A Space of One’s Own

“Been doing any writing?” my sister asked me at Thanksgiving.

“No.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Psychotic.”

I should have said, of course, “Hyperbolic and clichéd,” since I’m not feeling exactly psychotic, but more like imbalanced or disoriented—like when you wake in the dark and don’t know where you are. And the cliché: “I need to find time to write,” says every writer in the world.

But for me it’s actually more akin to finding space to write. The best writing I’ve done this fall, I confessed to a writing friend, was during my commute. “Confessed,” because doing it was dangerous bordering on reckless, even when I qualify this confession by noting that I meet perhaps five cars during a forty-five minute stretch of my drive.

More pertinent to why I write then is that space opens up then. Sometime after the stop sign in the unincorporated town of Kenneth, with the bar that will have eight cars parked out front in the evening. Typically after the descent into the long valley of Champepedan Creek with the ghostly cottonwood, its long arms stretched above its head to bless the creek pasture and its cattle. Sometime after the midway point of a ten-mile flatland, marked by three cottonwoods grown up as sisters in a touchless dance. Before the road bends in deference to the next river, the Kanaranzi, which is said to mean in Dakota, “where the Kansas were killed.” Somewhere in this space, inspiration—or at least the deep, irresistible impulse to write—comes upon me.

And I do write, right or not, and drive with my knee.

I know when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own, she had something a little different than this in mind, but my commute reminds me that a writer needs a space of one’s own, that time when the quotidian recedes or, conversely, coalesces into a present that launches writing. One of these spaces, in a semester of chaos, happens to be my commute.

Another one of these spaces, a better one, though not necessarily safer depending on what kind of God one might meet there, is a worship service. Amongst the words of scripture, catechism, and hymn; lost in the long prayer, in the wonderful interminable sermon. Then, too, I find myself in a space of my own with something lurking in the spaces between the words and all those rapt consciousnesses. Then, too, things come clear, words suggest themselves and I make notes madly along the edge of the bulletin. I would stay in that moment because something has opened up—a where and a when, a place and a time, a space.

We would do well to cultivate such spaces, but also take them where we find them.

(Painting by Edvard Munch)

What are you playing at?

In my mid-twenties, in a time of profound personal crisis, I began trying to draw things. I wanted, as always, to write, but I could not write at that point—I could barely talk. It was the first time since early childhood I'd even made an attempt to draw anything: I knew by then I had no aptitude or natural skills as that kind of artist. What a surprising delight to find that I was better than I expected, even with just a tiny bit of instruction, some space to work, and a few hours of attentive play. I began to learn some of what I assume most beginning art students do: how to look; how to see the whole of a thing and its parts sandwiched between back and foregrounds; how the surface and texture of a thing suggests or conceals what is underneath and inside; how to estimate proportion, the size of a thing relative to another; how to direct the trajectory of the next stroke; how light on things makes shade; how a simple thing on a table can become beautiful—a wonder; how to take these things in, and then to render. It was fun—it was true play.

It is harder for me to say how this and other experiments with art (watercolors, carving, cooking, music, photography, filmmaking) have helped my work as a writer, but I'm convinced they have. The rudimentary skills I just described with my foray into drawing overlap or translate pretty directly into a good skill-set for writing, sure. More than anything related to the craft of writing, though, it is the play that has helped me, I think. Experiencing, maybe rediscovering, the joy of dabbling, of failing without cost, of being lost for a while in the act of making: it's playing when I can't (or won't) do the work of writing that has helped me most, though I can't (or won't) say how, exactly. It's too soft or sacred a thing to say directly.

Last summer, my wife bought me a thing I'd been wanting but didn't want to spend the money on. It's called an Olloclip, and it is a tiny set of interchangeable lenses that fit over the camera built into my iPhone. The set she got me has a fisheye lens, a wide-angle lens, and what I most wanted: a macro lens. The macro lens lets me take extreme close-up photos and video. It basically straps a 10X microscope to the HD camera in your pocket. I have spent hours inching my way across the living room shooting subjects I never saw as subjects before. The carpet. Rocks in the fish tank. My pant leg. You may have no idea how thrilling dirt and dust is, until you get real close to it. I would say Extreme Close-Up Vision is a pretty lame superpower for a superhero to have, except that all of my favorite authors seem to have it. May I get real close to you, right now, and ask in a 10X whisper: what are you playing at?

(Photo by Michael Dechane)

Ponderings. . . on Verbicide

Can you do me this favor right now and imagine in your mind’s eye an altar. OK. Now put the following title “Progress” on that handsome altar. (No doubt you are chuckling right now, but work with me.) OK, we probably would agree that such a thing is not just connected with a strict religious connotation, right? Altars are used for sacrifice, and that is not always bad. Parents sacrifice time for their children. Couple’s sacrifice their earlier freedoms for—hopefully—the bliss of togetherness. Respectable citizens sacrifice their money for good charity. Forward thinking students sacrifice some frivolities for future degrees, etc., etc. We generally sacrifice something for a reason, and that's good.

