Building The Cathedral
Craig Cunningham on Faith, Fables & Following a Dream
(Note: I have switched the podcast host for Make It. Share It. to Riverside FM, the service I use to produce and edit the podcast. You can find all the links to the show here or just go to wherever you enjoy podcasts.)
Join us as we welcome back our very first return guest, author Craig Cunningham, to talk about his new fable, The Cathedral.
Craig shares the origin of the story—a years-old vision of building an actual cathedral in the West Texas desert—and how that idea eventually merged with his own journey as a writer into the tale of Adeo, a boy called to build a cathedral of his own.
Craig walks us through writing the first draft in three uninterrupted days in Terlingua, Texas, how he finds the voice for every one of his stories, and the four mentors who guide Adeo across his life: the traveler, the architect, the magician, and the angel. The conversation lands on the book’s central twist...the cathedral was never the building. It was always being built in him.
Three Key Takeaways
The project is never the project. What’s being formed in you matters more than what you’re building.
Obedience, not strategy, is what actually opens the doors you couldn’t have planned for.
You rarely get to see the full impact of what you create. Trust that it’s part of a bigger story.
Something Unexpected
Craig reveals that after seven books, he almost thought The Cathedral might be his last, until the process of writing it convinced him to keep going indefinitely.
Listen to the full episode for:
Craig’s story of finding his novel’s voice through a single opening line, and why that line changes everything for him creatively.
A rich discussion on why self-promotion feels impossible for so many creatives, and why doing it anyway matters.
Lauren and Steven’s own stories of building something (a coffee shop, a music career) that shaped them more than the outcome ever could.
An update on the film One Night in a Thousand Years, including a major new investor commitment.
Resources from the show:
One Night In A Thousand Years Film Journal
The Cave, The Road, The Table, and The Fire
Kurt Vonnegut On Buying An Envelope:
(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope)
Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”