It’s one of those days where a nation is met with terrible news of unspeakable, unpardonable violence. We wish for less of those days. We cringe at the hearing of them. Sometimes we are quick to respond. Continue reading
Author Archives: Caleb Coy
Coming Soon: A premiere, genuine, Caleb Coy Novel
Very soon, you will hear the announcement.
We here at Caleb Coy blog have been working day in, day out to produce a novel of sorts.
It will arrive this summer. In fact, here’s your first tease—a sketch by a Nashville graphic artist currently working on our cover.
How will we know about it? Subscribe to this blog, if you haven’t already. Subscribe to my Twitter (which you can find running below my stately picture in the right column). You will soon be invited to participate in a novel experience.
Unlike most of the novels you see in stores, this novel will not pass through the grindings of a traditional publisher. This novel will take passage through a more recently carved path—that of digital self publishing, specifically, by way of crowdfunding.
Using IndieGoGo, Caleb Coy is going to sell preordered copies of his brand new novel in order to crowd fund its production. It is in the spirit of the novel itself, and its narrator, to bring the story to the public in such a fashion. In other words, YOU can make this novel happen before it even happens.
Stay tuned. This novel is so hip it hasn’t even been published yet. Be one of the first to preorder it, and you can enjoy one of many upcoming perks.
On Saying Farewell to Students
When you teach, you reach a point at the end of the year where a blend of emotions trespass upon you and take you hostage. You are pleased to complete another year, excited at the prospects of next year’s plans, relieved that you survived various mishaps, afraid of what trials await you the following year, regretful of your mistakes, proud of the students you see moving on to their next adventures, mournful of the ones you will miss the most, tickled by the appreciation they have shown (well, some of them), but sometimes mostly empty—empty because that is your room at the end of the last day, your room for the entire summer. Continue reading
Bivouac —New Silly Poem
BIVOUAC
Twas a lubugrious time
to bivouac
in our bivy sack
but come the morning time
we went galumphing back.
Why Bruce Jenner Is Not a Woman
Confrontational thoughts from a fellow blogger. Despite how tired we might be of the Bruce Jenner story, what angles are being neglected?
Part of me hates to bandwagon onto this topic, as so much has already been said. It is a bit strange that as our economy sputters, the Middle East burns, and our communities descend into violence, we choose to obsess over the personal decisions of someone who a few years ago would have been considered a D-list celebrity. However I’m going to do it; not because I feel compelled to support or attack Jenner, but because the transgendered movement—and our society’s response to that movement—is illustrative of a broader, more important trend.
There is a shift going on in our culture to deny objective reality and to substitute in its place subjective feelings. While we should respect and value the human rights of each individual, we do not have the “right” to determine our own reality, nor do we have the right to then force everyone else to go along with…
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On “Freedom” in Jonathan Franzen’s Novel, Freedom
Jonathan Franzen has said of fiction that if it “isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown” it “isn’t worth writing for anything but money.” The author’s passion we read in his the novel Freedom was hardly an adventure for money. This novel hurts to read. It makes you ache. It makes you depressed. I makes you yearn for the freedom of having finished it.
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A Church Who Loves the Idea of Racial Diversity
At our church we are very passionate about diversity. We may not have a diverse family in our belief community, but we believe in having one. We are very quick to tell you we are very diverse, and just as quick to tell you that we are not as diverse as we would like to be. We know you are looking for a church with ethnic diversity, but if you happen to be white, don’t be afraid of tampering with our ethnic variety ratio by joining. 
We are neither Jew nor Greek, neither black nor white, neither Polynesian nor Cambodian, neither Serbian nor Turkish, neither Guatemalan nor New Guinean—but our home page photo sure is. You can’t find a more inclusive congregation than that. Even photo models who have never even heard of our church are members.
We love to use photos of diverse, happy herds of people, people gathered into tight groups on an invisible plane, surrounded by an endless sea of white background. Always a white void we contrast against, always white and pale. Anyway, we are desperate to appear to visitors and seekers as a colorful cast of differing faces all unified in racially diverse solidarity, and we will pay whatever price we can for those photos, even if none of us are in them. We will put those stock photos on our website, photos with a decent ratio of males to females, and a spectrum of whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and maybe even one Pacific Islander. Some churches hope that one day “Muslim” will be added to the wish list, while other churches hope that one day the distinctions between “Arab” and “Muslim” will be more widely known
Why Soldiers Won’t Talk
“Men in prolonged battle are not normal men. When afterward they seem to be reticent- perhaps they do not remember.”
John Steinbeck
Who Needs an Epigraph at the Front of their Novel?
“Never use epigraphs, they kill the mastery of the work.”-Orphan Pamuk
Is Pamuk right? Are epigraphs necessary before a great work of art? Do I need to hear a completely different artist sound the most prominent note of a masterpiece before the featured artist plays?
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Paper Towns and The Idolatry of Imagination: Part 3—The Vessel
“Forever is composed of nows.”-Emily Dickenson
Part 3: The Vessel
[read Part 1: Strings and Part 2: Grass]
Quentin Jacobson had been searching for Margo Roth Spiegelman, but he had yet to go on a journey. Like Whitman, he needed to travel across the country, become exposed, truly listen for Margo. He needed to experience and understand that paper towns existed all over, with paper people living in all of them. “The world is full of people,” he comes to say, “full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently mismanaged.”
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CALEB COY 