Of course, while some sacrifice can also be offered out of good intentions, it can also have lamentable consequences. We make a sacrifice for a perceived good and then it turns out later to make things worse. We have sacrificed our environment for the sake of convenience, our health for the sake of a quick meal, and our leisure for the sake of cheap utilitarianism.

What about words though? And what of that altar of sacrifice? Let’s take another thought test: think of the following words “pure,” “chaste,” “modest,” and “virginal,” (I cringe whilst typing!) and then imagine employing them in an everyday conversation. Better yet, try to remember any modern day movie or play or novel you have heard them in.

Maybe it’s just me—though I don't think so!—but doesn't “purity” have a rather flaccid, weak and wimpish connotation to it? And a “chaste” individual in our time and age is a what? A nun? Probably a modest nun. As far as “virginal”? ... no one even wants to go there. Yet despite the fanciful claim that our age is still sexually repressed, why then have we sacrificed the non-sexual meanings of these words in even our spiritual settings for the most part? Part of it is that we are paranoid of gendering words, I think. (I can't help myself, but when was the last time you heard the word “maiden” used? It’s sexist right? I mean a maidenly CEO is literally an anathema. And understandably so: maidenly is not productive or efficient.) Even words like “innocent” or “wholesome” are little used. What would “innocent” look like? A reaction I have gotten when asking is “oh, probably someone really naive, or young or frigid.” When I asked if “wholesome” could be included with vibrant sexuality, I got a truly odd look; sure, organic food is wholesome, Jersey cow cream is wholesome, but, like, an actual person who partakes in “wholesome” sexuality ... and isn't Amish (AKA boring)? I can't ever see Victoria Secret coming out with a “wholesome” line of undies. I rest my case.

We all know that chaste doesn't just mean abstaining from you-know-what. It also means to be circumspect, restrained from excess, and to be free from indecency or offensiveness. As consumers, that sounds like something we need more of! (Even if nothing else than to rid ourselves of kitsch.) How about being chaste of desire? And not sexual desire either. Yet, since that word has lately been castigated to only its sexual connotation, what has modern culture lost? In his Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis talked of verbicide. He mentioned that morality and immorality have been linked nearly exclusively to chastity and lechery. Yet morality includes more than just the sexual. So do words like “modest” or “chaste” or “pure.” They do, in fact, include large tracts of our life, and we will be better off if we don't sacrifice their use in our diction simply because current culture isn't comfortable with words that carry the whiff of—heavens!—temperance. And there is yet another word we could study!

Internal Editor

Editing, in itself, is not the problem. Editing is usually necessary if we want to end up with something satisfactory… [But] The habit of compulsive, premature editing doesn’t just make writing hard. It also makes writing dead. — Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers

Last Fall, my wife and I began reading The Artist’s Way together and doing some of the work Cameron prescribes for recovering or nurturing the stunted artist she claims is in each of us. Early in the book, she lays out the importance of free writing exercises and brings up the idea of an internal editor that will invariably try and squash these attempts to just write. The exercises were fun, and the time with my wife was delightful, but I was uncomfortable with really believing that there was some kind of creativity-killing hobgoblin lurking in the shadows of my inner life. A year later, I wonder why: there really is something – someone – there, that fits that bill. Just trying to write a post about it/them is enough to prove Cameron’s idea plausible, if not true. And I remember Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects, riffing on Baudelaire: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

So I’m trying to understand who this editor is. And what to do with them: try to ignore them or bypass them or shut them up? Or talk to them, get to know them, understand what they want, and find some way to live (and write) with them? There is a false kind of freedom in saying or writing, without filtering, whatever I want that isn’t good or godly, and that’s not what I’m seeking. Instead, I’m searching for the true freedom to speak from my true self without fear. I want this in conversations, in relationships, and in my writing, too. And it’s in prayer that I think I’m beginning to get a clue.

The free writing exercises inspired by The Artist’s Way quickly became a kind of morning prayer journal for me: a happy deviation from what Cameron was actually encouraging. Spending 20 minutes early each morning just trying to tell God what I was thinking and feeling, and trying to listen for Him in response, was a wonderful thing for someone like me who has never had a regular ‘quiet time’ or devotional life. I’m convinced that no time trying to pray is wasted or a bad thing. But I look at those entries now and see how far from free they really are. I pose and filter in every conversation, and none so much as those sacred ones with my Maker. Maybe this says more about my spiritual life and sense of assurance before God than my abilities as a writer, but I think there’s a connection. I have a dim, immature understanding of reverence. The difference between saying, or writing, what I think someone wants to hear, and saying whatever is true may also be as far as the East from the West. Am I willing to believe that? And write, speak, pray, out of that belief?

Today, at least, I am. I will not shame you, little voice inside me, or suffer you to shame my true self. I will not crush you, or be crushed. I will not pretend you are not there, not some part of me. It’s a beautiful, bright autumn morning, and we’re going to let the fig leaves fall where they may.

