cat-naps throughout the daytime hours to keep himself energized. "I just get pumped and will go for a couple of weeks like that," he explains. "The longest I've ever gone was six months."
Manic writing is something Boyd is doing a lot of these days, because he's got at least two more books planned for publication in the next several months. In July, Baker Books is to publish Repenting of Religion, which Boyd says "focuses on love in the mental picture of God. I always had a strong emphasis on the character of God being unsurpassingly loving, but this book was really inspired by my reading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer," the German Lutheran theologian and preacher who was executed in 1945 for strongly opposing the Nazis' actions against the Jews. And in January 2005, Baker plans to publish Escaping the Matrix, which Boyd says is about "how to get authority over your mental representations." —Dale Buss
