☀️A World of Sun

Friday, March 1 - 2024 Week 9

Mar 01, 2024

How was your Leap Day? Ready for March? Here we go.

☀️World-building Stories

Evangel Classical School will host its 8th annual Raggant Fiction Festival on Saturday, March 23. The keynote speaker is Christine Cohen, director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, ID. Mrs. Cohen has already published two novels, The Winter King and The Sinking City (both of which I very much enjoyed and recommend to all readers 8 and up).

The theme of this year’s Festival is reading and writing as world-builders under the title: “Till We Have Fiction.” The title is a play on C.S. Lewis’ myth-retold, Till We Have Faces. Mrs. Cohen will be speaking about how Lewis’ work relates to many literary influences and philosophical traditions as well as about how Lewis constructs the setting—how he builds the world—of his book.

In the afternoon Mrs. Cohen will be leading a Writer’s Workshop on “how to craft a consistent, incarnate world and plant characters that grow naturally from that soil.”

All of the above is non-fiction; just the facts. But why spend the better part of a Saturday talking about fiction?

I will be speaking during the first session, and I hope to give a few answers to that question. But even the festival itself is a work of imagination. Here in Marysville we celebrate strawberries, why not stories? There are conferences and seminars of all types, for business and leadership and networking, why not consider (and celebrate!) books that feed our creativity?

The idea of “making Marysville a destination” is an imaginative effort. Building the muscles of our mind’s eye is important work; it’s the way inventors and entrepreneurs figure out ways to bless people that those people didn’t even know they wanted. Whether he said it or not, Henry Ford certain lived out the statement, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Not just the car, but a culture that depends on motor-vehicle transportation was the result of Ford’s imaginative faculty. Reading good fiction can let out the clutch, it can get the wheels turning, if you know what I mean.

Tickets are on sale through Monday, March 11, $35 for adults and $15 for students (K-12). A ticket includes copious amounts of coffee (and tea), snacks during breaks, lunch, and the possibility of taking home some books given away throughout the day. You’ll be full, in belly and soul.

☀️White House or Bust

What thing is more pointless in Washington State than the Presidential Primary election process?

There actually are things with higher levels of uselessness, like all the state funded academic institutions, but I mostly just wanted to vent about the vanity of these votes. And to continue applying my alliteration abilities.

Ballots are due back by Tuesday, March 12. Most of those ballots will be mailed, which, no matter how many standards and safeguards are trotted out, still keeps raising my suspicions. Other ballots will be dropped off in boxes, and again, there was a whole documentary made about how mules made a mess of the November zoo in 2020.

One election affront that even evoked Elon’s inquiry is that WA voters must mark which party they’ve voted for on the outside of their envelope. This is actually not a new requirement, apparently in place since 2019. The reason for this, so I read, is to allow political parties to target their campaign mailers for the actual election in November more effectively. That’s what we’ve all been hoping for: more “relevant” government junk mail.

But let’s get back to the bigger pointlessness. I suppose this shows my partisan hand, because Democratic voters don’t feel the futility. If anything, they might have such confidence in the outcome that they assume their individual vote is unnecessary. History helps, since the last time WA’s members of the electoral college cast their votes for a Republican presidential candidate was Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Then consider the names on the paper. In the blue column are two names I’ve never heard of followed by “Uncommitted Delegates,” and the incumbent at the top of the list may not remember his own name. He is the living version of “Weekend at Bernie’s” except the in-real-life Bernie was too aware of his surroundings to be the puppet of the Donkey Party (Obama? Others?) In the red column, in case you haven’t opened your package yet, is a list of names from well over a month ago before DeSantis and Ramaswamy dropped out of the race. Yes, Trump is on there, bringing up the rear.

What should you do? Well, vote! Your life is like a vapor anyway, and these presidential election cycles are as rare as Leap Days. Enjoy them. Who should you vote for? Ah, I see you are asking the toughies now.

Let me put it like this. I’ve got some cancer on my head (true story), and it will spread and cause more problems if I don’t deal with it. Thankfully, I just need to have it scraped and cauterized, no radiation or chemo. But while I’m no doctor of democratic republics, even I can see the distended American torso that demands attention. Want to remove the cancerous lump? Then vote for...well, consider the argument in this video.