Blog Archives
The Homecoming Tree — 20 years!
My mother and father married on July 27,1935 in the middle of the Great Depression. Most Americans have no idea how bad times were in 1935. My father wanted to be a farmer and by the time 1940 rolled around their family was almost starving. My mother laid down the law and my parents along with my brother and sister moved from the tiny watermelon capital of Louisiana, Saline to the big city of Shreveport. My father was fortunate to get a job at the post office thanks to his brother in law. My mother went to work at Sears & Roebuck downtown.
They leased a house of Buckner Street with plenty of room for the family. Then, in 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. My father was thirty days away from being deployed to Europe when he was told as an employee of the U. S. Post Office, he would keep his job.
Soon after, my uncles from Saline left for Europe or the Pacific. Their families, one by one, moved in with my parents. My father converted a back porch into two bedrooms. The Hennigan “boarding” house was in business.
One of my aunts worked as a taxi driver in Shreveport during the war and the stories my parents told about her antics showed she was far ahead of her time! I loved to sit just off my uncle’s living room in Saline while my parents and their brothers, sisters, and in laws shelled peas and shucked corn and told about life during the Depression and World War II.
In 1999 I had converted all of my parents’ photographs from the past century into an old fashion slide show. My brother, born in 1937, joined them and I turned on the video camera while they told me their life story. Slide by slide we covered their lives from 1914 until to the early 1950’s. In particular, I was interested in life in Shreveport and Bossier City during the war.
In 1992, I became the drama director at Brookwood Baptist Church. By 2005, I had written and directed over 100 long and short dramas and I was ready to move on from drama to dedicate my time to writing books. For my last production, I decided to write a play based on my parents’ stories from World War II for our holiday production in 2005.
“The Homecoming Tree” told the story of a family living in Shreveport from their Thanksgiving meal up through Christmas Eve 1941. It was a huge production covering the entire stage area of our new church campus and featured over fifteen actors and actresses. We had a snow machine for outside scenes. We turned the baptistery into a radio studio. My mother had passed away in 2004 but my father recorded a 1940’s song and along with songs from 1941 it played during the scene changes. I had a three camera setup to record the entire production. (Unfortunately, one of the main actors routinely got off track in the third act and we had to flail around a bit to get everyone back on task.) However, it was one of the best received productions at Brookwood Baptist Church.
A few years passed and I was not happy with one of the characters I had created. I imagined a different framing for the story and rewrote the play featuring a modern day business man about to ruin his family by running off with his secretary. In order to teach him the importance of family, he is sent back in time to 1941 with amnesia and has to learn the lessons of the Greatest Generation. To be honest, many churches asked for the script but because of the scope of the production, they were unable to produce the play.
I decided to write a novelization of the play. “The Homecoming Tree” novel premiered in 2018. Great reviews followed. One reviewer said it reminded him of his favorite Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (which was totally intentional on my part) and that reviewer reads the book every Christmas to get into the spirit of the holidays.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of “The Homecoming Tree” play and I want to encourage everyone to check out the book for this Christmas. Now, more than ever, we need to remember the sacrifices and devotion of the “Greatest Generation” as they fought and defeated evil throughout the world in order to bring about freedom and liberty.
You can find out more about the book at this link.
The Shreveport Times Article
I met author Judy Christie a few years back at our “Author! Author!” event here in Shreveport. Judy writes excellent novels with a “Louisiana flair” and her books are delightful. Check them out. Well, not too long ago, Judy and I reconnected and she has written an article for the Shreveport Times about little old me! I am humbled and honored by her article you can read at this link.
Now, for an update to the fourth book in the Chronicles of Jonathan Steel. I am finishing up the final edit this week. After being released from a very restrictive book contract and whittling down the story from 120000 words to 75000 words it is a pleasure to completely redo the novel. I was forced to cut so much of the story in order to meet these word count restrictions. Now, I have written the book I want to read. And, hopefully, my writing has improved thanks to editorial input from fiction editors I worked with while at Charisma.
My plan now is to publish the book under my own imprint and I am shooting for August or September so I will keep you posted.
Thanks again to Judy for a wonderful article.
Apologetics, Fiction, Drama, Speaking, and I’m Tired, Oh My!!!!
January and February are usually quiet months for me as an author. With one notable exception. Last year, my editor sent me the first editorial suggestions for “The 13th Demon” in February and I spent the month working on a major rewrite for the book that came out in October of 2011. This year, I was prepared to spend mid February to March on the book. I was thinking that January would be quiet. Dead. Nothing would happen.
Wrong!!!!!
Here it is the end of February and I am SOOOOO busy and I love it! Already, I’m out of breath and the year has just begun. And, according to my stalwart editor, Andy, the second book “The 12th Demon” out this coming October is MUCH better than book one. I’m getting stoked for a good year.
Bottom Line so far: God is so good. And, as I look forward to 2012 and look back to where God has brought me from, I realize I’m riding the wave of His plan for my life, not mine. And, that is just where I need to be.
