Jeffrey Overstreet, Gradually Dazzled.

Jeffrey Overstreet is the author of a four-volume fantasy series called The Auralia Thread, which includes Auralia's Colors, Cyndere's Midnight, Raven's Ladder, and The Ale Boy's Feast - as well as a memoir of "dangerous moviegoing" called Through a Screen Darkly, which has become a popular university textbook on film interpretation and faith. He is also a contributing editor to Seattle Pacific University's magazine Response, and a blogger at LookingCloser.org. He reviews movies twice a month for Image. Here's a full bio.

[marvinm00re]

Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford Photo by Annie Leibovitz Rolling Stone, July 24, 1980

I played around with the color a little.

[unrar]

A Syrian refugee kisses his son as he walks through a rainstorm towards Greece’s border with Macedonia, near the Greek village of Idomeni, Yannis Behrakis.

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Before the big announcement, some background...

When I was a kid, a big box of crayons with a sharpener represented, for me, full creative potential. It heightened my heart rate. It inspired adrenaline. It made me want to make stuff.

But, on my family's budget, it was too expensive — especially when we already had some crayons and colored pencils in the house. And so, that super-sized set came to represent something just out of reach: the capacity to bring all of the colors to life.

I can hardly complain. That creatively ambitious kid grew up to have more than his share of opportunities to do creative work and share it with the world. This year marks the tenth anniversary of my first two books: the novel Auralia's Colors, and my memoir of dangerous dangerous moviegoing Through a Screen Darkly. Having been granted those unexpected, unlikely opportunities — and the subsequent publications, speaking opportunities, and teaching work — I live in a state of perpetual gratitude. What's more, I'm blessed with a creative, supportive community.

But I'm not interested in looking back and settling for nostalgia. Any opportunity I've had to tell stories, write reviews, edit other people's work, publish, speak, and teach has felt like practice for the next thing.

So I'm still reaching — wanting a chance to share more stories and bring new ideas into the world. In recent years, increasing pressures and troubles have forced me to postpone or give up on a variety of dreams and projects. I lack the resources, the connections, the opportunities, and the time — especially the time — to realize my creative visions to my own satisfaction. (There won't be more novels anytime soon unless I find the kind of work that makes a project of that magnitude possible.)

Meanwhile, all around me I see vibrant, creative people struggling to make ends meet and fighting to keep their own artistic visions alive, hoping to bring light into a darkening world.

So I've decided to start something new. Something creative. Something that I can manage in the midst of a difficult and demanding schedule.

I call it...

My Box of 64.

Listen to Episode One.

This opening episode begins with a long introduction: a letter that I've written to the most mysterious person in my life.

Then, I welcome a special guest: Seattle musician Robert Deeble.

And that's just the beginning.

Moving forward, you'll find the episodes become unpredictable. I aim to misbehave.

It will be fun. I'll host interviews with special guests about their own creativity. I'll do some storytelling — glimpses of new and unpublished fiction. I'll share poetry readings — in my voice and in the voices of the actual poets. I'll premiere new music from musicians I love. I'll review movies (of course). There will be conversations about artmaking, about the writing life, and about how to keep hope and creativity alive. There will be discussions and debates about movies. And much, much more than that.

I hope that this new Looking Closer audio journal — My Box of 64 — will provide for you some creative inspiration. I hope it will introduce you to exciting new art, artists, and ideas. And I hope it will prompt you to share with the rest of us the work that is inspiring you creatively.

Here's how you can be part of the show:

My Box of 64 on Twitter, and engage the conversation there. Selections from those exchanges will become part of upcoming episodes.

Follow the Looking Closer with Jeffrey Overstreet Facebook page, where a lot of My Box of 64 updates, previews, surprises, and opportunities for listeners to participate will be posted.

Add [email protected] to your contacts. Why? You can send emails to ask questions, share anecdotes, and recommend music, books, movies, poems, paintings, and more — anything that might be worth reporting in an upcoming episode. I'll share selections from what I receive there.

Check out new music by Robert Deeble at PledgeMusic.

And so it begins... a new Looking Closer adventure. What's in your box of 64? I hope you'll share it with me.

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Confession: I enjoy remote-locking my car a block away from the parking lot. Because it’s as close as I’ll get to this kind of cool.

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Visit Original Link

In honor of Glenn Yarbrough, who sang one of my childhood's most formative songs — here I am, with my friend Todd Fadel, back in my college days, singing in affectionate imitation of Glenn's unique style.

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Finding glory in Finding Dory

I did feel some trepidation as I took my theater seat. Did I really want a sequel to what I consider to be Pixar’s most beautifully realized film, its most perfect execution of its narrative …

Andrew Stanton proves once again that he's one of the big screen's most imaginative sDorytellers.

[theparisreview]

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist.

