LAYMAN OF LETTERS
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a man of letters is “a man, usually a writer, who knows a lot about literature,” while a search for “man of letters” on Wikipedia redirects you to the page for “Intellectual.”
Now while I am indeed both a man and a writer—and I would say I know a fair bit about literature (though “a lot” might be pushing it)—I’m certainly no intellectual.
When I think of men of letters, I think of men like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton—writers who wrote anything and everything—prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, novels and short stories, critical essays and scholarly dissertations, historical musings and popular apologetics. Men who never stayed in their literary lane nor settled for a single genre.
But as much as I admire these literary legends, I’m no Clive Staples or Gilbert Keith—I’m just a layman, both in the religious and secular senses of the word: a bibliophilic cradle Catholic and an autodidactic college dropout who learned from the masters that writing isn’t just about what you write, but how you write it.
The love of language, the music of metaphor, the gestalt of grammar—you get the idea.
In other words, expect to see anything and everything written on here—all of the aforementioned forms will likely make an appearance at one point or another, but with the throughline being my personal perspective and a commitment to aesthetic originality.
As for what it is I actually want to write about, well, a sampling of my eclectic tastes should give you some idea: Roman Catholic Christianity; classic literature and pulp fiction; culture war politics and popular history; American comic books and Japanese animation; horror movies and professional wrestling; RPGs and plastic model kits; expect to see all these nerdy niches and many more as I add to my archives every single week.
You can also look forward to future forays into fiction via the various short stories and serialized novels I have planned—all written as only a LAYMAN OF LETTERS can.
Building a reader base from scratch is difficult enough as it is, but for a layman not adept at (nor interested in) the finer points of algorithmics and search engine optimization, I can only pray that potential subscribers who stumble across my work will be kind enough to engage with the content I provide by LIKING, RESTACKING, and COMMENTING on my posts! (hey, maybe I’m better at this social media stuff than I thought…)
