The Venerable Wolfe, part 2
Vatican, AD 2200. First, there was Saint Chesterton. Then Tolkien. Now, a determined Devil’s Advocate races to block the canonization of the most infamous author of all: the Venerable Gene Wolfe.
By Andrew Gillsmith
Continued from The Venerable Wolfe part 1
“By rights,” intoned Severian, “I could have you both hauled back to the Santarixarum and sent down to Isidore for repair and re-sanctification. This is highly irregular. A pair of agiomatons loose in the world! I’d expect it from the dog, who isn’t even a real saint after all. But you, Lucy? I’m disappointed.”
Guinefort bared her teeth and growled. Lucy’s eyeball earrings blinked, and, though it was difficult to tell without the context of a face, Severian would have sworn that they rolled skyward in disdain. “It’s alright, Guinefort,” she said, stroking the dog’s head until it settled and began wagging its tail. “He means well. And of course we have to remember that there are forces acting upon the poor Advocatus in all directions. Up and down. Good and evil. Backwards and forwards. We see them plainly enough. But to him, it must feel like a Typhon. He’s God’s own chew toy.”
“I’m sure you mean ‘typhoon.’”
Lucy merely shrugged.
Severian crossed his arms and directed a glare at the pair of wayward machines that would make even Savonarola blush. “Look, I don’t know about this miracle business, but I must say that it is entirely in keeping with the Venerable Wolfe’s slippery and mercurial character to go AWOL just before his trial. It is a mark against him.”
“You act as if you’re in charge, Severian,” laughed Lucy, “when you should know that the Increate directs your every step. Come on. We don’t want to be late.”
“An Advocatus is never late,” began Severian. “Or early. He always arrives precisely—”
“Oh bother! Take it up with St. Tolkien. I expect he’ll be joining us at some point. Let’s go.” She turned and began walking towards a door on the far side of the little courtyard, with Guinefort trotting behind her.
“Go where?” shouted Severian.
“To Peoria, of course,” Lucy replied as she disappeared through the portal.
Severian paused for a moment, considering his options. He could return to his office, pour himself a brandy, and file a report. That would be the smart move. More importantly, it was what the code of his order demanded.
Perhaps it was that something was already stirring in his heart: curiosity or some flickering hunger to taste the world as it really was, out there beyond the walls of his tower and the strictures of his code. Quite possibly it was pride–the idea of two agiomatons defying him, one of which was a dog, must certainly have offended his dignity. Then again, the Increate acts in mysterious ways, sometimes casting effects backwards in time from some yet-unknown cause or using even one’s own concupiscence to bring forth the good. Knowing this, it was likely both.
Severian followed Lucy and the dog through the door.
***
The sky in Peoria was the color of a synodal declaration–noncommittal grey and subject to revision at a moment’s notice. Severian shivered and drew his fuligin cloak closer to shield against the midwestern chill.
There was no sign of the portal through which they had passed, which would no doubt have attracted unwelcome attention at the corner of Frye and New York Avenue. Lucy bent down to Guinefort’s ear and whispered an apology. “I’m sorry, Guin, but you’ll need to wear a leash. The last thing we need is animal control showing up to issue a fine.”
“Where, exactly, are we?” asked Severian. He did not give voice to the other, more urgent question on his mind, which was “how, exactly, did we get here?”
“I told you already,” replied Lucy. “Peoria.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. But where in Peoria, aside from the intersection of two rather sad, American streets.”
“Follow me,” said Lucy, turning south on New York.
Severian followed behind her, dodging gaping cracks in the sidewalk and the occasional deposit of dog excrement. Ramshackle houses, Victorian in name only, lined the street. Americans, thought Severian. They could bleed the whimsy out of a gingerbread house. There were no bright colors, here. No turrets or trim or gracious bay windows. Just peeling whitewash devoid of any ornamentation.
A church came into view a block ahead, its red brick modestly covered by oak trees still clinging to the last leaves of fall. Were it not for a patinated, copper cupola in more or less the shape of the Duomo of Florence, it could have been Methodist or, worse, Baptist.
“Well,” said Lucy. “We’re here.”
Severian read the name, which was engraved in a nondescript concrete slab amidst the masonry. “St. Bernard’s.” He rather liked the irascible, old Cistercian, whom he considered a kindred spirit. “Is he our mystery guest?”