(Drawing by Escher)

The Space Between

"In his 1951 essay ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,’ British psychologist D. W. Winnicott wrote, ‘It is in the space between inner and outer worlds, which is also the space between people — the transitional space — that intimate relationships and creativity occur.’” - quoted by Alexandra Enders in “The Importance of Place: Where Writers Write and Why” (“The Literary Life,” Poets and Writers, March/April 2008)

The routines of writers seem to be of perpetual interest to us bookish types. Stories abound about where and when and how (and with precisely what type of instrument) famous writers have done their work. I’ve always been intrigued by those stories, in part as they helped me think about my own habits and preferences.

I’m one who prefers to be in a public space. Even when I have a nice office, I find I’m more productive when I leave it. When I worked in the private sector, this made more sense: I kept shop in a mind-numbing gray cubicle under mind-numbing fluorescent lights, with the nearest window way down at the end of my row.

So I wrote most of the early drafts of my forthcoming novel at a Tim Horton’s just around the corner from that office. I always took the same table when I could get it, next to a giant window that let in every bit of the cloudy daylight afforded by the long winters of Rochester, NY. I’d hurry through a bowl of soup and nurse my black coffee for the duration of lunch hour. And I would enter that space between the inner and outer worlds.

I remained partly aware of my surroundings: the blasé music, the retirees who met every Wednesday and sat at the large round table in the back, the business crowd wiping slush and sticky rock salt off their polished shoes as they yapped into their phones. At the same time, I was entirely absorbed in the world of my story. I could see and hear my characters clearly, follow them where they went, imagine what might happen next, fashion careful words to represent that universe.

And now I’m finishing the final work a world away at a small coffee shop in Hartford City, Indiana called Common Grounds. I chat with Katie, who knows my routine: after I order, she lets me get to work, then quietly brings my food and coffee over when it’s ready, for which I’m deeply grateful. Each table contains a tablecloth with a hearty thread count, a small lamp, and a centerpiece of several antique books or a milk bottle from farm days past. The music is good: Neil Young or Dylan or Louis Armstrong. A small television mounted to the wall plays Turner Classic Movies in glorious black and white, set to mute. I like to sit where I can see it out of the corner of my eye. Then I enter into the world of a story that, by now, I’m very tired of and will be pleased to leave behind soon.

Floating over the top, I’ll hear someone yell out the day’s headline from The Hartford City News Times or start yet another conversation with, “Hey, remember [so-and-so]? Well, did you hear what happened?” But I’m into my book, sometimes immersed in the vivid and continuous dream of the story, sometimes taking a cold, critical look at a darling phrase and dragging it by the neck to the chopping block.

I can’t seem to do without either; it’s that space between the exterior and interior worlds where I feel most able to write. I don’t know exactly why this is, and I don’t know if the why matters. It’s what works for me.

What works for you?

What keeps us writing?

I am up this morning, discovering that today will be the first day in many months that the Texas sky is cleared for go on all the blue it can project, and the temperature a wonderful 75 degrees, with not an ounce of wind. Finally.

I fire up my computer and prepare for a day of writing. I notice an email from an author and close friend who provides me feedback on my stories. She writes to congratulate me on my short story Rehabilitation and for it having made it into Relief's 7.2 edition. She writes, "I will miss Jake and Kitty and the early days when their story was being written. Now they belong to the world."

It isn't often that I come face to face with why I sit down in front of a blank slate and write, and more often than not, take walks, brood over non essentials, and spend days procrastinating until something dislodges and I find my way back to letting a story unfold. And then when things really start to happen, and I'm being drawn into another world, into other lives, that I can't be exactly sure where the words and the sentences and paragraphs are coming from. This is why my friend's point that ". . . they belong to the world," hits home.

Only yesterday, I was struggling with a plot issue in a story that has been on my plate for months. It needed something more, and nothing was coming to me. I leaned back and reached for the 2013 Pushcart book, fanned through the pages and found Sonny Criss, a short story by Jeanne Shoemaker. Well, for obvious reasons, with her name almost my own, except for the "r," I had to read it. Forty-five minutes later, I'm crying. I sat wondering, how did she do that. I said to myself, I've got to read this story again and analyze it. I asked, who is this author that can keep me turning pages and bring me to tears in the end? It was then I realized that by studying it, I would steal the beauty of it, take the gift, as it were, and start looking for the price tag.

Maybe, writing is, first and foremost, an imaginative process before it is anything else. The same lesson keeps coming back to me, that the story must come from a place that is beyond my own ability to make happen. No matter what I might do in the way of framing the elements of structure, plot, theme, characterizations, voice, and settings, whatever it is that draws me into the world of language and story, is pure imagination. What else can it be? Apart from imagining, there is nothing to work with. After reading Sonny Criss, I found my way back into my own story and the plot problem disappeared. I saw something deeper in my main character and it was all I needed to let the story achieve is purpose.

