Bourbon Cowboy

The adventures of an urbane bar-hopping transplant to New York.

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Location: New York, New York, United States

I'm a storyteller in the New York area who is a regular on NPR's "This American Life" and at shows around the city. Moved to New York in 2006 and am working on selling a memoir of my years as a greeting card writer, and (as a personal, noncommercial obsession) a nonfiction book called "How to Love God Without Being a Jerk." My agent is Adam Chromy at Artists and Artisans. If you came here after hearing about my book on "This American Life" and Googling my name, the "How to Love God" book itself isn't in print yet, and may not even see print in its current form (I'm focusing on humorous memoir), but here's a sample I've posted in case you're curious anyway: Sample How To Love God Introduction, Pt. 1 of 3. Or just look through the archives for September 18, 2007.) The book you should be expecting is the greeting card book, about which more information is pending. Keep checking back!

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Brian McLaren on Worship

Can't seem to remember how to make a pretty YouTube window appear in my blog posts. But I can still cut and paste links! So here's a link to a short, interesting discussion by Brian McLaren about what he calls "The Worship Industry." Many of the things he mentions--like the fact that worship that "works" for people often does so by being dishonestly upbeat--are the same things I have noted (though not yet posted) about why evangelicals have a hard time writing good novels, painting good paintings, and in general producing non-musical art that communicates to people outside of Lewis's and L'Engle's allegories for children. (As I discovered as a young wannabe evangelical writer, the moment you identify a truly good Christian writer--say, Dostoyevsky or Flannery O'Connor or T.S. Eliot or Walker Percy--you quickly realize that they're not exactly evangelical Christians.)

On a style note, I think this short film idea (along with what Rob Bell's doing with NOOMA, though I don't like those as much) is the sort of thing I should be doing for promotion of my book...if only I had a camera, editing skill, and access to a series of public-domain film clips. *Sigh.* I need a damn agent.

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