“No,” replied Lucy. “He wouldn’t be much help, I’m afraid. He’s rather consumed these days with his vow of silence. Making up for all that preaching and whispering in kings’ ears he did while he was alive, I suppose.”
“Hmmph,” said Severian. Perhaps it was for the best. Much as he admired Bernard’s crusading temperament, the saint’s homilies on the Song of Songs were choc-a-bloc with mystical twaddle and rapturous nonsense—exactly the sort of thing Wolfe probably underlined twice and recited aloud before bed.
“They’re in the crypt,” said Lucy. “Or rather the basement. Americans don’t have crypts.”
“Indeed they do not,” agreed Severian. He cast a sneering glance over the simple church. Even from the outside, it was evident that the stained glass windows were of the quality one might find at a family-owned funeral home. “The closest thing to a relic in these parts is probably a St. Joseph statue buried upside down in a parishioner’s yard, right next to the garden gnome.”
Lucy opened a side door and followed Guinefort down a flight of linoleum-covered stairs, with Severian begrudgingly in tow. Faint voices echoed off the bare walls, growing louder but no more distinct as they reached the bottom. The sound came from the other side of a door that was marked “Adult Faith Formation/Bingo Table Storage.”
Guinefort pawed at the door.
“He’s inside, I presume?” asked Severian.
Lucy smiled and gestured for him to enter.
***
“....So I said to ze Archbishop, ‘Zat, Your Eminence, is ze difference between ze noosphere and ze yessosphere. Zat and ze tambourines, of course. Ze cosmic Christ loves ze tambourines!’”
The voice did not belong to Wolfe, but to a bespectacled Gaul in a Roman collar. He was a priest. What was Wolfe doing talking with a priest in a basement in Peoria?
“Zut, alors! It seems we have visitors!” said the Frenchman. He seemed startled by Severian’s appearance but remarkably nonplussed by Lucy’s eyeless visage. “From ze Vatican by ze looks of you. Zat’s usually not a good sign. If you’ve come to ask about ze six propositions, you may tell Ruffini I’ve already signed them. Even ze fourth.”
“Master Advocatus!” exclaimed Wolfe. “What an unanticipated delight. Do come in.” He offered a tin of Pringles. “Would you like a potato chip? Aquinas tells me that I shouldn’t call them that. He says they resemble potato chips only in accident, not in substance. Still, they’re rather tasty.”
Severian was momentarily unsure of where to direct his glower and so divided it equally between the two men.
“But I’m being rude. This,” said Wolfe, “is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist of some repute. And quite a good storyteller, as it turns out.”
“At your service,” said Teilhard de Chardin, with a slight bow.
“I know who he is,” hissed Severian. “A heresiarch. A half-Gnostic theologaster and a mystagogue. Worst of all-–an unauthorized agiomaton. How did he come to exist?”
“Ah,” said Chardin. “Straight to ze existential questions, I see. It’s a funny story…”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“It’s simple, really,” said Wolfe. “I asked Isidore to build him for me.”
“You asked Saint Isidore to build this, this abomination for you? And he complied?”
Wolfe’s mustache danced over his smile like a Latin epigram bristling with innuendo. “Well, yes. Why wouldn’t he? He gets a bit bored down there, you know. I think he enjoyed the challenge. You see, I asked him to build Pierre here using not just his own writings but my own as well. Surely you must know that the Book of the New Sun is shot through with his ideas on convergence and reverse causation. It’s the whole Omega point, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
De Chardin chuckled. “Yes! From black hole to white fountain, ze birth of a new sun. Very good, very good!”
Severian could not believe his ears. He turned, mouth agape, to Lucy. “There! You heard it–straight from the man’s own lips!”
“To be honest with you,” replied Lucy, “I’m not much of a science fiction fan.”
“That—that’s beside the point. He just confessed that his entire body of work is nothing more than novelized heresy! He is no saint.”
Wolfe shrugged his shoulders and reached into the tin for another crisp. “I never claimed to be one in the first place. But as for calling Pierre a heretic, I think that’s a bit harsh.”
“Harsh! He gave rise to a thousand New Age inanities. He mechanized grace and stuffed it into ill-fitting genes. Of course he was a heretic.”
“If you go around calling everyone who has unorthodox ideas a heretic, you’ll have to excommunicate practically every science fiction writer who ever was,” said Wolfe.