So, here I am again this morning knowing that the character Sonny Criss and his Wyoming family has changed me. And, I realize I've been given the gift of introducing Jake and Kitty in the story Rehabilitation, and they too, to find their way into our world.  As for those of us who bleed at our keyboards and worry everyone close to us, we become forever connected with the characters who speak through us, and we offer them like newborns, unique, memorable, and full of purpose. Maybe it's this that keeps us writing, like parents, never letting go of the work we have to do.

(Photo by Fausto Padovini)

- Guest Blogger, Mike Shoemake (Read Rehabilitation in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.)

The Holy Going, Writing as Exploration

Annie Dillard’s essay “Expedition to the Pole” takes two threads— observations from a real or imagined Mass at her local church and details she culled from historical records of failed expeditions to the North and South Poles—and begins winding them together in alternating blocks of prose. Her deft juxtaposition creates a third thread, at first invisible, to make a remarkable weaving which turns its nose up at the flattening simplification of allegory and rises above the common mystery of metaphor and seems to strain for the hallowed ground of the parabolic.

God knows one of the last things we need in the world is another reductive division of humanity, one more faulty ‘us vs. them’ delineation to add to the heaping bag we are carrying around. Just for a minute, though, and just for fun, let’s say there are two kinds of writers: those that adhere to the ‘write what you know’ creed and those that are in the ‘write what you want to know about’ camp. There are fine and enjoyable writers on either side of that fence, but my favorites are those skilled (and brave) enough to take both imperatives in hand and set off blazing a different track in the wilderness.

Early in the essay Dillard references the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. Wikipedia tells us it is “a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide access. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline. The term describes a geographic construct, not an actual physical phenomenon. Subject to varying definitions, it is of interest mostly to explorers.” Her essay becomes, right in front of us, a writer’s travel diary of her expedition toward that Pole. With what she has known and lived in one hand, and what she believes is out there and wants to know in the other, she goes, and asks us to join her, not just as readers, but as fellow explorers.

At one point she makes the aside: “There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer, fine as the conception is.” So, shall we let her lead us, or would you like to cut drifts in the snow for the rest of us awhile?

Storytelling and Slenderman

Two 12-year-old girls recently lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her with a knife 19 times. They left her to die, but she survived. Those who attempted to take her life said they wanted to prove Slenderman exists. They planned to escape to his mansion in the woods.

Slenderman is a character of mythical Internet proportions — a tall figure in a business suit with tentacle-like arms. He preys on children. Created in 2009 in a horror genre Internet forum, Slenderman is a striking example of a fun project taking on a crowd-sourced life of its own in the imaginations of millions. It’s a testament to the power of stories and the possibilities of the imagination to create new, perhaps even unthinkable, realities. It’s shocking, though, how a story can compel children to find meaning in acts of violence and some have called for the censorship of stories like Slenderman. But the answer is not censorship. Instead we need to write better stories.

Creating them is no light task and we cannot do it by pushing dogma and happy endings while ignoring evil. We can’t create better stories by isolating ourselves from reality and by painting perfect pictures of a perfect world. We can, however, offer meaning in spite of the violence and evil we encounter. We need stories that address evil truthfully and directly, stories that equip us to address evil truthfully in our everyday lives.

The young girl who survived 19 stab wounds will have a more powerful story to tell than her classmates. Because she lives, her story will transcend a horrid act of evil. That’s the story we look for — the story the world needs.

What is writing for?

Is the purpose of writing to communicate something to readers, or to mystify them? It’s been almost fifteen years, and James Miller’s article in the now-defunct Lingua Franca pitting clear communication (personified by George Orwell) against mystification-as-profundity (poster boy: Theodor Adorno) has stuck with me. First reading it fresh from grad school, where both perspectives were drilled into me with equal vigor, I’ve seen this either/or proposition reproduced in almost every argument over the goal of good writing that I’ve been dragged into since then. Whatever battle lines are drawn — literary vs. commercial, spiritual vs. secular — the old antagonists return to fight. Advocates of clarity are accused of dumbing ideas down, while advocates of mystery are chided for hiding their confused or commonplace thoughts behind a curtain of obfuscation.

I wish I could claim to have kept above the fray, but I’ve been a partisan more often than not — and for both sides, too, my allegiances shifting with the context. If I’ve switched sides back and forth, it’s not for lack of conviction. It’s just that neither side embodies what I’m actually attempting to do when I write fiction.

To me an unread story is a gesture of love left unconsummated.

Unrequited might seem a better word, but it’s not: there are books you haven’t read but for which you still feel affection. (Consider the American love affair with the Bible.) In some cases not having read the story keeps the love alive. The pages do not always contain what we’ve been led to believe.

As a reader I don’t seek consummation for reasons of clarity or mystification, although both sensations are part of the experience. What I look for is something closer to communion.

To me an unread story is like bread and wine left untasted on the table, an author’s gifts placed before readers out of a thwarted desire to know and be known.

Some of us don’t like to think of readers at all. We write for ourselves, telling the stories we’d like to hear. Art for art’s sake, with no hint of accommodating the audience. Mystification for its own sake, feeding your inner Adorno while your inner Orwell starves. This is a pose I’ve sometimes adopted, yet it seems more and more to be a mere shield against rejection: “You didn’t love me? That’s because you didn’t get me. This was never meant for you; you couldn’t have understood it.”

