Many towns have their murderers, but are they also members of a church, a Boy Scout leader, or president of the congregation? Could they be trusted to bring a covered dish faithfully to church suppers? This novel takes the BTK murders in Wichita, Kansas, as inspiration to question issues of evil. How could a man commit murder and yet sit in church all those years until he was caught? What is a Christian? What is Christianity? Can a Christian murderer go to heaven? Mark Cabot and Ralph Gheary, minister and assistant minister of the church to which murderer Thomas Fout belonged, disagree as...

A 1994 trip to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency began the group of poems for The Collector of Bodies. The manuscript stayed in a file until the Civil War began in Syria, March 18, 2011, the author's 70th birthday. The poems were retrieved, and the manuscript continued. Glancy wrote as an observer--as someone who had talked to the students in the universities--who had experienced a foreboding of what was ahead for Syria, especially after listening to the unrest of the students. In the bright sunlight, as they walked toward her, smiling, she...

No Word for the Sea is built on several layers of questioning: What is language? What is memory? Where does the mind go when the circuits shut down? The novel covers seven years in the lives of Solome and Stephen Savard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Stephen is provost at Cobson College, and Solome has raised three children. The events alternate between Stephen's first-person narrative and Solome's third-person narrative in accord with the breaking text of their lives. ""Once there was a common Indo-European language with words for winter and horse, but no word for the sea."" The history of the...