“Don’t tempt me,” seethed Severian.
“All I’m saying,” Wolfe replied gently, “is that you have to leave some room for speculation. Otherwise, you’re just as guilty of mechanizing grace as you accuse poor Pierre here of being. I mean, what exactly would you have him do? He signed those six propositions. He went into exile, willingly. He submitted to the authority of the magisterium. Now you want to police his inner thoughts. Forgive me, my dear Advocatus, but it seems almost Protestant of you.”
De Chardin gasped, and even Guinefort tucked her tail and whimpered. A deathly silence fell over the storage room before Severian responded. “I think that our business here is concluded, Lucy. If you would kindly conduct me back to the Tower, I shall have my report filed by midnight.”
Before she could reply, the fluorescent lights flickered and there was a soft rap at the door. When it swung open, a puff of pipe smoke poured into the room like incense. The source of it was a tweed-clad badger of a man whose expression betrayed an unusual combination of fierce intelligence and wry amusement. He slid in with an easy, aristocratic grace and bent to scratch Guinefort behind her ears.
Behind him, another man squeezed sideways through the opening. A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perched daintily on an upturned nose, giving his face the general aspect of a Christmas ornament in the shape of a pig. His hair appeared to have just finished an argument, the outcome of which had either been a decisive loss or a pyrrhic victory. He smiled broadly and exhaled once he was clear of the threshold. “Well,” he said, “here we all are then, in Plato’s Cave. I hope you remembered your torch, Professor Tolkien.”
Severian glowered uselessly. Neither Tolkien nor Chesterton had ever displayed the slightest susceptibility to his moods. “If you’ve come for the entertainment, I’m afraid you’re a bit late,” he said. “Wolfe has just disqualified himself. I shall file my report this evening. The outcome of the trial is now certain.”
Tolkien took a long draw of his pipe and puffed out a series of concentric rings. “You forget to whom you speak, Advocatus. My portfolio includes eucatastrophe. Nothing is ever certain in this world, least of all unhappy endings.”
Severian harumphed. “Unhappy? A strange choice of words, Professor. I should think that you, of all people, would approve. Did you notice who Wolfe was speaking to?”
“I did,” replied Tolkien. And it was evident that he did not entirely approve.
“That’s right. None other than Teilhard de Chardin. I believe you had some choice words about him while you were alive.”
“I did,” Tolkien said again, smiling this time.
“Well, you should know that Wolfe just confessed to basing his entire oeuvre on de Chardin’s musings. Surely you agree this is disqualifying?”
“I confess,” began the saint, “that I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations and have done so ever since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”
It was Severian’s turn to smile, though the moment was short-lived.
“That being said,” continued Tolkien. “We are not here to judge the quality of Wolfe’s writing but rather to judge Wolfe himself.”
“Thanks be to God,” said Chesterton. “I may have written the proverbial book on Orthodoxy, but there are only so many times one can re-read a text to decide whether it is heretical or merely French.”
“Nonsense,” protested Severian. “It is impossible to judge a writer without judging his writing. We cannot separate the man from his work, and because we cannot truly know the soul of the man, we must make do with his words instead.”
It was, he thought, a rather deft rebuttal. Tolkien puffed contemplatively on his pipe, and even Chesterton was at a momentary loss for words.
Wolfe broke the silence first. “I agree. Wholeheartedly, in fact. I willingly submit to your inquisition.”
“You flatter me,” said Severian. “This is an inquiry, not an inquisition.”
“To the tortured man,” replied Wolfe, “that is often a distinction without a difference.”
***
“It seems to me to be an open-and-shut case,” began Severian. “Wolfe was a writer. A good writer, I’ll grant you. A clever one. Perhaps even a great one, though certainly not to my taste. That is all quite beside the point. If we are to canonize a writer, surely it must be on the basis of whether his words have beckoned souls closer to the Truth. Yours certainly did, Professor. As did Chesterton’s. That you both did so with subtlety and a certain—oh, what’s the word?”
“Je ne sais quoi?” suggested Chardin.
“No, that’s not it. Panache! The fact that you did so with subtlety and panache is irrelevant. If such things mattered, we’d have a Saint Asimov and a Saint Le Guin. Perhaps,” he shuddered, “even Harlan Ellison would have made the cut.”
