Is there a literary genre that you haven’t tried writing yet that you’d like to tackle?

Probably.  I don’t know.  I do know that I’ve had unusual success in children’s poetry and then in the poetry of The Singer.  Some of my serious books, The Book of Jesus … that was popular and never in the Christian market.  It came out from Simon & Schuster in New York, and it sold in Doubleday Book Club rather than in the ECPA.  So a lot of people in the ECPA probably still don’t know that I wrote it.  But it was in a marketplace that did kind of count.  That’s where we’d all like to be with our writing, I think.  In the secular market, if we can. 

The Greek god Proteus was a god who could change his form to meet every occasion.  He could be an animal or a bird or whatever.  And in terms of genre, there are not too many people who can change very successfully.  A novelist only usually writes novels well.  Occasionally there’s a man like C.S. Lewis who can do children’s books who can do Surprised by Joy who can do theology and popular thought, who can do all of that.  And when he comes along, you’re so grateful because it’s a huge balancer.

I’ve found one of the things that’s bad about not being able to change genres is that it seems that no matter how good a novelist is, pretty soon if I’ve read ten of their novels and they start sounding alike.  And it’s kind of like my friend Madeline L’Engle.  She always wrote novels, but she said they always sounded just alike.  And she used to say [to the publisher], “Well what are you calling it this time?”  So I think the good thing about being able to skip from genre to genre is that you lose that predictability that you get if you only stay in one form. 

For more information about Calvin Miller, The Path to Celtic Prayer or The Singer, please visit Calvin Miller's site or InterVarsity Press.