Story EmbersStory Embers was run by a group of Christian writers and editors who were committed to glorifying God with excellent craftsmanship. We accepted article, poetry, and short story submissions from a number of Christian storytellers around the world. You can peruse posts from contributing audience members below.
One of the most common tips writers hear is “Just write.” Though that’s a true sentiment, it’s also deceptively simple. How are you supposed to write amid school, family, jobs, sports, church functions, and other activities?
I’m yesterday born; I’m a thousand years aged. I’m a song just composed and a hundred times played. I’m as loud as thunder and as soft as a whisper. I’m your best friend’s face and the smile of your sister.
In a desolation that’s fraught with danger, here I stand alone, a stranger. In this land not my home, I’m sent as a minister; yet from the ground to the sky, nature is sinister.
I was born with the sun on my skin and the wind in my hair. Everywhere I looked, I felt the beauty of creation and the hurt we bring to it. Autumn’s tradition perplexed me as I strove to find why the trees cast off their abundant green gowns into showers of red and gold in return for winter’s careless mantle of snow on their bony frames.
Father! Father! What are you doing sawing the branches of our apple tree? Won’t the tree hurt with all those cuts? Won’t it look ugly?
I’ve come all the way here to talk to you. I have come from birth and teething rings and standing up and falling down and stealing toys and riding bikes and building forts and telling lies and driving cars and texting friends and rebirth all the way to you in an empty McDonald’s corner booth around nine in the evening.
Many people write stories—but few achieve the uphill climb to publication. Aspiring writers look at how far they need to travel and start feeling so dismal that they’re tempted to quit. They worry that their work is poor and question their calling to authorship.
My soul weeps, and its tears glisten in the fading sunlight; emotions run out into the open, empty air of aloneness. On my skin, they trim their graves with salt and leave the ground beneath them thirsty and cracked so that the light might reach my deepest places.
Unbroken mists upon the water veil the island’s silhouette; just a shadowland, it caught her by its magic, in its clutch, with just a touch of violet amid an iridescent gray.
I don’t have a temple; I barely have a prayer. In the hollows of this empty church, I know that You are there. I find You in the silence, in the way the shadows fall, I find You in my heartbeat as it echoes from wall to wall.