Tolkien nodded gravely. “True. We are discussing heavenly matters, after all, not the Hugo Awards.”
“A chilling thought,” mused Chesterton. “We should be thankful that Heaven does not employ ranked choice voting. Otherwise the good thief never would have made it past round four. Poor Augustine would probably find himself de-platformed.”
Tolkien continued, “Certainly, The Book of the New Sun is not my cup of tea. It’s better than Dune, of course. And, though I shall deny it if you ever quote me, far superior to any fiction dear Clive ever penned. But there is a kind of darkness in it, or rather a dimness befitting a world that has outlived its own eschaton.”
“Precisely,” said Severian. “It is covered in a fog of gnosticism, whereas your books, Professor, are filled with light. Even the most casual reader would note the difference.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any casual readers,” noted Wolfe. It was not so much an objection as a wistful shrug.
“Which brings me to my next point,” Severian replied. “This whole business of requiring multiple re-readings strikes me as satanically ambitious. Prideful, even. The truth does not need to be hidden beneath a fuligin cloak and a mask. On the contrary, the message of the Gospel is simplicity itself. Wrapping it in obscure metaphors and intertextual puzzles is like hiding the Eucharist in a pudding.”
Chesterton nodded, though Severian couldn’t help but notice he was licking his lips. “In fairness,” he said, “man cannot live by bread alone. Nor can a writer be expected to do nothing but produce recapitulations of the Gospel each time he puts pen to paper. There would be goodness in it, to be sure, but perhaps not enough joy.”
“It is true,” said Tolkien, “that there is a joy in subcreation. Properly ordered, it is not a mere pastime, but a vocation. But there is peril in it, too. Fantasy can be carried to excess. It can be ill-done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came. The right to create–and make no mistake, it is a human right–is no guarantee against error.”
Wolfe wiped some Pringles crumbs from his mustache and reached back into the can, as rapt as if he were in an adoration chapel.
“You make my very point, Professor,” rejoined Severian. “We are free to explore, but only within certain limits. We are free to taste the fruit of every tree but one.”
Tolkien exhaled a cloud of smoke in the shape of a winged dragon before responding. “It seems to me that we must distinguish between the artistic impulse and the theological claim. It is natural and even just to take pride in one’s work. The danger is in mistaking it for revelation.”
Severian sensed victory was at hand. “Indeed. And when the line between story and doctrine begins to blur, someone must step in to draw it again. That is the very definition of disordered pride, is it not?”
“And who, Advocatus, do you suggest has the authority to draw this line? The critic?”
“That is an unusual way to refer to the Holy Office, but yes. Certainly we cannot leave such important matters to the whim of the artist.”
Tolkien removed his pipe with deliberate care. The smoke-dragon he had puffed earlier floated menacingly towards the drop ceiling, now exhaling its own smoke. “I’m afraid I cannot agree. It all reminds me too much of the critics I contended with at Oxford, the ones who wanted to scour every metre of Beowulf until the beasts themselves were banished, to say nothing of the magic. The monsters matter, Severian.”
“The word you’re looking for is ‘disenchantment,’” said Chesterton. “Man perishes for want of wonder. Just because one unclogs a drain doesn’t mean that the basin is any better or cleaner, only emptier.”
“Quite so,” agreed Tolkien. “Furthermore, literature is not catechesis. To claim otherwise borders on blasphemy. At its best, a book might be a conduit for grace.”
“And at its worst,” retorted Severian, “it is pure Pelagianism, preaching salvation without grace.” Even the Professor was momentarily stumped by this new angle of attack, so Severian pressed on. “The Book of the New Sun is a sacramental word salad! We have resurrections effected by the glandular secretions of alien beasts. A cannibalistic eucharist! Hierodules masquerading as angels. And worst of all, a self-transcending cosmic Christ who ascends to the Omega point and then returns to anoint us all with a chrism of smugness!”
“Yes, but this is all quite irrelevant!” protested Chesterton.
“How so?”
“You speak of grace as if it must always appear in white robes and golden light, singing Alleluia a capella. Hidden grace is still grace. And sometimes, it wears a fuligin cloak and carries a bloody longsword.”
Tolkien smiled wryly. “All that is gold does not glitter. And not all who wander are lost.”
“And does grace walk around shirtless, bedding every woman it meets like some angsty Lothario with an Oedipus Complex?”
