Thanks Phyllis for the intro, and thanks Sybil for the first-ever selfie review! We love this book!
I don’t remember the exact place, of course, but I do remember that it was at lunch. [Sybil MacBeth and I “do” lunch fairly regularly, or we would, if only we could manage to be in the same place at the same time more than a half-dozen times a year. Her PRAYING IN COLOR work and my Emergence talks keep us both fairly well occupied…or perhaps better said, pre-occupied.]Anyway, she had just received the final, last-chance-to make-corrections version of her new book, The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Extremist from Paraclete Press, the publisher. I had already seen various iterations of the copy and the artwork when we were to have lunch that day. Sybil’s an Advent freak, to put it kindly, so I had asked her to send me the latest version. She did…and I, who really am not an Advent fan, fell in love with what she had done. I said, “This is great stuff. It is so you and so what Advent should be.”Sipping from one of her numerous glasses of unsweetened Iced tea with lemon, she, uncharacteristically, admitted that she herself liked what was happening, but there was jitteriness in the response. The tea or something else, I wondered? Sybil: #quot;Phyllis, I think this is an odd book. The first third of it looks like the inside of my brain–lots of messy rooms and scrambled thoughts. So I##039;ve beat other reviewers to the punch and have written my own review. The review is sort of an apologetic for the structure of the book, but it also tells readers about my vision. It’s partly serious, partly goofy. It was really cathartic to write it. Now I feel better about the book##039;s oddness.#quot;Phyllis: #quot;I want to see it.#quot; Sybil: #quot;Uh, really?#quot;So Sybil sent me the review and I loved It. “This is too much fun for you to keep it to yourself. I dare to you to post it for the world to see. If you post, I will too,” I said.So these several months later, the book is now available; and Sybil, who cannot for the life of her refuse a dare and I knew it, may have written publishing’s first selfie review, which I am more than charmed to post here. As I said, I love this book, and I think you will, too. Go ahead. Read it. I dare you.Here##039;s Sybil##039;s selfie review: http://prayingincolor.com/selfie-review-of-the-season-of-the-nativity