A story must communicate, or so they tell me. The question is, how? Must we follow the expected patterns, tap out only the approved rhythms, and keep culling the word horde until all the mystery is gone? Start thinking of what we do as mere communication and before long you find the reader can be quantified, reduced, understood –– and that a better term than reader is consumer. If writing for myself was a dead end, writing for consumers is even worse.

This is why, instead of communicating with readers, I want to commune.

I’m not aiming at blasphemy here, or even irreverence. It seems important to me that the creative act be understood in terms of incarnation, and the Christian Eucharist provides an apt metaphor. In spite of Walker Percy's belief that “the incarnational and sacramental dimensions of Catholic Christianity are the greatest natural assets of a novelist,” here I find Calvin’s notion of spiritual presence helpful. The author’s presence in the paper and ink or the pixel, though not physical, is nevertheless real in a way that can only be impoverished by ascribing it only to symbolism. Entering into the story is, at least for “worthy receivers,” to commune with an author who is actually, though spiritually, present in the work.

Somewhere between demystification and mystification for its own sake –– or perhaps I should say, somewhere above them –– there is a place for something both mystical and substantial, an experience of one another through words that has become almost a secret, a guilty pleasure none who know it feel entirely comfortable talking about. It does not always happen, but when it does, we remember why we read and write to begin with, just as there are moments in church with the taste of bread on the tongue and wine on the lips when we, for an instant, recover the true urge that brought us there.

Bright and Shining

I finished revising my debut novel and graduated from an MFA program in the same month. I am tired. I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. Of course, one of the first apocryphal rules you learn when you start writing is do it every day. Put that butt in the chair and fashion yourself after the Postal Service. Snow? Sleet? Debilitating fatigue? Doesn’t matter. Put those words down, son.

So when my friend Sara asked me what I was doing for Lent, I laughed. This was the first year in over ten where I wouldn’t be a church worker and I was sleeping in on Sundays like it was my job. While I appreciate the discipline of Lent – I’d taught it how many times? – I was on sabbatical from anything that wasn’t Mad Men or Game of Thrones. And that included God.

Thomas Merton went to Gethsemane to remove himself from the world, to seek God with integrity. As everyone knows, the world came knocking on the doors of his monastery in the way of literary fame. Merton was stuck between his desires for solitude and – this is my assumption – a calling to write. But then, on a routine trip to the doctor in Louisville, he had a vision. Him, being held up by (and inextricably connected to) the world he once hoped to spurn. He described the experience as inevitable, saying, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

I eventually texted Sara back and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll say the Lord’s Prayer every night.” It was something I’d never done. And if I’m being honest – it was a discipline I had no real interest in keeping. But much like the pull I feel every time I walk past my laptop – like there is something I should be doing – once I was lying in bed I couldn’t escape words. Our Father… I don’t claim a Merton-like moment of transformation. Everything I learned was a lesson I already knew. Yet, sometimes it is good to be reminded that the work will always be there when you’re ready. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that we are bright and shining.

(Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt)

Silent Retreat: Saint Meinrad Archabbey, Indiana

When we first arrived, before we entered the silence, we did Lectio Divina together. The words from 1 Peter 3:15 struck me: "In your hearts, set apart Christ as Lord." As we reread and listened to the passage, I kept hearing the phrase, "Christ as Lord." During the third cycle, which asks us to respond to what God is speaking, I prayed, "Christ, be Lord." The prayer moved me toward surrender, and centered me.

Despite that prayer, it took me a long time to be silent inside. The first night, my brain was spinning, my thoughts louder than the silence around me. I spent several hours wandering around the dark, yelling at God. Hope felt as far away as the quiet stars. Eventually I walked inside the dimly lit cathedral, the flap of my sandals reverberating in the emptiness.

I knelt down near the suspended crucifix and began to cry. After hours of wrestling with God, in a moment, the pain behind my anger dissolved into tears. I had the distinct impression that Christ was grieving with me, that I was not alone. I didn't find answers, but I knew God was there. The tears were not only a cathartic release; they became a symbol of surrender.

Silence is a type of surrender. It's a letting go of the incessant spinning within—the worry about what's next, about what I'm not doing, about the people I love, about the people who drive me crazy. Silence requires me to stop whining at God. This is the necessary cessation if one is to inhabit silence fully.

By morning, I felt as if I had accessed a river of peace. I walked around St. Meinrad not so much thinking as being. When people came to mind, I prayed for them, but the prayer felt more like a gentle lifting of them to the Lord than a cognitive exercise. Put in different terms, I felt as if I had accessed the subconscious. A great space broke open in me.

***

Richard Foster says before we can speak or write, we must be silent. We need to be still so we can hear what God is saying to us. Otherwise our words come from a place of noise. I have experienced the truth of this paradox at different points in my spiritual journey as well as in my writing life.