Henry Miller, The Art of Fiction No. 28 (via theparisreview)

[jeffreyoverstreet]

A movie that draws too much attention to its own showmanship: Why the Oscar front-runner never drew me in. Read “The Revenant: Malick-ish. Tarkovsky-ish. Profound-ish.”

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Room: It’s my story, too.

[jeffreyoverstreet]

‘Twas the day after Christmas

And my gift to you 

Stars my old action figures — 

It’s a Star Wars review!    Check it out here!

[usborneyashelfies]

Sunday Shelfie: Sara Zarr, author of “How to Save a Life” and “The Lucy Variations”

A couple of years ago my husband and I bought a small downtown condo, and had to part ways with probably 75% of our books. We really had to think about what we wanted to have physical ownership of vs. what we have in ebook form or can borrow from the library. I got down to two small shelves in my office, consisting largely of favourites signed by authors or first/rare editions, non-fiction and reference, and a whole lot of stuff I haven’t read yet. 

There’s no organisational system other than an attempt to group by broad category. I also use the “make a bunch of piles” method with books I’m in the middle of reading, lining them up on my desk with the optimism that all us readers share: I WILL FINISH ALL OF THESE! 

My dream home would include a huge library with floor-to-ceiling shelves and several comfortable reading chairs, but I’ll have to write a bestseller first. Besides being small, my office is also very narrow - like a galley kitchen - which is why the angles are so odd here! My many attempts at getting both me and the shelf into the picture mark the first (and probably last) time I’ve thought, “I could sure use a selfie stick.”

Follow Sara Zarr on tumblr and twitter -she’s awesome!

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My (anglicized!) shelfie for my UK publisher’s tumblr. My commentary on a few titles that jump out at me when I look at this picture:

GIRLS by Frederick Busch - every time I cull my books, I can’t seem to part with this one, though at the moment I’d be hard-pressed to describe it except it’s partly about a missing girl. That’s the backdrop, anyway, along with winter. Probably influential on me in terms of writing ONCE WAS LOST (aka WHAT WE LOST). Here are the opening sentences: We started clearing the field with shovels and buckets and of course our cupped, gloved hands. The idea was to not break any frozen parts of her away.

ROUND ROCK by Michelle Huneven - MH has become one of my favorite authors of contemporary adult fiction in the last couple of years. 

READ BETWEEN THE LINES by Jo Knowles - one of the few 2015 YA books I read, and I loved it

There’s a signed first edition of THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK there because Matthew Quick is my people.

The bottom shelf has a bunch of my favorites from childhood: several Zilpha Keatley Snyder titles, Robert C. O’Brien’s THE SILVER CROWN, EB White collection, for example. There’s also a special color edition of THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN.

Near the top of my head, some poetry and spirituality and my ACOA daily meditations because issues.  😀

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Hi Jeffrey! I just received your signed copy of Auralia's Colors in the mail! Thank you so much! I don't know why it's so surprising when people do nice things, but it was! So thanks again!

I’m glad to see it reached you. And again, thank you for the encouragement.

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Kill Bill’s role model for a Christian woman

Lauren Wilford at Christ and Pop Culture: A fictional bride helped me be a better woman, but it wasn’t Princess Buttercup. It was The Bride (Uma Thurman), the furious hero of Quentin Tarantino’s tw…

I love this so much.

[danielbowmanjr]

Now, I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. But if it is rejected or despised, it will grow into wild and weedy shapes; it will be deformed. At its best it will be mere ego-centered daydreaming; at its worst it will be wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it is taken seriously. The man who refuses to read novels because it is unmanly to do so, or because they aren’t true, will likely end up watching bloody detective thrillers on television, or reading hack Westerns or sports stories, or going in for pornography…. It is his starved imagination, craving nourishment, that forces him to do so. But he can rationalize such entertainment by saying it is realistic–after all, sex exists, and there are criminals, and there are baseball players, and there used to be cowboys–and also by [thinking] it is virile…. If they were genuinely realistic, which is to say genuinely imagined and imaginative, he would be afraid of them. Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Language of the Night (via danielbowmanjr)

[ayjay-deactivated20161206]

The purest and truest adherence of Christianity have always hindered and called into question its worldly success and so-called ‘power in history’ rather than promoted them; for they were accustomed to place themselves outside the ‘world’ and had no regard for the 'process of the Christian idea’; for which reason they have as a rule remained holy unknown and anonymous to history.

Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (via ayjay)

Is that supposed to be “adherents”? I ask because “adherence” does not make grammatical sense.

[jeffreyoverstreet]

Birthday Party on Bald Mountain

75 years ago today, Disney’s Fantasia — directed by Norman Ferguson — opened. It was the first of its kind in many ways, most notably in that it was the first film presented in stereophonic s…

What do these fellows all have in common?

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[jeffreyoverstreet]

YES.