The pulpit and the pen Former Maine minister embarks on new career as versatile author

A minister who writes heartwarming, “Chicken Soup for the Soul”-type stories – that makes sense.

But one who writes chilling horror stories – that doesn’t jibe for many people.

Steve Burt is a now-retired minister who writes both of those kinds of stories, and more. He doesn’t see any contradiction.

“As a minister, I speak about the Holy Ghost, about Christ coming back from the dead on the third day, about all kinds of supernatural things in the Old Testament,” Burt said. “As horror writers, we’re talking about an afterlife, about spirits coming back. There’s a long tradition of clergy writing horror stories in England.”

Burt’s career as an author stretches back further than his ministering. He began writing sermons, meditations and articles and getting published while at Bangor Theological Seminary between 1979 and 1983.

“It gave me a good sense how to find my way around the market,” said Burt, who served Methodist and Congregationalist churches in Brewer, Thorndike, Madison, North Arson and Edgecomb during his almost-20-year career. “I learned the basics of free-lance writing. It gave me the discipline to write at night while I was a pastor.”

Burt also had a brush with horror-writing greatness during his seminary years. He lived on Cedar Street in Bangor, three houses from Stephen King’s residence then. Both would walk, individually, down West Broadway to the old Fairmount Restaurant for the 99-cent breakfast special.

Logically enough, Burt first made his mark writing books about church leadership and articles on small-church topics. Today, such nonfiction is his least favorite thing to write, he said.

Next up came heartwarming Christmas stories, which Burt would write for Christmas Eve services to spare his congregants from listening to a sermon. He collected these into his self-published hardcover “A Christmas Dozen.” The CD version of the book was one of nine finalists for a 2001 ForeWord Awards Audio Book of the Year. Also Family Circle will publish one of the stories from the book, titled “Christmas Eve, 12 Plus 97,” in a special holiday issue this year.

Burt, who grew up watching “The Twilight Zone,” returned to the horror genre in 1990, while he was teaching at a Missouri seminary. While sitting at an airport one day, he picked up a copy of “Weird Tales” and began to read.

“I enjoyed [those types of magazines] when I was 14 to 16, and this brought back to me how much,” Burt said.

Burt collected nine of his published stories, six of which were honorable mentions by the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology, into the book “Odd Lot: Stories to Chill the Heart.” The book itself won the silver Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Mystery/Suspense Book of 2001 from the Publishers Marketing Association.

Some of those stories came out of his duties as a junior-high summer camp director.

“We’d tell stories nightly around a campfire,” Burt recalled. “I’d run through the old standards pretty quickly, so I’d start making up new stories. Eventually I wrote those down.”

The title story for his third book, “Unk’s Fiddle: Stories to Touch the Heart,” was included in the “Chicken Soup for the Single’s Soul” anthology.

What do the prizes that his writing has won mean to Burt?

“Early on, it was a sense of affirmation,” he said. “Now the prizes help to give me some legitimacy. I can use it as leverage.”

Because of 200 speaking engagements a year, mostly for readings of his heartwarming stories, Burt retired from his ministry in May 2001.

Still, many of the skills earned through his years of ministry have served him well as a writer.

“I dealt with people at their most human, their most vulnerable,” he said. “To learn to translate that into illustrations and short stories was valuable to me. It’s given me a feel for people, how to capture emotions in stories and anecdotes, both in print and orally.”

It’s left Burt with one drawback as well.

“I’m so used to writing at sermon length that it took me a long time to break out of that,” he said. “My agent’s been after me to do longer stuff. I’ve just started to write long in the last year.”

He has recently finished a pair of novella-length psychic mysteries, and is retooling a murder-mystery. He’s working on two other novels, both set on islands in Maine.

As his own publisher, through Burt Creations, Burt finds himself on the road weekends, selling books at craft shows. His works are available at some book stores, as well as on Amazon.com and his own Web site, www.BurtCreations.com.

Burt isn’t ready to concentrate on any one genre of writing.

“I’m making a living writing various types of things,” he said. “I’d like to spend less time hawking and more time writing the books. I’d like to get out of the publishing business.”