Putting Pen to Paper
A Conversation with Benjamin Struck on Goals, Passion, and Risk
He’s a husband and a father. He’s a Liberty Classical Academy graduate and science teacher. He’s the son of a Liberty Classical English teacher. He’s an academic and he’s a scientist, with a degree in biochemistry. But he’s not a scientist the way some people would define it—dogmatically loyal to algorithms that quantify our universe or so prescriptive with reason and logic that he dismisses any possibility for mystery. Quite the contrary. Benjamin Struck is a scientist because it’s his excuse to play, create, and invent. It’s his chance to explore, because that’s what he’s built to do. He’s never been able to quell his curiosity. He’s never stopped questioning realities, imagining narratives, and exploring possibilities.
Science helped give his unending curiosity a playground.
Science took Mr. Struck as a field biologist to the backcountry of Alaska, living for months in a canvas tent on the tundra. It gave him the ability to interact with systems; to experiment with cause and effect. He lived in nature while he also relied on it, studied it, and marveled at it. When you speak to him, he’ll catch you off-guard with his reflections from those days. Like when he tells of his first time seeing the Denali mountain range and how the sight of it brought him to tears.
But science fell short. Eventually physical matter, atomic structures, field biology, and the empirical world surrounding him were not enough. That’s when Mr. Struck created his own playground for exploration and also became an author. That part technically started when he was in the 6th grade with a story of a band of Legionnaires who daringly joined together to rescue their comrade’s son. He probably wouldn’t be overly eager to share that first piece of literature with many of us. But fortunately for us, he’s sharing his stories now.
Mr. Struck’s first fantasy novel The West Wind Tales: Of Sword & Sand was released in April. The story has an original Old Norse and Icelandic-influenced language along with detailed maps of an adjacent and whimsical universe. With careful thought and precision, he has imagined and built a world with more depth, characterization, substance, and meaning than most of us observe or experience in the physical world that we actually inhabit.
The adventure takes place in Yordn; in the Northland Kingdom to be exact. The protagonist, River, embarks on a journey to discover and reclaim what’s been lost. His struggle to know what is true and what is possible brings him to the essential questions he must face if he’s ever going to fight the battle he was born to fight. What unfolds is an adventure not for the faint of heart. It’s full of passion and blood, with magic and mysticism, and with that thing that is present in every human heart: a simultaneous and infinite capacity for cowardice and heroism.
Putting Pen to Paper
I’m glad that people like Wendell Berry never submitted to that inner voice that says, “Don’t waste your time” or “Why would anyone care what you have to say?” Imagine what we’d have lost if Tolkien never came up from grading papers long enough to write that first line of The Hobbit. Think of a reality where Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” was never given a voice and Rembrandt’s depiction of The Return of the Prodigal Son never made it to canvas.
Try to place yourself in a world where these dreams never took form because those dreamers never took risks.
And that’s what inspires me about Mr. Struck. He always had a dream of being published before he turned 30. He’s 29. Along the way, he questioned his abilities to tell a story, to write a story, and to sell a story. Along the way, he abandoned his efforts at random times and then came back to them. Along the way, he asked questions of himself and his abilities much like River asked of himself in his journey through the Northland Kingdom. But in the end, he picked up a pen and he wrote a story.
And it’s a story worth reading.
At some point we all have to make the choice that Mr. Struck made: the choice to move forward with some dream that we’ve had; some belief that someday we’d do the thing, make the move; be the person. At some point, we have to put pen to paper.
Thank you Mr. Struck for showing us what that looks like. Thank you for not snuffing out your curiosity but instead being so bold as to indulge it. Thank you for not believing the lies that told you it wasn’t worth your time or effort. Our world is a better place when God’s people put Truth, Goodness, and Beauty into it. Our school is a better place–and our students are better people–when dreamers like you put pen to paper.