A Recap of the Festival of Faith & Writing 2012

Web Editor Ian David Philpot shares his experience at the Festival of Faith and Writing.

Last weekend I attended Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, MI. This was my second time at the biannual conference. Both times I've attended I've been representing Relief, of which I am the web editor. This means that I spent a good amount of the conference at the Relief table in the exhibitor hall telling people about the journal and meeting people who we have published.

The sessions I saw were incredible! This is in stark contrast to my experience at AWP. Though I only went to four sessions (all on Friday), I couldn't have been happier with them. The first session was called "The Word Needs Flesh: Sex and Faith in Contemporary Writing" with John Estes and Amy Frykholm (a Relief published author). The second session was "From Page to the Screen: Adapting Novels and Short Stories for Film" with Scott Teems. The third was an interview of one of my favorite authors: Craig Thompson. The fourth and final session was Craig going through his graphic novel writing process. I ended the day at Calvin's art gallery where some of Craig's drawings were on display.

Here are some of the snippets that I took away from the sessions:

• "We're uncomfortable with our needs and our wants because they're selfish and we don't want to be perceived as selfish." —John Estes
• "The church can't make you holy any more a school can make you smart." —John Estes on self motivation
• "If you don't really look at pleasure, you can't have discipline over it." —Amy Frykholm
• "Our job as adapters is to attempt and theme—attempt to portray the author's intentions and sort out the themes to display to keep the audience interested." —Scott Teems
• "Once you've done something autobiographical, you've burned all your bridges and you're free to do whatever you want." —Craig Thompson on the creative freedom that opened up after writing Blankets
• "Because of the paper canvas, comics feel like a letter from the author." —Craig Thompson

I also had the opportunity to meet some new people who were very kind, entertaining, and nice from Antler, Rock & Sling (here's a picture a the awesome banner over their table), Word Farm, and many more. I also had a great time meeting some of the Relief staff I hadn't met before, like Jake Slaughter, Lyle Enright, Andy Koenig, and Tania Runyan. Our evening shenanigans were the best I've ever had at a conference, and I was sad that they had to come to an end. Great people.

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This blog post originally appeared on Ian's blog. Ian writes fiction, poetry, and music. He prefers tea to coffee, Coca Cola to Pepsi, and only eats yellow cake.

The Unspeakable in Poetry: A Love Story

5.2 poet Julie L. Moore explains how her poem became the occasion of our first printing the word "vulva" - and it turns out to be for the best of reasons.

Back in July of 1975, when I was just ten, a nurse carted me into the operating room of West Jersey Hospital. My parents walked along at my gurney’s side, my dad, holding my hand. At the O.R. door, the gurney stopped, my parents kissed me, and I looked at them and said, “Don’t worry. God is going to take care of me.”

In May of 2009, a nurse rolled me into the operating room at Kettering Medical Center in southwest Ohio for my eighth surgery and the removal of my fourth organ. My faith, scarred as my abdomen by then, was no longer blind or simple but hard as a dog’s big rawhide bone. When it fell, it clattered as it hit the floor. It was also vulnerable, capable of being devoured in one sitting, if I let it, by the sharp teeth and strong jaws of pain. And it wasn’t the kind of faith you cuddled up with.

It’s fairly easy to talk about losing body parts. I’ve received phone calls from friends and emails from readers I don’t know who find themselves in my uncomfortable shoes:

I have an ovarian cyst. Didn’t you get an ovary removed because of this? I’m going crazy here. Can you help me?

I’m having all kinds of trouble after having had my gall bladder removed last year. I heard you had trouble, too . . .

And I answer them.

Some, too, have contacted me because they endure unimaginable pain, the kind of long and deep suffering I had no idea existed when I was just ten. The kind that digs into their bones, their backs, their bellies. And that, too, I have talked about.

But there is one area that, until now, I found to be unspeakable. I knew I wasn’t alone, that other women endured what I was experiencing. But write about it? That just seemed wrong. On many levels.

Level One: I’d embarrass my family and/or myself.

Level Two: I just shouldn’t talk about that. Some things should remain private.

Level Three: If my readers know that, they’ll focus only on that and not on my work. (Maybe that’s not a category of “wrong” but rather a category of “ego.” But still.)

So I wrote about enduring pain, about making sense of suffering. I was vivid in my descriptions and clear about the temptations intractable pain brings, like overdosing on medications from well-meaning doctors. When pain stabs, shoots, tears, claws, shocks, and yes, feels like “fifty pins embedded” in flesh, who can stand it?

Yet, I avoided describing all my medical conditions for a variety of reasons. One, I didn’t want readers getting distracted by terminology and two, the most important thing was never what went wrong in my body but how, and why, I endured it.

After I’d published poems about my experiences, however, there was still a voice, sounding an awful lot like Elizabeth Bishop, that kept saying, “Write it!”

And “Prayer Shawl” was born. “Confession,” a poem I’d written several years ago, was the only poem that came close to naming the body parts that hurt, the incredibly feminine nature of my pain. But that poem was cloaked in biblical narrative, the hemorrhaging woman whose labia throbbed.

How to say vagina in a poem. Or vulva. With the possessive pronoun my.

But there it is in “Prayer Shawl,” a poem wrapped in the story of others, dear friends, who have likewise suffered, felt the temptation to throw in the towel, experienced the unrelenting grief of permanent loss. Yet endure.

And my poem is wrapped in the story of my marriage, a husband who has also endured pain and anxiety and the threat of premature death. How terrifying to live through such experiences together in our early forties. This wasn’t the way our story was supposed to go.

And how agonizing to realize that the love we shared, and yes, the making of that love, could not heal me. That I experienced such tremendous pain off and on for six years stood to threaten the very fabric of our marriage. What’s a love story without good sex, after all?

Except that sex isn’t the only way spouses can express love. Except that love can transcend even suffering. Except that prayer to a God who hung himself on a cross, while nails, no less, simultaneously punctured his tender flesh, really has sustained me.

This is my story, pain and love on multiple levels, a story that, as I’ve lived it, has often struck me dumb.

Julie L. Moore's poem "Prayer Shawl" appears in issue 5.2 of Relief.