Now on Substack!

October 5, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Since “pick a lane” has never exactly been my forte, I’m now on Substack.

But, for a reason distinct from my other text ventures, as for example Theology & a Recipe, which is the newsletter I send from here.

I’m putting my fiction on Substack, in part because many of you like my theology, and many of you like my fiction, but not all of you like both (or at least not in equal measure). So this way you can sort yourself into your lane of choice—and of course, if you’re a both-laner like me, please subscribe to both! (And now I think I’ll abandon the overtaxed “lane” metaphor.)

First up on Substack is a complete serialization of my novel A-Tumblin’ Down. I actually ran a serial reading of it a couple years ago, before it was published, and it was… SO. MUCH. FUN. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it again, especially now post-publication, and this is it!

Read more about it and, better yet, sign up here. The serial, communal reading begins October 22!

Introducing a New Podcast: Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Stories

July 4, 2023 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

It turns out that podcasting is habit-forming.

To be honest, I’ve been surprised at how much podcasting has captivated me, equally as a listener and as a creator. I can’t remember being so taken with a medium since I was about five and realized that it was possible to become one of that marvelous set of authors who produced the wonderful things we call books.

So, joining her big sister Queen of the Sciences (halfway through year 5!) and the slightly neglected middle-child The Disentanglement Podcast (briefly on hiatus) comes the brand-new podcast Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Stories…

Cobalt: A Mystery

January 25, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

A mystery story from my new collection Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction… especially for those who would like to see more historical Lutheran pastors featured in detective stories.

***

Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was old, sick, stiff, and hungry. For all that, he was the most able-bodied of his household. His wife Anna, terrified by reports of the battle in Long Island and little comforted by news of the Continental Army’s timely retreat, hid in the bedroom, alternately sleeping and indulging in fits of hysterics. Henry’s daughters and daughters-in-law had their hands full minding her and their little ones, not to mention the heavy burden of fear concerning the fate of their husbands. One daughter-in-law’s parents, their house in New Jersey having been quartered by the British, had fled and taken refuge at the Muhlenberg home, but they were still weak and in shock at losing all their worldly possessions. Not to mention the narrow escape en route from bandits, who enforced their own version of the law when the armies were engaged elsewhere.

All Henry wanted, then, was a nice dish of sauerkraut and dumplings, followed by a good night’s sleep. What he got instead was a pounding at the door and a summons from Lieutenant Colonel Brodhead’s men. “It concerns a prisoner. You are needed to translate” was all the flunkeys would say…

All about "Protons and Fleurons"

January 11, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This story collection, Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction, gestated over a long period of time. “Iron” and “Gold” were the first two stories I drafted, well over a decade ago. At the time I didn’t have any sense that they would be linked by a common theme of an element of the periodic table to each other, much less to another eighteen stories.

I can’t remember anymore exactly how the idea for a whole book of stories based on the periodic table came together, though “Molybdenum,” as an exercise in metafiction, tells some of what I’ve been able to reconstruct from my memory.

After I settled on the idea, though, I read John Emsley’s comprehensive book Nature’s Building Blocks: An A–Z Guide to the Elements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I took notes about aspects of the elements that I thought might give rise to a good story. The resulting stories are the ones that coalesced into a good yarn…

Mystagogical Realism

May 25, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

I can remember the first time someone told me about Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It’s magical realism,” he told me. “What’s that mean?” I asked. The answer: “There’s a priest who levitates when he drinks hot chocolate.”

That was enough for me. I was hooked. You can guesstimate when this conversation took place based on the fact that I ended up reading the book in my private berth on an Amtrak traversing halfway across the country because all the flights were shut down due to a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.

Marquez’s fiction has a distinct flavor all its own (of hot chocolate?), but it wasn’t so far off from other books I’d known and loved but had no collective term for. Top of the list was C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

I did not start out loving this book, probably because I was too young the first time I read it. But more importantly because the trilogy structure inadvertently misled me. Out of the Silent Planet takes place on Mars! Perelandra takes place on Venus! That Hideous Strength takes place on… Earth?! I was bitterly disappointed, that first time through.

But subsequent rereadings shifted its status from my least favorite of the trilogy to my very favorite of all of Lewis’s works. It spoke to the intuition that there is much of a wondrous nature even on this Earth. The problem is not wonder’s absence but my (and our) perception thereof…

Transgenre Theology

May 11, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

You may have misread the title of this post. Take a second look just to be sure.

I’m fascinated by and obsessed with genre, which is not necessarily the most flattering moniker in the literary world.

“Genre fiction” is dismissed as formulaic, literarily subpar, and morally questionable to boot. Passive tools of the powers-that-be drug themselves with one escapist fantasy after another, whether it’s romance, Western, or sci-fi—or so the accusation goes.

Ursula K. LeGuin taught me to reverse my suspicion toward such suspicion of genre fiction, and enough disappointed dabblings in literary fiction have taught me that there’s more than one way to drug a populace. It’s the sniffy writers of beautiful sentences devoid of meaning or plot who are most likely to claim that their work can’t be classified; it’s beyond genre, so they say.

While I do like to read all kinds of things, I’m not especially devoted to any one genre. If it’s a good story, well told and well written, I’m game. The real reason I’ve become a genre devotee is because of the epistemology it unlocked for me…