Thirty Years of the Biblio File Column

Cartoon by Steve Ferchaud used by permission of the artist

Back in the last millennium I realized that, though perfect in every other way, the E-R lacked a regular book review. My wife, bless her, encouraged me to do something about that, and to call it the "Biblio File." Though the details have flown the memory coop, I was given my first chance to lay an egg when the column debuted in March 1987, thirty years ago this month. Since then, of course, I've made many omelets possible.

In the early days, way before the digital revolution and the flourishing of local authors, pickings were slim. In one column I reviewed the newly redesigned telephone directory. You want local names? The book was full of them!

Another column was devoted to letters from Chico-area writers published in such prestigious places as The Wall Street Journal (yes, I reviewed letters from locals) and when that vein played out I resorted to connecting my own life experiences.

A memory book recalled my being in a speech contest in which another speaker, who had tried to memorize word for word, stumbled, stopped, and then cried out, "I can't believe it. I just forgot my whole life." Over the years I talked about my uncle's apple orchard, a failed attempt being the family plumber, and about Larry's Little Diner on the Skyway.

As time went by, not only did my picture change (more distinguished now, don't you think?) but so did the column. Personal stories fell away; most weeks now feature a book by an area author or visitor. My goal is to evoke the tone of the book and let readers know what it's about so they can make up their own minds.

Along the way there have been some gratifying notes from readers. Among the most cherished is from the college instructor who wrote in 1997 that "I'm finally compelled to write, simply to thank you for broadening my world…. I am continually inspired by your writing. I appreciate, too, your variety of books."

Variety has been the watchword; from teen romances to government contracting, from travelogues to game wardens, from sci-fi to an elephant ballerina, my own world has broadened as well.

Thank you, writers, and thank you, readers, and thank you, Dear Editor.

"Hard And Clear"

Write about the hard things, Ernest Hemingway advised, and write clearly. When Jim Coons joined the pastoral staff at Chico’s Bidwell Presbyterian Church, he brought comfort and spiritual challenge to those under his care. When he was diagnosed with colon cancer he became the one who needed comfort.

A year later, “just before Christmas 2009 I was told that I was N.E.D. (No Evidence of Disease).” The story is told, through posts he made on the CarePages.com site, in “A Line In The Sand.” He wouldn’t let cancer define him.

But in the summer of 2010 his father died, from cancer, and in November he faced the news that his own cancer had returned. This would be the last battle, played out over the next five years in honest and eloquent CarePages entries now edited into book form.

“Hard And Clear” ($9.99 in paperback, self-published through Amazon CreateSpace) is the voice of Jim Coons, a husband and dad who tells it like it is. “While I still hold to the conviction that cancer doesn’t have the right to define me,” he writes, “it does, like a glacier, shape who I am and who I am becoming.” Cancer is “scarring and shaping me” and yet “I am still just Jim, a beloved Child of God.”

When a young friend died in 2013, Coons wrote: “I have concluded that it’s not supposed to be this way. But the truth of the matter is that it is this way.… We feel the pressure of our sadness and grief while at the same time the injustice of the world presses in on us too. I feel like I might just pop. This is exactly the place that the power and presence and goodness of God meet us.”

His last entry was in March of 2015, from Lake Tahoe: “God of all comfort and praise here I come, ready or not, exploding on the gates of heaven to sing and praise, rest and sleep, smile and rejoice, to dream once again.” He was at home when he died on Holy Saturday, April 4, 2015.

Because of Christ’s coming, he is now truly at home. And the fishing is great.

“Lessons In Belonging From A Church-Going Commitment Phobe”

Erin Lane, who has friends in Chico, “works for the Seattle-based nonprofit Center for Courage and Renewal as an assistant program director for clergy and congregational leader programs.” She’s also a millennial (a generation “born between 1982 and 2004”) who has struggled with how to be part of a community, especially a local church.

Out of her experiences has come “Lessons In Belonging From A Church-Going Commitment Phobe” ($16 in paperback from InterVarsity Press; also for Amazon Kindle). “Mine is a story,” she writes, “of trying to belong to the church, to my husband, friends and strangers, too. It’s a story about enduring community when it’s awkward, when small talk suffocates and the preacher gives bad sermons and the suffering of others is intrusive. It’s about choosing to trust people, not because they’ve earned it but because you want to.”

She writes about “the rituals of belonging in a particular iteration of mainline, evangelical, American Protestantism. Although my experiences are unique to me as a woman, a white person, an introvert, a Midwesterner and a millennial, I hope to offer some insight into broader patterns of belonging,” especially “what it tells us about the God who has the audacity to call us ‘my people.’”

She spent her time in graduate school “speed dating” local churches, but nothing clicked. And, “being married to a pastor, I had withstood more than a few of Rush’s job interviews and was left scratching my head at the politics of it all.”

And yet: “It’s hard to call the church out when we’re not faithfully under its shelter. … If we want the church to be a place where we no longer feel like strangers, we need to take ownership for the ways our actions—and our inability to belong—have made it harder for others like us to find their home there.”

Drawing on her early family experiences; her time with Rush in North Carolina, where he worked at one church and she attended another; and her often fragile attempts at belonging, Lane finds the urge to “be” carries with it a deep sense of “longing.”

“Homesickness,” she writes, “is our spiritual condition.”