Writing

When I was in fifth grade, we had to write a story. I wrote a two- or three-page rip-off of The Lost World, having seen the movie not long before. That was the beginning, I guess.

I don't recall writing anything other than school-related essays after that until my senior year in high school. At that point, I began to write poetry. Pretty bad poetry, of course, but at least it didn't rhyme. I had a sense of the rhythm of language but not much sense of how to make the lyrics match the beat. I wound up being interviewed for an article about my poetry in the school newspaper, and two or three poems were included. The only thing I remember about the article was that it started out with, "If you see Mike Dodd and he's not smiling, then that's not Mike Dodd." It struck me as funny at the time because I was in a pretty depressive period. Hence the poetry, right?

I got a couple of things published in a national college poetry review when I was at Michigan State, but I did not put much energy into writing. Well, except into letters. I kept up a voluminous correspondence for a few years in there with friends back in Texas. My roommates hated me my freshman year because I received at least one letter every single day, and sometimes as many as seven or eight.

After entering the monastery, I wrote articles for the magazines that the Carmelites published, and over the years got involved in other ways with their publications, writing, translating and doing some light editorial work. I had things published in the States, in Europe and in Africa, twenty or so articles and book reviews. I edited a quarterly province-wide newsletter and a monthly vocation newsletter. When I was prior at Holy Hill, for three years I contributed an article to the monthly news bulletin.

A guy I knew from my doctoral studies at the Catholic University of America asked me to contribute an article to The New Catholic Encyclopedia of Spirituality, a work he was editing. He was happy enough with what I sent him to ask me to write five more when other solicited contributors failed to meet their deadlines.

I finally published my first novel after leaving the Carmelites, although I  had begun writing it while still a friar. The Dark Night Murders: A Fray John of the Cross Mystery appeared in 2009, followed a few months later by two short works of nonfiction -- Elijah and the Ravens of Carith and Jerome Gratian: A Treatise on Melancholy. The WhoVille books, Wicca in WhoVille and Wickedness in WhoVille came out last year. A third one in the series, Wacky in WhoVille, is in process.

I began keeping a blog in 2004, I think, or soon thereafter. The first one was called Damien's Spot, in honor of St. Damien the Leper, and it dealt with whatever struck me at the time. It was more issue-oriented, dealing especially with topics of religion, gay rights and progressive politics. After a couple of years when I had run out of things to say, or lost interest in some of those topics, I dropped that blog. For a couple of years I kept one called Sleeps with Dragons, and then dropped it, too, deciding to move away from controversy. I started In Dodd We Trust mainly as a way of communicating with my family in Texas about my life in Wisconsin. 

I like blogging, as Michael/Ur-Spo said about himself, because it is one way to scratch the itch of wanting to be a writer.