Blessing of Unicorns: Nature, plants, novels, homeschooling, and trying to write better

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One unicorn out in the wild is lovely, unique, special. But herded together, unicorns form a blessing. So, here’s this week’s Blessing of Unicorns upon your Friday morning—including essays on living creatures, plant life, homeschooling and parental rights, conservatives and academia, and trying to write better with the help of two masters of the craft.

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Hadden Turner writes on the joy and privilege of “Naming Creatures” in Plough. It all started with birdwatching


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From creatures to plants—I loved Amanda Patchin’s essay “The Light Eaters,” on ZoĂ« Schlanger’s book by this name.

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Tara Isabella Burton begins a Symposium on the Novel at her Substack with this lovely essay “On trying to write a novel.” A taste, before you go read it in full:

One of the worst things we can do as human beings, I think, is lie about the nature of reality.

There is only one problem. I am also a novelist. I am a Christian novelist — whatever that means — and a novelist who spends a lot of time fretting over theological implications of things, but I am also a novelist who loves novels; insofar as I have a vocation, and I think I do, it lies primarily in my fiction. And yet, still I sit here, trying to write this novel I’ve been mulling over for years about Trieste and Duino and Habsburg nostalgia and disillusioned writers and dissolute expats.

I joke, often, that one of these days I’m going to ‘meme myself’ out of writing novels. I don’t want to do this. Not just because I, personally, want to write them, but because I do have an instinctive sense, reading, say, The Brothers Karamazov or Middlemarch or any of the novels that make me want to write novels, that what I am experiencing is not a kind of aesthetic distraction from reality — something I do and have experienced elsewhere, including from more indulgent novels — but rather a fuller, richer, sense of it.

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A fellow homeschool mom-writer, Sara Butler Nardo, documents beginning the school year (insert ominous background music), titling her piece on this subject “Perhaps It Will Kill Us All.”

We normally start the school year on August 1st, but a book deadline this year motivated me to take our summer vacation in August, so we’ll start towards the end of the month.

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Speaking of homeschooling, I’m looking forward to chairing/commenting on a panel about homeschooling at the Conference on Faith and History this October—with Brantley Gasaway, Joseph K. Griffith II, and Dixie Dillon Lane. Two of the three panelists happen to be good friends of the Williams fam, so this will be extra fun.

In the meanwhile, I highly recommend Griffith’s essay last week on homeschooling and parental rights in Christianity Today. And you can check out Dixie’s piece on a related subject from the Current vault—Homeschooling and the Washington Post.

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Last week I recommended Mark Moyar’s essay on conservatives in academia. This week, I’m happy to follow this up with Kayla Bartsch’s piece for The National Review: “Universities Are Not the Enemy.” Bartsch responds to J.D. Vance and conservatives who are attacking academia: There are plenty of thoughtful conservatives in academia who are trying to reform it from within. Attacking universities Ă  la Vance doesn’t make their task any easier.

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Finally, from reading to writing. A few months ago, I read (retired IVP editor) Andrew Le Peau’s Write Better.

Now, per Current editor Eric Miller’s recommendation, I just picked up a copy of Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style: A Guide to Writing English.

Will reading more books on writing make me a better writer? There’s only one way to find out. But in the meanwhile, I will say, both are fun reads.