Writer Showcase: Gina Dalfonzo's Best Work
An interview series, volume 5.
I am honored to count
as a dear (but not strange) friend. She is also a wonderful writer, and is the author of Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis and One by One: Welcoming the Singles in Your Church. She reviews books at Dear, Strange Things (titled after a quote from Dorothy Parker) and writes essays for Plough and Christ and Pop Culture, among others.What do you write about?
I write book reviews and, occasionally, author Q&As.
Why did you choose this theme/topic?
The subtitle of my Substack is "A journey through the TBR [To Be Read] pile," and that's exactly what it is! I'm a rabid collector of books, to the point where I'm really going to have to live a thousand years to get through them all. At some point it struck me that it might help me make some progress through the pile if I started reviewing them on a regular (biweekly, as it turned out) schedule! And also, I just like writing about books. I like discovering something good and telling people about it. And even when I come across something not so good, it can be interesting to think and write about the reasons that it's not.
How long have you been writing on Substack?
Four-and-a-half years. I started in January 2021 with a double review of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi (an exceptionally good book) and Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education (also good, if a little bit gruesome and violent for my taste).
What other bylines have you had in the past?
I’ve written for a number of outlets, including The Atlantic, Christianity Today, and Plough. I’ve also reviewed local theater productions and done interviews for DC Theater Arts. Currently, I write now and then for Christ and Pop Culture. It’s a great site—I’ve been writing for them for years, and I love the people and the publication. And I run a little blog about one of my favorite authors, Charles Dickens, that’s simply called Dickensblog. It’s currently on Typepad, but right now I’m looking to migrate it to WordPress, no easy feat due to my deep level of technological illiteracy! (One reason I like Substack is that it’s so user-friendly even I can use it!)
Please share a few of your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.
“The Good Christian Girl: A Fable”
I wrote this—wow, 15 years ago. It was a chance to be thoroughly open and honest about how hard singleness can be in the church. I would keep on writing on this topic for years, eventually writing a whole book about it (One by One), but I think this early one is one of my more memorable pieces on the subject. It even won a prize for humor, which left me a little bemused, as it wasn’t meant to be humorous. But if that helped the message get out, I guess it’s all good!
“Redeeming von Trapp: Coming to Terms with Unwanted Legacies”
“Small Funny Things: The Subversive Gift of Tim Conway”
Honestly, I have a soft spot for a lot of the pieces I’ve written for Christ and Pop Culture. It’s such a special publication that really encourages you to think deeply and differently about all kinds of cultural artifacts. It even lets you be a little provocative (I’m quite proud of my CAPC piece that defends the ending of My Fair Lady!). I believe it brings out the best in me as a writer. It was hard to pick just a couple of these pieces to share here, but I’ve managed to narrow it down to just these two: my tributes to Christopher Plummer and Tim Conway after their respective deaths. They’re very different pieces (as the two men were very different performers) but they share a common theme: the way that God can use a person’s unique gifts and callings to help make the world just a little bit better, in ways that the person might not even understand or appreciate. And the former piece, in particular, helped me work through a lot of conflicted feelings about my own life and career.
I’ve reviewed a lot of books for Substack, many of which I absolutely love, but Ian Garner’s Z Generation may have struck me the most deeply. Garner lays out the current situation regarding youth culture in Russia quite calmly and matter-of-factly, but the effect is devastating. I hope and trust my review of his book captured a little of that effect, and got at least a few of my readers interested in this incredibly important topic.
“Book Review: The Shadow Histories Duology”
New Zealand writer H. G. Parry is my favorite modern novelist. As I say in this review, if I were a novelist, I’d want to be her. It’s so much fun to review a writer like that—you get to write about so many of the qualities and ideas in books that matter the most to you. I recently reviewed her latest novel, A Far Better Thing, which is wonderful, but I think I did a particularly good job with this earlier review (if I do say so myself).
Who is one other Substack writer you admire? (Link to one of their pieces.)
(Rachel Herrington) is a lovely person, a fellow bookworm, and particularly a fellow Dickens fan. I enjoyed this recent piece she wrote with her husband, Boze, ranking all Dickens’s novels (even though I would have mostly ranked them differently!).Amy here. It was hard for me to choose a favorite of Gina’s pieces to feature at the end, but I finally settled on “Born to Raise the Sons of Earth:” What Ovid Taught Me About Christ. My personal benchmark for a good book review or literary critique is one that makes me want to read something I would otherwise have no interest in, and Gina does just that with Ovid’s Metamorphoses (what can I say? I am sadly lacking in the Classics) in this lovely little essay. I highly recommend Gina’s work as a reader and a fellow writer.
I really enjoyed this! That piece on Tim Conway is wonderful.
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