I am a writer. Last year at this time, I could barely choke out those words. It felt audacious, yet I couldn't deny the primal pull words had for me, calling me like the shore calls the sea. I had to respond. A central theme of this past year has been exploring and embracing that identity. I've asked myself, what does it mean to be a writer? A writer of faith? What do I have to say? Why should anyone listen? Does it even matter?

Silence is helping me keep the work I've been called to in perspective. At best, I don't enter silence with an agenda, to have an experience I can write about later. That may happen, but it isn't why I'm silent. I pursue stillness because God has called me to stillness (Psalm 46:10). Stillness not only helps me connect to God, it helps me connect to this work of writing.

Writing well feels like surrender. I open myself to another place where words flow like water. When I stop striving and am still, sitting in God's presence, I leave space for Him to be God. The same, I'm learning, is true with writing. When I write from a place of rigidity and noise, my words feel stiff, contrived, narrow. When I sit with the white page and let go of my preconceived notions of what's supposed to happen, it works—some of the time, anyway.

Yet stillness isn't a formula that gets me something. Instead it allows me to connect more deeply to myself, to God, and to my work. Some days it feels far away. But the retreat taught me that the river of stillness is closer than I think. I just have to slow down enough to enter it.

Guest blogger Diana Meakem is a senior English creative writing major at Taylor University in Upland, IN. A native of North Carolina, she’s an Ockenga Honors Scholar, member of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honors Society, and was the 2014 Editor-in Chief of Parnassus, Taylor’s literary magazine. She has accepted a fellowship at the University of Maine, where she will begin work on her MA in the fall.

(Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Announcing Relief Issue 7.2 pre-sales!

Relief Issue 7.2 is now available at the pre-sale price of just $11.47, a savings of 23%. This issue will hold the mirror of reality up to you and slap you in the face.

• You'll find a story of a farmer's daughter abandoned, pregnant, by her missionary husband, who takes solace in a Thomas Kinkade gallery of all places.
• You'll see the world through Bob Denst's wry yet sacramental imagination that turns a discarded KJV into a flapping bird and a Red Cross blood donation center into an opportunity to encounter something other, and you'll follow Kyle Laws through a series of spiritual emotions you may have forgotten were in the Bible.
• You will also find work from Relief favorites like Jean Hoefling and David Holper, both of whom always manage to take something we may have thought we knew and tweak it into their own idiom.
• You will also find something original under the sun (sort of): a Relief-produced work of graphic fiction called "Earl and LeAnn."

The Real Race

I started running seriously about a year and a half ago, as I was beginning my MFA thesis, which means I was digging deeply into old drafts and seeing my old writing faults everywhere I looked. On a whim one night, I signed up for a half-marathon that was four months away, Googled a training schedule, and started getting out on the road to pound out miles.

My life—which at the time was in various states of emotional and professional turmoil, and some of those linked to one another—fell into a rhythm of work, writing, and running. Whenever I wasn't at work, I was either at my computer or out on the pavement.

Five half-marathons and thousands and thousands of words and only a few mini-breakdowns later, I'm still surprised to realize that, for me at least, consistently running is far easier than consistently writing. In fact, running is almost comically easy: it’s just one foot in front of the other, and a lot of ignoring the voices in your head. There’s no grammar or style or word choice or any of those things to attend to. All runners engage in the same general muscle movements: the legs lifted and placed down, the feet striking pavement, the arms pumping back and forth. Sometimes I run past a person whose stride has been altered by injury or some kind of muscular defect, and his gait is noticeable only because it is different.

That means that the main difference between me and Haruki Murakami, who runs marathons and ultramarathons and wrote a book about running and writing called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is just that he’s repeated the same muscular motions, the breathing and pumping of limbs, a lot more than I have.

Murakami also has a great deal more practice than I do with writing. He has been writing for three or four hours per day for decades. I suppose that means he also has developed the muscle for discipline. Reading his book on this point, I found this passage:

To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein. So as soon as I notice one water source drying up, I can move on right away to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble.

When I started writing, I “relied on a natural spring of talent,” especially since I was mostly writing short informational pieces. But when I decided to dig deeper and dredge another hole called “creative writing,” one in which I had to work with my own stories and my own material, I discovered that I’d exhausted my source—my natural spring—and now was going to be forced to do the hard work of sitting down and writing every day.

That is a real drag on the ego. Someone who sprints and then decides to train for a marathon will hit a wall around mile four, and might get discouraged. And someone like me has her identity rocked when she can’t do something well on the second or third or even tenth try.

I can tell you this: her tendency is to try to find a shortcut, or just quit. Usually the latter.

She has to take a hard look at herself and get ready to fail and then keep going. She has to be ready for sore muscles, and a bruised ego, and maybe even injuries, and the possibility that she might never be as good as the other guy, the hard truth that it’s possible she’ll never be a standout. Or she may write for years before she has anything to say. She might have to write from fear, and through fear, before she is ready for the real race.

