Writer's Corner: Fr. Matthew Penney

Motivations and inspirations for writing are tricky things. Sometimes a story is a small seed that grows in the back of your mind, which you occasionally water and prune, and you just know when it’s ready to bloom onto the page. At other times, it’s an idea, or a feeling, or a person, so irresistible that it impresses itself on your mind and sweeps you along with it, like a leaf on a river’s current.

When I first became Orthodox, I was dazzled by the brightness of a whole new reality. It was like the sun bursting from behind dark clouds to illumine a landscape that I had only ever seen in grays and shadows. One of the things that struck me was just how supernatural, miraculous, and alive this new world was. I remember thinking: Orthodoxy has all the mystery and wonder and “magic” that any modern fantastical story has – except it’s true. I remember thinking of all the times as a youth that I had longed for the stories and the worlds and the characters I’d loved to be true – but they never were. And so I said to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great to write stories that people could fall in love with, a world they could yearn to live in, only to find out this world does exist and you can live in it?” This became my over-arching motivation for wanting to write fiction – not writing to justify Orthodox belief or make an apology for it, but presupposing it. What does the world look like when God exists, when miracles occur, when saints do superhuman things, when the invisible spiritual warfare is perceptible? And how do the human beings involved in this world react, how do they struggle to come to terms with such a world, and what does it teach us about living in the brightness of awareness, rather than in the grays and shadows? Particularly, I wanted to do this for our young people – to give them something to be inspired by, to delve into, to be surprised by, and in a way that meets them where they already are.

Martin, Brigid, and Ashley’s story in Voyage to the Rock is meant to be just that. Real kids, real situations, but with a sudden glimpse of a deeper world where they never expected one. The story is written for Orthodox youth so that they can become excited about their faith and their history, and so that they can begin to approach the ‘Lives of the Saints’ in a way that is initially a bit more accessible. But my hope is that it is not so ‘in your face Orthodox’ that others couldn’t enjoy or benefit from reading it.

From what I’ve seen and heard, there is a general lack of good stories written from an Orthodox perspective – again not necessarily preaching it, but embodying it. So I wrote this quite intentionally to help fill that gap. Our young people are going to read; we’re constantly encouraging (and forcing) them to, whether for school or for fun. So why shouldn’t we offer them a chance to drink deeply from the well of our Holy Orthodox faith and to retreat into the mystery and wonder of the life in Christ, rather than into that of imaginary fantasies, or even – in worst case scenarios – into spiritual and moral poison? And why don’t we strive to do it in a way that isn’t pedantic or preachy or poorly written (forgive me for the times that my writing crosses these lines!). Our faith promotes itself when we present it authentically – because it’s true and because it’s beautiful.

I hope my small offering of Voyage to the Rock encourages our writers out there to do what they can toward producing great works. I intend to keep writing with these goals in mind. I am presently working on a sequel to Voyage, and have other stories slowly growing in the back of my mind. With God’s help and your prayers, those of us at our new Lumination Press, will continue to offer more of these stories.

Check us out at http://luminationpress.webs.com, and the website for the novel at http://voyagetotherock.webs.com.

[Fr. Matthew Penney is a priest of the Canadian diocese of ROCOR. In June of 2013, he received his M.A. in Theology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, having lived in Greece for four years with his Matushka Catherine. In September of 2014, he will begin a doctorate in Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He considers it a great blessing to have been ordained both a deacon and a priest at Holy Trinity Monastery. Voyage to the Rock is his first Y.A. novel, and the first publication of Lumination Press.]