Atkinson has put together a collection of short stories that, while they can stand up individually on their own, together begin to put together a vivid picture of the man called Foy Davis. There is no set arc to his story – some stories flash back to Foy’s childhood, others jump ahead to his time in New Orleans, to where he has sort of run away after leaving his position as a minister. Individually and together, they offer a complex and human look into a fascinating character.

Foy is the everyman, questioning his beliefs. Only – Foy is a preacher. Aren’t they supposed to be pretty secure in their faith? And there is the hook – it is the honesty, the real-ness of the character that settles into your bones. This is the guy I want to sit down with over coffee (or a beer) and talk to about faith and life, because he makes you feel ok about your doubts.

But the book is more than that. There is a quiet presence in all his tales that really connected, a clarity in the writing, a total lack of pretense. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve every struggled so much in trying to capture in words the feel a book projects, or what exactly it was that resounded so much with me, but it did. Deeply.

I was provided an copy of the book for review - all thoughts and opinions are my own. ( )

To me, Gordon Atkinson will always be the Real Live Preacher (RLP). Even though he no longer holds a position as a church pastor, he is still preaching the word, to me at least. This book, Foy: On the Road to Lost, is yet another example of his still preaching.

I first got to know Gordon Atkinson (aka RLP, as I'll call him during the rest of this self-indulgent excuse of a "review") when I discovered his web site back sometime around 2005 or 2006. I had a lot of dead time in the lab waiting for things to happen (I was slowly heating things up until they exploded) and so, I spent some of that "waiting" time surfing the web. I believe he began the site in 2004, so I got on board, so to speak a year or two after he began that site. At the time Gordon was the pastor of a small (I think) Baptist church in Texas.

I didn't know much about Baptists then, although some of my Kansas cousins on my maternal grandfather's side were Baptists. He and my mother's people were Methodists. Anyway, what I thought I knew of Baptists was the most obvious, and odious, form of them, the Southern Baptists. If rank-and-file Southern Baptists are anything like their more prominent "leaders"—e.g. Al Mohler, Robert Jeffress, Richard Land, Franklin Graham, etc.—they would be a more ignorant and bigoted group of people than you could ever hope to meet. An object lesson of all that's opposed to the Jesus' "good news". My guess is Southern Baptists are, by and large, wonderful people who just got stuck with the dregs of humanity populating their leadership ranks. [sorry for the digression; on to RLP]

But RLP, as I'll refer to Gordon—I hope he'll forgive me—was clearly cut from different cloth. He, like my other favorite Baptist, Fred Clark (a.k.a. Slacktivist), was a thinker and questioner. RLP (and Slactivist), understood that the human condition was complex, that the questions about what came first and what comes last were not straightforward. In short, RLP was one of the most honest thinkers of the human condition I had yet encountered.

So, anyway, RLP would post various musings about life and spirituality, musings that resonated with me, a lowly UCC (pronounced uhck; allegedly it stands for United Church of Christ; sometimes people refer to UCC as "Unitarians considering Christ", or occasionally, to our "old" New England name, Congregationalists). Along with his musings about this and that, RLP also posted stories about a guy named Foy Davis. That is the genesis of this book. It seems that RLP has written some 41 stories about Foy, although I'm not sure they were all posted on RLP.com back in the day. He's still writing/revising them. He has collected 25 of them into this volume. Another volume is to come out later in the year. There may be more to follow, it's not completely clear. RLP is being coy, but does promise a finale of sorts.

What we have here are a series of vignettes in the life of Foy Davis. His life from beginning to end is to be sketched out in these vignettes, although not chronologically. When we're done, after another volume or two, we'll find out that Foy, like most of us, was an authentic person who had his failings all the while trying to be a good person. Something like that.

Atkinson is a gifted writer. He is very good at helping us see into the mind of his character, by relating universal, albeit trivial, instances in day-to-day living. I was blessed with an advanced copy of this book, and I can't wait for the next.

Normally, I read on Kindle, so am not generally exposed to decent typography. But, I read the dead-tree version of this book, and one of its great features was the typography. The typography in this book is better than you find in most dead-tree books, and certainly way above anything one could reproduce on a Kindle. I think the type face was something like Caslon Antique. Whatever, it gave a particularly graceful look to the telling of Foy's life. So, even if you aren't interested in reading about the all-too-common struggles of Foy's attempts to find meaning in his life, read this book for its presentation.
( )

I feel like I just spent time with a friend.
This is one of those books that would certainly have passed me by if I hadn't requested it for review from Audiobook Boom. The bright orange cover is appealing but I don't think the content would have been able to compete against the huge publicity machine that is today's book industry.

Fortunately it caught my eye as a freebie and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the ruminations of Foy on everything from his childhood as the son of a Baptist Minister, to his following in his father's footsteps, to his questioning what he does and does not actually believe - and leaving the ministry.
It's not at all preachy and has a very genuine, human feel to it. Foy is generous hearted and considerate and I particularly liked the episode where he spent time with a man who was dying of aids.

By the time the audio was finished I felt as if I was losing a friend and I hope I shall be able to follow this with more excerpts from Foy's life in the future.
An interesting comment caught my eye in the acknowledgements - only his wife knows how close, or otherwise, Foy's character is to the author's.

