I’m giving two lectures at this weekend’s Northwest Christian Writers Renewal event.

As a preface to these events, Kirk Kraft asked me some questions. (more…)

I need to write this all down while the details are still vivid in my memory.

And then I need to stop telling the story for a while. I’ve answered so many questions about it this weekend that I’m exhausted and I need to set my mind on other subjects. You’ll understand…

On Friday morning, just after 9 a.m., at the corner beside our house, Anne and I waited in the left-turn lane for the signal to change. It was sunny. Anne was driving. I had an enormous red mug full of Earl Grey tea. We were on our way to Edmonds, Washington, for our typical Friday-morning writing session with our friend Reece Carson.

Across the intersection, a salt-and-pepper-haired jogger waited on the corner. Anne remarked that the runner was remarkably muscular and fit for a woman of that age.

There were no other cars at that intersection, although traffic was approaching behind us.

The signal changed, the left-turn arrow came on.

We pulled into the intersection gradually.

A blur of motion to our left caught my attention. … (more…)

On Monday night, April 31, Anne and I sat in the middle of a crowd of comic book superhero fans and film critics. And we had a fantastic time, as the crowd cheered and laughed and celebrated throughout The Avengers‘ 142-minute running time.

But then, what you feel while you’re watching a movie can be very different from what you think about after the movie.

I’ve written a review that includes all of the exclamation points that were exploding in my head while I watched the movie… and yet it also includes many of the misgivings I felt after the movie was over. (more…)

Whenever I put on Sixpence None the Richer, my cat Jonathan Mardukas sings along.

Sometimes, Zooey joins in, singing harmony.

They’re a regular She & Him, Zooey and the Duke.

And speaking of Sixpence None the Richer…

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Look what Roger Ebert’s adding to his Ten Greatest Films list. (more…)

Steve Taylor, director of Blue Like Jazz, controls the chaos in a recreation of Reed College's "Renn Fayre," a three-day campus festival. Photo by Jimmy Abegg.

My review of Blue Like Jazz was published at Filmwell.org several days ago.

But that was just the warm-up… (more…)

Here’s an excerpt from a thorough, excellent review of Gary Ross’s The Hunger Games by Roderick Heath:

“If I’m sounding a little jaded about Collins’ creation, which I enjoyed reading, it’s because the more I thought about The Hunger Games, the less and less satisfied I was. It’s a novel that carefully sets up a situation that is, by definition, a zone of moral nullification, and yet contrives to have our heroine emerge smelling like a rose without ever having to make a genuinely hard choice, in a tale that counts finally as neither effectively elemental nor symbolically rich, but rather as efficiently marketable…. Katniss remains such a clean-cut moral avatar for her audience, in high contrast to a hellish scenario, that its starts to feel somehow dishonest.”

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It was a pleasure to be interviewed by Melinda Schmidt today on Moody Radio’s “Midday Connection.”

If you’ve come here after listening to that, here are some things you might want to know:

You can email me at joverstreet [at] gmail.com.

You can follow me on Facebook at http://facebook.com/jeffreyoverstreethq (please *don’t* bother trying to connect to my other Facebook profile, which I’m currently in the process of dismantling). (more…)

It’s available on Netflix Instant, so now there’s no reason why Lourdes, one of my favorite films of 2009, should remain so obscure.

If this were a “Christian movie” about an afflicted woman who devoted herself to years of prayer, we’d have no reason to suspect anything more than a miracle followed by rejoicing and the promise that her testimony would bring others to faith. Thank God — Hausner’s film gives us something more truthful, stubbornly refusing to deliver the feel-good conclusions that we’ve come to expect from “miracle stories.” That’s not to say the film discourages belief in miracles. It just invites us to think more thoroughly about the implications, and consequences, of divine intervention.

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I come from a family that read hungrily and constantly; there was music—banjo to clarinet to piano—and hikes beside copper-colored ponds, beneath the huff and shrug of spruce at places like Peaks of Otter, reciting the names of deciduous trees. In between, stillness, time to reflect. And within that, Walter Farley’s novels and Webster’s Dictionary, the 1970 edition, I Capture the Castle and World Book Encyclopedia, which opened up the universe and made me hungry to understand why a Tennessee Walking Horse was what it was. But I cannot tease it apart, say, here I begin, here I turn my face toward a different tree line, moving from reader and listener to writer. It doesn’t begin. It doesn’t end.

Any guesses on who wrote that?
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