Signing off, Signing On

I never wrote anything good until I stopped trying to write the truth. I never had any real fun, either.
Truth is not the truth.
Fiction is the truth.

—Steven Pressfield

***

Hello, friends! After fifteen years of writing my Monday’s Penny blog, it’s time for a new thing. This will be my final post on this format. Beginning today, September 23, I’ll be writing at my new Substack. I hope you’ll join me there. You will have both free and paid options, as well as a founding member opportunity. I appreciate any little help, whether through a paid subscription or simply sharing the site to help me get the word out.

I have a lot of reasons for the shift, but two stand above the others.

The first is audience. Most of my Monday’s Penny readers are connected with my career as pastor. While I still hold my clergy credentials and am appointed to extension ministry, I no longer serve a local congregation. Writing as though I still had one seems a bit silly. People can ignore their own pastors well enough. No need for me to try to fill that same space.

On a similar note, I’m also shifting content of my writing. Over the years, I prided myself in speaking truth without fear, only to discover time and again that—whatever the biblical precedent of honesty and courage—the job of the modern pastor is to fulfill people’s expectations about God and faith and church without meddlesome suggestions of how we might live more faithfully with God and our neighbors. Such subservience to popular opinion makes it almost impossible for a creative spirit like me to write, or at least to write anything meaningful. In a famous essay, Kathleen Norris asked, “Can you tell the truth in a small town?” I think the same question could be posed to church as we know it—one big small town, really—though I’m not sure we have the capacity to answer it.

While I continue the work of a clergy person in my professional life (albeit in a setting beyond the local church), I’m shifting my writing life almost exclusively toward fiction. My second novel, Home from Away, will launch a week from today (Monday, Sept. 30). I’m also preparing a foray into a bit more genre fiction, where an independent author has a better chance of finding an audience. I’m very excited about becoming part of that community, and about carving out a little niche in that sphere.

Thank you to those of you who have faithfully read these pennies throughout the years, despite the fits and starts with which I’ve written and the occasional long gaps between posts. Thanks for coming back time and again to critically engage with my ramblings. If nothing else, writing this blog has helped me clarify my own understanding of the world and my place in it—both where am not welcome and where I ultimately belong. It’s been a journey of painful lessons, but also of beautiful people. I’m grateful.

And so, a shift in audience. A shift in content. Signing off from one place, and hoping to see you in the next.

Goodbye, friends. And onward.