Talking of acknowledgements, I should make a mention of the excellent narration by Karl Miller.
Thank you to Audiobook Boom, the publisher, Material Media and Audible for my free copy in return for an honest review. ( )

LITERARY FICTION
Gordon Atkinson
Foy: On the Road to Lost
Material Media
Paperback, 978-0-9967-5355-5, (also available as an e-book), 194 pgs., $15.95
March 1, 2017

Minister Foy Davis is having a bad week. His wife, and mother of his daughters, has served him with divorce papers, then two days later, in a more or less mutual decision (“like two lovers staring at each other and saying, almost simultaneously, We need to talk”), he’s been removed and/or resigned as pastor of a Baptist church in San Antonio. Foy’s midlife crisis of faith has been building throughout his adult life. He wonders what it would be like to be “a regular person.” As he’s leaving the church for the last time, he reaches for a vial of rose oil used for anointing the sick, gifted to him by an Episcopal-priest friend, and anoints his own forehead.

Foy sets out to discover what he suspects he might’ve been missing. In New Orleans. During Mardi Gras. He may even take up cigars. Emotionally volatile—swinging from anger to sorrow and back again—Foy is weary of being responsible for his congregation (for their souls, no less), and thinks he’d like to be “mildly empathetic, across a vast emotional chasm,” instead. He has “fantasized about … absolute freedom” for years, but in the event, he may find that it really is just another word for nothing left to lose. No matter how he tries, ecumenical Foy can’t make himself stop caring about people.

Foy: On the Road to Lost, the first novel by Gordon Atkinson, M.Div., doesn’t fit neatly into any of our convenient genres. It is only loosely a novel, as addressed in the Author’s Note. Each chapter is a self-contained unit, and the whole resembles a collection of linked short stories. These related tales are really a character sketch, but too finely developed and richly detailed to be termed a “sketch.”

Atkinson is at his best writing about Foy’s childhood, as a small child in Fort Davis, then as an adolescent in Houston. I’m reminded of the story of Harper Lee’s agent telling her to rework her book from Scout’s point of view—that’s how good Atkinson is with the boy Foy. Another standout character is Foy’s mother, a philosophy student who put away her ambitions to settle down to marriage, motherhood, and the expectations placed on a preacher’s wife in the 1960s. “The Sunday school teachers swaddled [Foy’s] mind every Sunday morning,” Atkinson writes. ”Sunday nights she [Foy’s mother] took him outside under the stars … [and] carefully unwound the swaddling clothes and set him free.”

Kudos belong to the design team responsible for Foy. This slim, bright yellow book sports beautiful end pages of black-and-white photographic images of the mountains of West Texas and charmingly whimsical pencil sketches of a character we assume to be Foy. Even the typeface has a story; it involves a dispute between the owners of a nineteenth-century British press resulting in every piece of the metal typeface being dumped into the Thames. There are so many small, literary jewels in Foy: On the Road to Lost.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. ( )

Foy Davis, son of a Baptist minister, was born into a world that left little room for nonbelievers, doubters, or dissenters, and as Foy would learn to his surprise a few decades later, he had a little of each of these characteristics in him. But a minister does not just walk away from the responsibilities of a church and a congregation. Life is never that simple.

Gordon Atkinson has been writing short stories about the fictional Foy Davis since 2004 when he published the first one of them online. According to Atkinson, there are now forty-one Foy Davis stories, including even the one about Foy’s eventual death. Atkinson has chosen twenty-five of those stories and arranged them here in chronological order for what he calls “the composite novel” Foy: On the Road to Lost. Keeping in mind that each of the novel’s chapters were originally meant to be read as standalones over a period of years, I cannot imagine how reading them that way could possibly match the emotional punch that comes from reading them here as one, longer story of a man’s entire life. Transforming the stories into a novel this way is a brilliant idea that gives them new life – and Atkinson plans to bring out the second volume of Foy’s story sometime in 2017.

Foy Davis was born in Fort Davis, the small West Texas town at the foot of the Davis mountains where is father five years earlier had moved the family to accept a job as associate pastor of a Baptist church. As a PK (preacher’s kid), Foy recognized early on that he had a defined roll to play in Fort Davis social life and he fully embraced his responsibilities – even once trying to save the soul of a fellow third-grader by helping him recite the “sinner’s prayer” behind a shed they passed on their way to school.

Foy continued to do what was expected of him (and, more importantly what he expected of himself) as he followed his father’s footsteps into the ministry and a church of his own in San Antonio. But Foy’s approach to life and the ministry was, even then, a little bit outside the norm because Foy at times struggled with religious doubts of his own, and was even known to admit his personal struggle to those whom he counseled in his office.

For Foy Davis, life is about living as a Christian should live, showing kindness and understanding to everyone he encounters regardless of faith, sexual orientation, or personal failings. He believes in respecting everyone until they prove they do not deserve his respect. Most importantly, he feels that a belief in God is not necessary in order for one to live a good life – and he more admires those who live such a life out of personal choice than out of fear of the wrath of a vengeful God.

The twenty-five stories (covering the years 1961-2011) used in Foy: On the Road to Lost take Foy Davis on quite a journey, one in which he is still trying to figure out exactly who he is. My only (for lack of a better word) complaint about the book is that it was over all too quickly. I found myself liking Foy more and more, and then he was gone. I miss him and I want to hear more from him, so I’m looking forward to Atkinson’s “volume two” of the Foy Davis story. Stay tuned. ( )