Chapter Seventeen: The Stage Door

I have a book project that starts with memories and ends taking the reader on the kind of adventure you feel you need a parachute for.

And a cup of tea. This book — Stay with Me: An Adventure in Going Through It — contains the one about being under anaesthetic being chased by a red car.

It has the part about the hot soup and the elderly lady who was careful not to scold me when I was already burning.

And of course the multiple references to desert island backsliding potential, where flower arranging feels more important than ever.

But one thing it has in keeping with an awful lot of other books is a Chapter 17.

I saw a chapter 17 in Genesis, for example. The chapter where name changes make for new identities and vocations. Boundary-breaking chapter.

Again, in Job chapter 17 where he agonises over some of his darkest moments, almost as if he's quoting Psalm chapter 17.

Given up? No. Job's asking God to be his guarantor, while the psalmist holds out expectantly for vindication in the face of the impossible.

Cliff hanger chapter.

And even the big David and Goliath chapter is 1 Samuel chapter 17.

Game changer chapter.

Yes, it seems something unusual always tends to happen in Chapter 17s.

(Should that be "chapters 17"?!)

And in chapter 17 of my book?

Well.

There's even a dive through the fourth wall, and a theatre with a green room that offers less life guidance than you might like before it shoves you sideways into the adventure, so that by the end even the author doesn't know what's going on.

It's a different kind of chapter.

rabbit hole chapter.

A curve ball chapter.

A getting real chapter.

And so for reasons that are becoming clearer to me as I go, here and there on this website you may find a reference to a world beyond the Stage Door — and to the whole Chapter Seventeen-ness of life.

Imaginations need scaffolding. They need theatres, films, collaborations, conversation, tea and sometimes cocktails.

So if you should ever through the Stage Door, you should probably have a look around.

...

Theopoetic world-building hasn't looked anything like this before.

Okay. Except in Genesis…