[drumroll]

Early in 2010, we will be unveiling Wagon City Publications, the literary outlet of EMG. We are currently in the process of gathering, editing, and piecing together a collection of writings from unknown and/or unpublished authors and poets that deserve to have their voices heard. It will include short stories, prose, and poetry. We are very excited about this adventure and surely hope you are too. More info will be released as we continue this very exciting endeavor.

We are also working with several groups to bring philosopher/theologian Peter Rollins to Springfield, MO. This has got us all in a tizzy over here. The man is an incredible storyteller. If you live anywhere in or near the midwest, you need to be there. Again, as information flows in we’ll make you the first to know.

Keep checking in. See you soon.

However, you’ll be pleased to know that fresh new content is on its way in the form of:

• Dustin Gamble (for real this time)
• Our first ever filmmaker feature
• New poetry
• Other tidbits that haven’t had their details ironed out just yet.

Yesterday, Feb. 4, was our most heavily tracked day yet. That means you guys are spreading the word about The Everland and are anxious for new content. We’re thrilled by your enthusiasm and hope to have your faces smiling again very soon. Keep spreading the word, share your minds with us, and bring your neighbors along for tea and toast.

There’s very real potential for very exciting things here at The Everland. Keep your fingers crossed as we work our way toward bigger and better things and expand our creative community. We’ll let you in on them as soon as we’re positive we’re not jinxing ourselves. That’s a pinky swear, kids. You know how serious that is.

So stick around, keep checking back for new content. It’s on its way soon soon soon.

Things to check out while you wait:

• Laura Taylor (for your eyes)
• Cloud City (for your ears)
• Unscrew America (for your conscience)
• Validation (because we effin like you)

posted by Ian Scott Paterson, co-architect

The interesting thing is that my sister and I were always the top musicians in our sections from grade school on up. We also were elected to All-Conference Choir and were selected to play in severl ensembles in our surrounding communities. Now, let me back up for a second and say that I’m not saying any of this to toot my own horn. Since high school, my musicianship has plateaued, whereas my sister went on to dominate bands and ensemebles throughout college, taught music at the high school level for a while, and is currently a professional saxophonist. I play guitar at home by myself – poorly.

This part of my life came to mind while I was thinking about settlements because I saw a unique reality in how my sister and I reacted to music. I wouldn’t call either of our approaches more pure than the other, or better in anyway – I would call them honest. In that honesty, we could each respect each other’s efforts while not feeling like we had to compete with one another. That attitude did justice both to music and to ourselves.

The idea also came to mind of my often having said that I don’t want to marry a writer. I want her to read. Because, arrogant as I am, I would appreciate my wife’s writing – were she to write – but in the back of my head I would always compare it against my own. I don’t want that for either of us. Granted, I am far more open minded (and therefore less competitive) than I have been in the past, but it is still a very harsh reality I will always deal with to some degree.

As we chart the vast wildernss that is The Everland, it is vital that we be honest with ourselves and each other in how we can most purely be creative, and respect our individual ways of expressing ourselves. To be a healthy community, we must allow ourself to critique each other in order to get the best from ourselves, but not in such a way that it places either of us in a position of being “better” or “worse” than the other.

To build on an idea I expressed in “Pioneers,” The Everland is not about promoting ourselves as creative individuals. It is about giving each other the opportunity to exist in a community that stands for the hope that can come from our being creative. May we daily challenge each other to create honesty and truth through creativity, and let us use that creativity in our scattered settlements to unite us into a community as ever-growing and changing as we ourselves are.

I started writing today, thinking I was going to get Cartography, pt. 2 written (which I’m tentatively calling Settlements), but I just wasn’t feeling it. And I didn’t want to e-slap anyone in the face by posting something that was only half-sincere. Soon, though, I promise. Which, ironically, is a perfect segue into the actual content of today’s post: things to look for.

From the Everland:

• An interview with our next featured musician and good friend, Dustin Gamble
• Cartography, pt. 2: Settlements(?)
• Media Reviews
• Much more…

What we’re listening to:

• Fiction Family
• August, Inland
• Stealing Grapes
• The Abracadabras

Check back with us soon for updates on days when at least one of us isn’t being lame. Apologies.

posted by Ian Scott Paterson, co-architect

I think we’ll be just fine.
I think we’ll be just fine.
As long as we’ve got Jesus and these California waves,
I think we’ll be just fine.

Mark Bliss and Dane Gamble don’t fit in at home. They’re both from Johnson County, Kansas, a place famous for its high income per capita. Growing up in a suburban megachurch, they met in a youth group. After graduating high school and (hesitantly) moving on into higher education, Bliss and Gamble began to feel a growing discontentment with their experienced version of Christianity. Being locals of Kansas City, they were well-accustomed with the large amount of ignored homeless people in the Metro. Along with David Van Bebber, the guys started panhandling in downtown Kansas City and giving all of the loose changes rattling around in their guitar cases straight to those often deemed “less fortunate.” They began to build relationships with the men and women of the streets, taking them our for dinner, spending time in their “homes” or providing them with enough money to buy some groceries. This grew into a pseudo-organization known as Panhandlers Ministries.