Make It New

I recently watched Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live sing “Only When I Walk Away.” Multicolor laser lights flashed in geometric shapes and cast net-like patterns on the blackness of the stage. My 19-year-old son watched, too, and while he’s not a fan of Timberlake, he appreciated the fact that he was willing to try something new. The last time we saw Timberlake, he appeared on SNL singing “Suit & Tie.” It sounded like the Sinatra songs my dad sang around the house when we were growing up. What a contrast!

On one level, Timberlake’s diversity reminds me of the modernists’ creed to continually “make it new.” It also reminded me of Henri Matisse who, toward the end of his life, shifted from painting to making paper collages. Having survived surgery for cancer, he considered his last fourteen years “a second life” and he pursued his new medium with fervor. Matisse’s desire to try something new lead him to create what are often considered to be his greatest works. Matisse reinvented his craft. He made it new.

Jack Kerouac described how the jazz greats continued to develop their music. “They sought to find new phrases...They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned.” But what makes all that effort, that pursuit of the new, meaningful? Is newness, along with beauty, an end in itself?

God told Moses that Aaron’s new garments should be made for beauty, but also for glory (Exodus 28:2). As image bearers we have the responsibility to pursue newness and beauty. But what of God’s glory? Do we pursue it? Is His glory worth the wrestling, the laughing and the moaning?

(Art is La Lierre en Fleurs by Matisse)

God's Not Dead

The trailer for God’s Not Dead appeared on my Facebook timeline between a Buzzfeed quiz about Friday Night Lights and a Bruce Springsteen video. I took the quiz (I’m Landry Clarke, so you know) and listened to The Promised Land, trying to convince – or maybe distract – myself away from this movie. Even before I saw the trailer, I could make a guess at the plot.

Instead of asking a person to explore the mystery of faith, films like God’s Not Dead lay a straight and flawless road, painted over with harsh blacks and impossible whites – colors designed to make us comfortable. More importantly, they encourage Christians to ignore the twisting and turning deer trails that sprout off this main road. Trails that lead one through the mud, the murk. Places to get lost.

Could anyone argue that Flannery O’Connor’s classic short story A Good Man is Hard to Find might better end with the Misfit accepting Christ? To have him wave the family off, a pleasant sunset falling behind him? For some, yes. But for those concerned with producing art and living a faith with integrity – that actually represents our place in a sometimes savage, sometimes beautiful world – these knotted paths are the birthplace of transformation. They don’t avoid risk. They force it upon you. It is that tension, that real moment of grace and redemption, which Christian art hopes to harness.

A writing mentor once told me the worst thing a story can be is about something. I would add that, even when we know the ending, a story should also hide the turns. God’s Not Dead, like so much of Christian art, chooses to do neither. It plays to its audience, giving another boost to the myth of the embattled Christian while reassuring them that everything is okay. Cathartic as that might be, it isn’t true. And if Christian art doesn’t have truth – if it becomes yet another escapist trope – then what’s the point?

What are we going to do?

How do you tell the story of the end of the world without bothering to tell us how it ended? We get is a series of low concussive sounds, ash, fires, and cannibals. But what caused it all? Readers of Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road are often troubled by absence of a clear explanation for what caused the disaster, something McCarthy has commented on:

"A lot of people ask me. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do?"

"What do you do?" Near the end of The Road, the father asks his son a similar question: "What are we going to do?" And the son replies, "Well what are we?" That answer cuts to the marrow of our modern anatomy. What you do at the end of the world is remember who you are. And by that I don't mean the collection of social and commercial preferences we identify with, or our gender, or our personality type. At the end we have no choice but ask what it means to have being.

This kind of deep questioning is hard for modern readers because we are so terribly good at being distracted all the time. Its a good day when I don't wake up and immediately reach for my phone and fall asleep with it in my hands. The electronic buzz of being (as I've called it elsewhere) sweeps us up in continual checking and embeds us thoroughly within culture. It's difficult to think of ourselves as distinct beings with weight and purpose. Our identities are culturally defined so we can't quite imagine what it means to be a person made in the Image of God.

Had McCarthy identified the disaster, he would have distracted his readers from issues surrounding their existence. Instead of having to ask, "Why bother living in a world filled with suffering and lacking all hope for the future?" we would be asking how we can stop climate change, or a nuclear war, or an asteroid.

I think for some readers, the desire to know what caused the end is itself a form of escapism, a desire to avoid the anxiety which arises when we accept the startling world McCarthy portrays, one in which our very existence is questioned. It is easy to read a book and be chastised to recycle or advocate for nuclear disarmament; it's quite another to be asked to strip away everything that seems to make us who we are, so we can see our place and our being, truly. Yet, perhaps that's exactly what the best of Christian writing will do: help us see God's grace anew.

Negative Space

As a poet, I devote a sizeable portion of my writing time to thinking about form. Where do I break the lines? How many lines to this stanza? A poet is always trying to find the edges of the argument, the geography of the line. We are wary of saying too much.

Throughout high school and college I played violin in the symphony orchestra. Over and over again I was told to “play the rests.” Zipping through a 32^nd note run in a Shostakovich symphony, what difference could one small rest really mean? But when I took a moment to lift my bow from the string, to let the string hum a bit, the difference was noticeable. The measured space of silence buzzed with solitude.