Item #1 — Drama. I never wanted to be involved in drama. And yet, God positioned me to be in charge of a drama ministry at Brookwood Baptist Church for 15 years!!! Because of my experience with drama, I am requested often to speak on a multitude of topics relating to drama in the church. This past weekend, I spoke at the annual Louisiana Music and Drama Festival on my work with kids in our church’s Kidstuf program. That work involves writing and rewriting and adapting scripts for weekly drama and directing adults to act like kids. The weird things is, Kidstuf is oddly about apologetics. You know, the defense of the Christian faith; the establishment of the fact that our worldview is based on sound, rational thinking. So, how does Kidstuf work? Each month, we teach the kids a “virture” or value, like honesty, self-control, honor, generosity, sacrifice, etc. And those virtues are rooted in sound scripture. And how do we convey this to the kids? Through edgy sketches and drama that makes them THINK! That’s right! We’re making our kids think critically about the world around them. Imagine that! Which leads me toL
Item #2 — Apologetics. I never imagined I would be in this field. For one thing, I never knew it existed until I was challenged by my scientific colleagues on why I was a Christian. This story I’ve shared many times before. But, I never imagined I would become a trained apologist and then use that apologetics to defend my faith and help out with kids who are being twisted and deformed by our postmodern culture. In fact, since the first of the year I have spoken four times at major venues on apologetics! That is in addition to the speaking engagement at the drama festival. I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to our state Evangelism Conference. And then, I was invited to come and speak to Mark Sutton Ministries’ seminary class on apologetics. And then, I was invited to speak at two different “LifeGroup” sessions here in my home city. Tomorrow night, my best friend Mark Riser and I will be speaking at the launch of a new church series on the Life of Christ.
I mean, this is just too weird!!! How did I get into this? But, you know what else happened? Somehow apologetics made me want to write fiction that used those facts as the basis for stories and that led to . . .
Item #3 — Published Christian Author in Speculative Fiction. I started out at the age of 13 writing science fiction. For years I tried to get published and put my writing career on the shelf to conquer college and medical school. When I came back to it, God say “Write Drama” and that is what I did. In 1995 a series of children’s plays was published by Contemporary Drama. Wait! It’s supposed to be science fiction! And then, I got depressed. Bad depressed and worked through it in two years and my pastor said “Let’s write a book on depression.” And we did and in 2001 came “Conquering Depression” published by Broadman & Holman. But, where was the science fiction? I brooded over my multiple manuscripts of science fiction all in various stages of development and nothing happened. I told God I would write whatever he wanted me to write. After all, I hadn’t been too successful with the science fiction stuff, but God had used me to touch lives with other kinds of writing. Maybe the big Dude Upstairs knows what He’s doing!
I woke up one Saturday morning with this weird, scary, horror type story in my head that used, wait for it, apologetics as a center piece and the results, 30 days later, was “The 13 Demon”. I didn’t want to do what I now know is “speculative fiction”. I wanted to stick to good old hard science fiction. But, God had other plans. And now I’m writing, published, apologizing, kidstuffing and . . .
Item #4 — Speaking Career. Back in 2008 when I was taking a course in apologetics I was required to go to this Dynamic Communication Workshop and learn how to, uh, communicate. Get out of here! I already KNOW how to communicate! I write. I speak. I direct. I act. I chase little monkeys around the kid’s area. But, I had no choice. If I wanted to get my Certified Apologetic Instructor certification, I would head out at once to DCW. Guess what? Life. Changing. Experience! Bada bing! I was Co Mun Icating! And, now, I am getting all kinds of request to come and speak on everything from “How Can I Know God Exists?” to “Writing and Adapting Scripts for Children” to “Should I Self Publish or Not?”
Here I am smack dab in the middle of a plan I never imagined. I wanted to be the next Michael Crichton. Well, in a way, my speculative fiction is similar to the style he used. So, did God allow me to have the desires of my heart. You bet you He did! Man, what a year so far!
So, I’m contemplating a new endeavor. I’m considering starting a website dedicated to “apologetic fiction”. What does this mean? Simply, my goal would be to equip Christian fiction and non fiction writers with ways to use their writing to show the truth of the Christian worldview. I plan on talking about LEGACY — the mean and women of the past who used their writing to advance Truth. People such as C. S. Lewis and Tolkien and Chesterton. I plan on touching on BASICS, the basic tenets of apologetics — philosophy, history, science and how we can think again as Christians. How to use those elements in your writing. I plan on REVIEWS, covering books both fiction and non fiction about Christian apologetics so that you, the author, will know which book is best for your research. I plan on exposing FORBIDDEN topics, what my LifeGroup pastor, Weston, calls “speculative theology”. These are topics we Christians LOVE to argue over but that can become a stumbling block to non believers and skeptics we are trying to reach with our writing. And, I want to invite other authors to submit PARABLES, stories, poems, essays, blog posts illustrating the need for Truth in today’s postmodern culture. And finally, a little game in “NAME THAT WORLDVIEW” where I review a novel, a television show, a movie, etc. and see if you can figure what worldview is being portrayed.
So there it is. Look soon for the site intitled PARABOLE, the Greek word for parable. Is it more work? Yes! But, it is no more work than I am involved in right now preparing for these teaching and speaking engagements.
So, if you might be interested in exploring such a site, send me a comment. Make a suggestion. Let’s see if we can proclaim TRUTH to the world through our FICTION and our WRITING.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a nap!!!!!
Bruce Hennigan 
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