Their passion for music (and their weekly ritual of playing for hours at a time on street corners) inevitably led to the writing of original songs. Bliss and Gamble began to tinker with their ideas on political situations, social injustices and theology in the form of songs, stories and poems. Their prophetic lyrics and enjoyably typical folk-style make a combination that will have your toe tapping one minute, and your body frozen in shock the next. These two pull no punches in their hopes of communicating their desire for hope and peace in a chaotic world. From disturbing and challenging songs such as “Bury Your Bullets” to satirical rants such as “The Silence in the Soung,” Stealing Grapes calls back the prophetic tradition of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and CCR, reminding us of how easily we slip back into the comfortable routines and ruts of everyday life. “Oh, Mara” is a song about a girl that embraces intentionally bad rhymes and intentionally worse melodic lines that may at one point been a bad imitation of a kazoo, both in just the right quantities to be hypnotic and fun. Gamble’s poetry, filled with inner rhymes and poignant provocations are both easy to get lost in and tough to hear.

In truth, there may be little chance that Stealing Grapes will ever go much farther than the Metroplex of Kansas City. Their biting lyrics and reminiscent folk sound probably won’t sell. Their blatent criticism of “the man” might even keep them from ever trusting such endeavors. But Bliss and Gamble challenge their tiny tribe in ways beyond words. They dare a bunch of rich kids from Johnson County to reconsider the sea of Starbucks and shopping malls for a vision of hope and change that even Barack Obama can’t provide. Stealing Grapes dares me to be a better human.

Check out Stealing Grapes on myspace.

posted by Matt Gallion, co-architect

In light of that reflection, though, I remembered how the notion of other people is what made me want to be a writer in the first place. I want to tell stories not because I love hearing them or to establish myself as some great icon in the history of literature, but because once I’ve passed my words along to others, my story is transformed into something far greater than I could achieve alone: our story.

The same is true with art. I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen recently, as I often do, and we were having a similar conversation. On her refrigerator, there was a postcard bearing the image of a famous painting. Next to it, there was a torn out sheet of notebook paper with the stenciled image of a sailboat – all in blue, all outlines, no artistic depth whatsoever. “Who’s boat?” I asked. “Oh, that’s Bailey’s. Every time she comes over she says ‘I wanna draw! I wanna draw!’ So I get out the stencils and some crayons and she just goes to town for hours. When she made this one, she was telling me all about it as she was drawing it. She said…” and, teary-eyed, she told me the story of Bailey’s sailboat. In that moment I saw in her the same awe and amazedness I’ve seen in people at galleries of famous artists and at world-renown museums of art. That torn out sheet of notebook paper no longer held a crudely stenciled blue sailboat; it opened up my friend, crawled inside of her and started throwing things around. It was no longer Bailey’s sailboat, it was the other piece of art my friend keeps on her refrigerator door

As creative individuals, we must not fall into schizophrenic patterns of hoarding our art away and doing it injustice by coveting it in our locked trunks at the feet of our beds. We have both a desire to go diving into the waters of innovation and a responsibility to not only document our findings, but to use them for the betterment of people. Everyone exists in a community, and the health of that community is reliant on the health of communication between its members.

We have these phenomenal gifts that allow us to tap into the most sensitive and withdrawn areas of people – the dark and dusty corners where they’ve swept their pain and anger, rejection, broken dreams, lost loves. The problem is, we bring these repressed feelings out, then we just leave people to deal with them. This is why, as creatives, it is vital that we express ourselves both through our chosen mediums and through community. Is it not true that we would be doing our gifts and those affected by them injustices by not using said gifts to the full extent of their potential?

We have an opportunity here to be a new kind of poet, painter, vocalist, photographer, graphic designer, songwriter, actor, philosopher, writer, filmmaker, etc. As we discover who we are as a creative community of hope, let us be cautious not to retreat into ourselves. Let us not reject the communities that lay before us to make room for our own city limits. Let us be a microcommunity that co-exists within the cities/states/countries that have done so much to make us who we are as individuals.

As we explore the untamed forests of expressive potential, let us pioneer new trails that carve out our artistic identity.

posted by Ian Scott Paterson, co-architect

1. Relocation to the abandoned places of the Empire.
2. Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
3. Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.
4. Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.
5. Hospitality to the stranger.
6. Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.
7. Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.
8. Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
9. Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support for our local economies.
10. Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.
11. Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of community along the lines of the old novitiate.
12. Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, New Monasticism, (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008), p. 39.

What do these claims say about the Church? What do they say to the Church?

posted by Matt Gallion, co-architect

The premise is that any person can digitally sign a pact promising to serve each other in several ways:  1) To serve 50 hours annually with a non-profit organization, 2) A full or part-time service with a national service program like AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, Peace Corps or USA Freedom Corps, and 3) Active duty in the US Military, National Guard, or Reserves.

So what does that mean to the creative community? How can we be involved in making the world a better place? Well, for starters, we can all Sign the Declaration. By doing so we more than just decide to be a part of the solution, we put our name on it. Secondly, come up with creative ways to serve. They gave us three options to choose from, but (thankfully for us) they also gave an option to individualize your act(s) of service.

Here are just a few ideas:

• If you are a visual artist, gather your artist friends and hold an auction on location at a local non-for-profit and donate a portion of the proceeds to helping their vision.
• If you are a musician, go play some songs for people who are desperate for physical human interaction. Ask a staff member at your local homeless shelter or elderly care facility if you can have an hour or two once a week just to play music and talk to people.
• If you have a skill you can teach, such as pottery or knitting, find out if you can teach a class at your local arts center.

There are so many ways we can use our creativity to not only express ourselves, but to do so with the benefit of others in mind. How else can we be creative and communal? Let’s hear some feedback.

posted by Ian Scott Paterson, co-architect

We exist to be a Creative Community of Hope. What that means to us is that we are – and will always be – looking for new ways to innovate creative communities and creativley enhance those that already exist. So come ye writers, philosophers, musicians, poets, bloggers, cynics, filmmakers and scholars. Let us together explore our ever-fluid future.

posted by Ian Scott Paterson, co-architect