Beryl Markham, in her wonderful memoir, West with the Night puts it another way: “There are all kinds of silences,” she says. “And each of them means a different thing.” If we take the silence and give it form what are we left with but the silent white of the page? This is a sound the writer knows well. It is our siren song; it is what calls us in the evening to our desks and windows. It is a silence we try again and again to make mean a different thing.

Simone Weil wrote, “the poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.” I come back to this over and over again, because what does “real” mean, i.e. what is the form of real? When Weil says “real” I don’t think she is talking about reality, not what is physically in this world. Weil is talking about Real in a platonic sense. A real that walks in the garden with the Real.

The artist/makers’ responsibility then, is to create something beautiful. We are meant to find the beautiful among the Real.  Tomas Transtromer, Nobel Prize winner and Swedish poet, wrote that “through form something [can] be raised to another level. The caterpillar feet…gone, the wings unfolded.” In order for the moth to be, the caterpillar must first rest.

To write (and to be a “maker”) is to live with the paradox of filling and emptying. It is one of the numerous paradoxes that give our lives form—to be both forgiven and in need of forgiveness, to live because of death, to learn what is already known.

So perhaps when it comes to space, the form of our work must be one of respecting the silence. We must fill in the blank white of the page with not only what is beautiful, but also something that nudges at the essence of God and his creation. The poet must speak in order to make room for more silence.

Simone Weil also wrote “we can only know one thing about God—that he is what we are not.”

(Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

The Writer's Life

It's no secret that this winter has left Midwesterners pleading for days that are either a) snow free or b) above ten degrees. So when my poets' New Year's party turned into a 72-hour lock-in, I wasn't all that surprised.

Six adults and eight children gathered to toast 2014 with the finest of Aldi wine. In fact, my 2013 royalties from one of my books paid for a mid-shelf, $5.99 cabernet. We had already counted on holding our gathering overnight so we could stay up late into the evening discussing literary matters while our children slept.

That sort of happened. We made it to twelve. Well, except for one guest who missed the moment while rocking an inconsolable baby to sleep. Kisses were hastily exchanged, kids tossed into strange beds, and poets scattered to couches and futons throughout the house. When the morning’s snow rendered all roads impassable, our party extended into the next night. And the next.

Before forming so many close literary friendships, I envisioned them as intense, Eliot/Pound affairs, conversations laced with poetic references and philosophical flights of fancy, a steady stream of drafts and feedback in our inboxes. In truth, we do share in these activities. But the relationships are so much more.

As the wind rattled the windows, we did talk poetry and help one another with manuscripts. For a bit. We also negotiated with children about video games, improvised large meals in the kitchen, held babies and dogs, played ping pong, and napped. It was a long, loving, mundane, joyful, frustrating, and beautiful time together.

A writer who endeavors to live a writing life, rather than just a life, will often find her work—or at least her satisfaction in it—to ring hollow. When I first met my close-knit group of poetry friends at various conferences and festivals, we had words in common. Now we have the courage to move beyond the page to share our whole selves: marriage and parenting, jobs, insecurities, spiritual struggles and growth. We are close enough to get deep. We are also close enough to sprawl on the couch in sweatpants to watch episodes of New Girl. After spending time together, we return to the page, inspired and enriched.

The winter has been a beast, yes. And I am ready for the sun. But I hope on the eve of 2015, when I invite the poets over again, we get walloped with the blizzard of the century.

Passion Is Not Enough

“I see you’re a writer,” a friend messaged me. We had just reconnected via Facebook, after being out of touch for almost twenty years. She asked if I would be willing to critique a story. “Be honest,” she told me. “Don’t pull any punches.” I was honest. Her story was full of passion and longing. It dealt with family and belonging, hurting the ones we love most, forgiveness, redemption.  It was not a very good story.

I never heard from her again, and the other day I noticed that somewhere along the way, we had stopped being Facebook friends as well.

I’ve had a number of similar experiences with amateur writers, and two things are inevitably true: the writer is wrestling with real and important subject matter, and she does not want to put in the long, hard hours required to make it something great—she wants to take a short cut.

In an interview recently, Ira Glass, talking about an artist’s apprenticeship, said, “there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.” He went on to say most people quit before they’ve gotten through this stage of making bad art.

In the novel My Name is Asher Lev, the naturally talented Asher goes to study craft under a master painter. The gruff old man warns Asher that it is not going to be an easy apprenticeship. It will be rigorous and often not much fun—but it is the only way. He tells Asher, “Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it.” You can break any rules you can get away with breaking, to paraphrase Flannery O’Conner; but you have to be doing it for a good and apparent reason, not because you don’t know any better.

Short of being born a genius, there are no shortcuts. You have things burning to be expressed? Important things to say? Be serious about your apprenticeship—learn your craft. If your passion is true, this will not extinguish your fire. It will refine it, focus it until it burns white hot and pure.