By Guest Columnist Craig Seasholes
Methow Press publisher, poet, and author Greg Wright has published a 3-volume collection of Wonderstruck essays he’s written beginning in 2018. As Greg is someone who helps promote local poets and authors in events throughout the Methow Valley, I have been delighted to dive in and catch up on what he’d been writing.
The depth and breadth of Greg’s interests and experiences shine in essays that touch on his wide-ranging cultural interests to deeply personal accounts from nearly 15 years as caregiver during his late wife’s terminal illness. Soon after her passing at the end of 2017, he began writing letters and essays addressed in her memory. Exploring grief and love, and informed by his Christian spiritual beliefs, Greg coalesced his thoughts around the notion of Wonderstruck: Because the Universe Wants Us to be Surprised by What Comes Next.That title of the first of three volumes gathers chronologically his growing wonder at what others might call co-incidental occurrences that Greg finds with increasing conviction that all may be marvelous evidence of divine origin and capacious creative possibility.
Collected in his second volume Wonderstruck by Arts & Artists, Greg’s fascination with film, music, and language is a disco-ball scattering of topics that sparkle here and there across a breathtakingly wide range of interests. He recounts years as reviewer at HollywoodJesus.com and shares many of those film and music reviews. He recounts years as a published and lecturing expert on JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. He wrote and directed a Western film set in the Okanogan. Music and film reviews fly from his pen and dance across essays as wide ranging as his interests and connected by coincidence to personal events and musings of divine wonderment.
The third volume Wonderstruck by the Methow gathers essays penned after Greg made his move to the Methow Valley, beginning a new chapter in his life as pastor and publisher, storekeeper and cultural cultivator. Continuing to find coincidence and wonder as he settles snugly into this next chapter of his life, Greg penned essays describing his getting to know people and finding his pastoral calling. He describes high-country hikes that leave him speechless, wonderstruck by place and coincidence. Coming down from my own week-long journey reading Wright’s Wonderstruck trilogy, I’ll admit that throughout my reading I’d harbored a guilty feeling, because I was unfamiliar with the Todd Haynes 2017 film Wonderstruck, a mystery drama that so captured Greg’s imagination.
For some reason, all week long I had set aside my own memory of a book by the same title, the second of Brian Selznick’s hugely popular books for young adults. Selznick had shattered expectations with his first novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret that blended sections of intensely cinematic pencil-sketched sequences with prose passages. Awarded the 2008 Caldecott medal that celebrates best illustrated books for children, never before had a 533-paged tome gathered that award. I had seen the successful film adaptation. I had even been fortunate to see and hear Selznick’s 2015 AASL conference presentation of his method of drawing and writing, accompanied by his husband’s beautiful solo piano.
But somehow, it seems I’d missed that Selznick’s second cinematic hybrid novel Wonderstruck had also been adapted to film.
THAT Wonderstruck? It was the very film that by which Greg Wright was himself wonderfully struck!
Having enjoyed Wright’s Wonderstruck, I laugh aloud to confess that actually I did know the story, if not the film that so impressed Greg. And now, I recall the title of Selznick’s third tome: The Marvels.
I can’t but wait and marvel at what Greg Wright will be up to next.
The Wonderstruck trilogy is available now at Valley Goods and Trail’s End, and I will be emceeing a book release party for Greg at the Winthrop Library at 6 PM on Wednesday, May 28th. See you there!