Wolfe blushed and stared at his shoes.
“He was a boomer science fiction writer, after all,” said Chesterton. “You must cut him some slack.”
Severian could sense the argument slipping away from him, but he had saved his sharpest point for just such a moment. “All of that might be true. And yet still, God is not an unreliable narrator.”
“Unreliable? Certainly not!” said Chesterton. “We may rely upon Him to challenge us and confound us at every turn. God gives us mysteries for the same reason He gave us beer: because He loves us and desires our happiness. What would man be without mystery? What purpose could there be in life if everything were spelled out for us in sanitized syllogisms. The greatest mystery of all must certainly be that others love God and yet love Him for reasons completely different from our own.”
“All of this,” said Tolkien, “reminds me of the story of Aulë and the dwarves.”
“The what?” asked Severian.
“It’s from the Silmarillion.”
“I’m afraid I only read finished books, Professor Tolkien, not worldbuilding notes cobbled together by literary estates.”
“The Dwarves, you see, were never supposed to be made. They were not part of God’s revealed plan. And yet Aulë, the great subcreator, grew impatient. He went into his forge beneath the mountains and made the dwarves out of rock and pure stubbornness. God saw this of course, and so He reproached Aulë—not for malice but for presumption. The Great Smith was grieved and deeply repentant, and so he offered to destroy his creations with his own hammer. But just before the hammer stroke fell, God stayed his hand. Aulë had made them not out of pride or defiance, you see, but out of love. And so God gave them life. He wrote them into the story.”
“Are you suggesting that God made a mistake, Professor Tolkien? That he should have included the dwarves in his plan from the get-go?”
“I am suggesting,” replied the saint, “that humility is at the core of God’s plan. That by offering to destroy his own creation—to put them on the altar as it were—Aulë made it possible for God to give them life.”
Severian looked at Wolfe, then at Lucy. The argument was over. But he still had one final gambit to play.
“So it is the creator’s willingness to destroy his creation that makes it acceptable, then?”
Tolkien shrugged. “More or less.”
“Very well,” said Severian with a wicked smile. “Wolfe, I command you to destroy the agiomaton of Teilhard de Chardin.”
The room fell silent as silent as a cloister at midnight, but for a startled yelp from Guinefort.
***
Wolfe’s eyes, which normally teetered in a holy tension between sorrow and impishness, dimmed slightly. And yet, if one looked closely—and especially if one happened to be a writer—a new light flickered in their depths: the light of an author who finally realizes not only how his story must end, but no other ending could ever have been true.
“Dear heavens, man!” protested Chesterton. “Have you no mercy?”
“Mercy must be learned, Gilbert,” said Saint Lucy softly. “Justice is instinctive. Be patient, just a bit longer.”
Wolfe raised a hand to cut Chesterton off before he could reply. “It’s alright,” he said. “We are all torturers at heart. I do not care whether I end up a saint or not, but the Advocatus is perfectly within his rights to ask this of me.”
Teilhard de Chardin, for his part, took the news as well as could be expected. “Ah, well,” he sighed. “Zat’s evolution for you. One either ends up in the noosphere or gets kicked to the uh-oh-osphere.” He turned to present his back to Wolfe. A small, blinking kill switch protruded from beneath his stiff roman collar, looking for all the world like a confession light. “Go ahead, mon ami. You may press ze button.”
Wolfe hesitated, looking first to the assembled saints and then to Severian for any hint of clemency. Finding none, he whispered an apology to Teilhard de Chardin and placed his finger upon the button.
***
Suddenly, the air in the storage room became electric, and a prismatic aura appeared in their midst, small and dim at first, but expanding like a supernova to fill the room.
At its center there was a single, unblinking eyeball that seemed somehow to be staring at each person present as if he or she was the only person in the room. Surrounding the eyeball, there was a spinning gimbal ring of discs, gold in color and studded with countless eyes. Eyes sprouted from its wings, too, which quavered like a bumblebee hovering over a particularly juicy flower.
“Gene, Gene,” it said.
“Here I am,” said Wolfe.
“I know,” replied the angel. “I can see you perfectly well. I’ve got eyes in places they have no business being. Like a Catholic mother with six children at a fish fry. Anyway, do not lay your hand on the Frenchman or harm him in any way, for I now know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your creation from me.”
