Debra Murphy

Welcome to my homepage! The header image—which, by the way, is a photo I took in Fall 2006–is a grove of London plane trees in Lithia Park, Ashland Oregon, the home of the Oregon Shakespeare festival and one of my favorite places in the world. In fact, I (and my family) love it so much we will soon be living there. It will also be the site of several future novels of mine.

Speaking of websites, we’ve been working hard on upgrading all of them in the Idylls Press family. I’ve even (just for fun, to connect with folks with similar interests) put up a MySpace page. In the process, I’ve already re-connected with an old friend and fellow Shakespeare-fan from the Midwest, so I’m already glad I decided to try it.

My most recent article, an op ed piece on the Mel Gibson controversy (version 2.0, one might almost say) is on Godspy: "Signs and Contradictions: The Mad Mel Mess and Why (or if) it Matters." FYI, Godspy is undergoing a major re-vamp, and should be up and running again very very soon.

As for the rest of my novel-writing career, it’s a bit on hold while I get Idylls Press on a solid footing. However, keep my writing muscles limber by blogging and book reviewing and op-ed-ing.) I hate to order my priorities in such a fashion, since fiction is my first love, but my publishing experience these last couple of years has persuaded me that no serious Catholic novelist (who also likes to write serious novels with overtly Catholic themes) should be naive enough to think it’s an easy go. There are many reasons for this, and by no means all of them have to do with the so-called Culture War—a term I loathe.

But that’s a tale for another time and place. Suffice it to say that I’m focusing for the moment on the publishing end of things, and praying, hard, for a new Catholic literary revival. We have a glorious literary patrimony, but with a few notable exceptions we have been underrepresented, relative to our numbers.

In the meantime, to find out more about The Mystery of Things, visit the book’s website. It recently got a generous review from Stratford Caldecott, author of a number of wonderful books, and editor of Second Spring.

And don’t forget to visit the home page of Idylls Press, which specializes in quality Catholic fiction, both new and "classic". I firmly believe, as small as we are, that we are publishing books that will still be read a century from now.