Severian protested. “Metatron! You don’t have the authority. You are an agiomaton, too. Just like all of these others. This is a matter for the Church to decide.”
For an instant, the apparition glowed brighter than the sun. Severian shielded his eyes and retreated toward the door.
“I am no agiomaton,” said the Angel. “I am the true messenger of the Lord. Normally, this is where I would say ‘do not be afraid,’ but a little fear would do you good, Advocatus.”
Tolkien smiled as broadly as if watching Barad-dur collapse into rubble. “Eucatastrophe,” he whispered. “The best kind of catastrophe there is.”
“God did not make man to be an automaton–with apologies to present company. He gave you free will and an imagination. He gave you curiosity, which is really just another word for prayer. If you’re going to muck about seeking truth in something as primitive as language, you must have the freedom to be wrong.”
Wolfe and Chardin both asked the same question at more or less the same time. “Was I wrong, then?”
“Oh, quite,” replied Metatron. “But so were Professor Tolkien and Gilbert and even Lucy and Guinefort. That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” asked Severian, who had recovered his voice and at least some of his courage.
“The point,” said Metatron, “is that all speculation is holy curiosity if it is offered in the spirit of humility. You’re bound to get it wrong—you’re only human, after all. As for The Venerable Wolfe, well–his story is still unfolding, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” asked Severian.
“I mean that good stories—the kind of stories the Boss really loves—never really end. They grow. They invite people in. They let readers become characters and co-creators.”
“Sacre bleu!” exclaimed Chardin. “So it’s like I always said. Creation is not an act, but a process. It is always happening, even now. The universe is still becoming!”
Metatron rolled most of his eyes. “That’s a rather boring and academic way of putting it. Let us say instead, as Wolfe did, that in fiction you are not describing the real world, but rather making a new one. And if you do it well enough and earnestly enough, that world becomes real. Not just to readers, but in some strange way, even to God.”
The agiomatons were all smiling, but Severian’s brow was furrowed with worry. “So—have I erred, then? Do I need to make penance?”
“Not at all!” replied Metatron. “You are part of the story too, Severian. You were only playing your role, as best you could. What was it that Paul said? Something about how all things work together for good?”
“Well,” said Tolkien. “It seems our business here is finished. I do love a happy ending.”
“Ending?” replied Metatron. “No. The journey does not end here. There is so much before you all beyond this gray rain curtain. White shores, a far green country under a swift sunrise and all that. But I have already lingered too long. I trust,” he said turning to Severian, “that you can handle it from here.”
“I believe I can,” replied the Advocatus. And with that, Metatron vanished in a puff of purple incense.
***
Though he still harbored misgivings about fraternizing with the agiomatons, Severian found himself spending more time in St. Lucy’s company back at the Santarixarum. And with the others, too. He noticed that they no longer shrank from him in fear, and to his surprise, this did not trouble him in the slightest. Even Bede would occasionally seek him out, usually on the pretense of asking about the time.
One day, after Wolfe’s trial had concluded, he posed the question that had been bothering him ever since that fateful day in Peoria.
“When we began our little adventure, you said that we were going to witness a miracle. We saw a lot of things in that church basement, but I’m not sure any of them would qualify. I’m speaking technically, of course.”
Lucy smiled at him, her eyeball earrings radiating warmth and grace. “Oh, my dear Severian,” she said. “Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“It was you. You were the miracle.”
“Me? I don’t understand.”
“The greatest miracle of them all,” Lucy answered, “is a heart transformed.”
Andrew Gillsmith is a science fiction writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of the Deserted Vineyard series, the Planet Gallywood series, and The Jerusalem Passage.
Gillsmith grew up in the Golden Age of Cyberpunk. Fittingly, his first job out of school was delivering mail for Jeff Bezos when he was still selling books via Listserv. Since then, he's worked in a number of interesting roles, including head of customer experience for the Kentucky Derby, leader of a proposed hyperloop project in the United States, head of data analysis for a healthcare company, and SVP of sales for a digital marketing agency. He currently works in publisher development in the programmatic advertising space.
He is married to Cheryl and has two young sons, a Great Dane, and a pet rat named Reggie.
Copyright © 2025 Andrew Gillsmith & Incensepunk LLC
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Bravo! That was an absolute blast! So many memorable one-liners mixed in with the insightful wisdom!