Somewhere Between Tom Brokaw and The Misfit

I blame Tom Brokaw. Or someone, anyway, west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies. This might qualify Walter Cronkite, too, who was no doubt the most powerful white man of my youth. The news itself, it might be said, was the direct descendent of Puritan plain style, the most complex stories broken down into a few short sentences delivered by stolid white men in serious, accentless tones with direct eye contact. And Midwestern English had a starring role.

Spellcheck doesn’t recognize the word “accentless.”

The idea itself is illogical, like water without wetness. Language by nature has an accent. The idea that Midwestern English is accentless is therefore obvious bunk. Still, for generations it was the language of the news. Generations after Brokaw and light years from Cronkite, the Midwest continues to suffer from their legacy, the idea of accentless language.

Or the Upper Midwest does—maybe the northern plains—I’m not sure where to locate it. Certainly west of Chicago. Chicagoans’ accents are crystalized, their identity sure. Though also south of the Coen’s Fargo. North, certainly, of Hannibal, Missouri. Mark Twain’s writing is among the surest of itself, rooted, but Twain is a Southern writer. Sure, the Midwest feels affinity for Twain, but primarily in a kind of envy, as wannabes.

As a writer, I spent years trying to neutralize my voice. First, I tried to leave the Midwestern accent—or non-accent—behind by trying to sound smarter: I spent years trying on the greater non-accent of academia. That is, I thought as a writer I was supposed to climb to some position high above the biases and stereotypes of accented English, so I tried to leave Midwest English, a supposedly accentless English, for Academic English, a really accentless English.

I know it doesn’t make any logical sense, that being smart means you know there is no objective point of view or accentless English, but that’s certainly not the impression academic writing gives off.

Something has also changed about Midwestern English. Its supposed clarity has become equated with simplicity or facelessness. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the era of Kronkite and Brokaw hasn’t left a vacuum, if it hasn’t left us with Southern accent envy. This would help to explain the way Duck Dynasty has colonized the Midwest and why I see a Confederate flag displayed in the window of a tiny town (population: 50) I commute through every day—in Minnesota.

So, I'm trying to return to the Midwestern accent again—or, more precisely, to the accent in this part of the Midwest, south of Fargo, west of Chicago, north of Hannibal—to hear it, to align myself specifically with it. What are the ins and outs of the English spoken in my backyard?  What has the language itself sheltered within its peculiar constructions and idioms?

But where do I turn for help?  To Southern writers, where else?  When Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit says about Jesus, “He thown everything off balance,” we know we’re in the middle of it, in the middle of a mind, in the middle of a place, in the middle of a theology. The best writers both align themselves with an accent, the diction of a place, and enable us as readers to get inside it, too. They both affirm it and hold it up to the light.

Which drives me to a second source: to the men at the downtown coffee shop, to the women at the supermarket deli, talking their Middlewestern talk, here in flyover country, the land of Tom Brokaw.

Finding Livelihood: An Interview with Nancy J. Nordenson

I first read Nancy’s work in 2006 when one of her essays, “Nothing Can Separate,” was published in Relief’s inaugural issue. My friend Karen Miedrich-Luo, Relief’s first creative nonfiction editor, recruited me to come on first as reader, and then as nonfiction editor. In 2007, Karen and I formed an online critique group along with Nancy and another Relief essayist, Jill Kandel. Karen, Nancy, Jill, and I now count five published books between the four of us – including Jill’s prizewinning memoir, So Many Africas: Six Years in an African Village. The four of us continue to challenge and encourage one another nearly ten years later via the online group.

Back in 2010, after more than three years of online friendship, I met Nancy in the flesh at NonfictioNow in Iowa City. I immediately liked her as much in person as I had online. Nancy is humble in all the best ways, considerate of others, wise and careful when she speaks, insightful, deep, and brilliant. And her writing is the same.

In 2013, Nancy and I both applied and were accepted for a weeklong summer writing residency with the Collegeville Institute at St. John’s University in Minnesota. In our application materials, we hadn’t revealed that we already knew each other, and yet we were paired as roommates, writing all morning, lunching together, reading or writing until late afternoon. With the day’s work behind us and the evening gathering still an hour or so ahead, Nancy and I would sit together and talk about our writing and our lives over slices of Dubliner cheddar and a glass of red wine. I vividly remember reviewing Nancy’s manuscript for Finding Livelihood (tentatively titled A Work in Progress) and earnestly discussing structure and treatment. “This is an important book,” I assured Nancy. “You will find a publisher.” But Nancy wasn’t as certain, and I’m no prophet. It’s hard to get a book published traditionally, and for most of us it takes a long time, with lots of perseverance and plenty of rejection along the way. Nancy came close a couple of times with agents and publishers, and she used those rejections to rework and strengthen aspects of her book and proposal until finally she landed the manuscript with Kalos Press.

Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure was published in spring 2015. Read this book! Finding Livelihood finds beauty in both blessed and difficult circumstances as Nancy examines employment and unemployment, labor and rest, hardship and security, and the (for me) nebulous concept of vocational calling –  all without glossing over the pain that undergirds so much of life. The book is honest, artful, and lyric.  

~~~~

Lisa Ohlen Harris: First off, Nancy, please tell us about Kalos Press.

Nancy J. Nordenson: I’m thrilled that Finding Livelihood landed at Kalos Press. Kalos is a small press with a name rooted in the Greek word for beauty. It aims to give voice to literary fiction, memoir, essays, and Christian reflection that are outside the mainstream Christian publishing industry and are “beautiful in their literary form, and also excellent in their fulfillment of purpose.” I feel honored to be part of that vision and am so thankful for their kind and talented team.

LOH: At the end of 2008, I had the honor of editing your second publication in Relief, an essay titled, “A Place at the Table.” And that was the essay that launched Finding Livelihood. How did the essay – and the entire book project – come to be?

NJN: A year before I wrote that essay my husband had come home from work late one night, holding a cardboard box filled with his stuff, and told me he’d lost his job. I had recently started graduate school in the Seattle Pacific University (SPU) MFA program, a long-held dream of mine, and was on the verge of cutting back on my full-time medical writing work in order to give this graduate work my fullest attention. But this job loss changed everything and there was no easy answer. I needed to keep working more while going to school. The alternative was to drop out, which I didn't want to do. He felt “called” to his work; I felt “called” to the program; we were absolutely committed to our two sons in college, our mortgage, to putting food on the table, paying for health insurance, and so on. It all became very complex and difficult. While I had long been pondering the topic of work, and doing some writing about it, this time of his job loss is where all the experiences became a critical mass and said, “You need to look at me.” The many workplace stories that Dave and I had shared with each other during our decades-long marriage and now this new story we were living of a slashed income and mutually frustrated “calls” raised complex questions about the nature and experience of work. I wrote the essay “A Place at the Table” to deal with his job loss, to make peace with it, but it became the crystal for the book. I pulled in earlier writing about work and kept writing in order to make peace with work, to explore where it fit in a lifelong spiritual journey.

LOH: Finding Livelihood isn’t really a memoir. I suppose I would call it a themed essay collection – is that fair? How would you describe the structure of the book and its purpose?

NJN: I think of it more as a book-length essay, or idea-driven linked essays. From a book publishing perspective, I realize we are cautioned about calling anything an essay, lest readers get scared away, but essays have always had an important place in literature; consider, for example, the work of Annie Dillard or Joan Didion, two of my perennial favorites. Finding Livelihood has more structure than a collection of essays all on the same topic, so that’s why I don’t think of it as a collection. While the style is lyric, making the structure a little less obvious than a straight-forward book, there is a rationale for the way the essays are placed, how one leads to another, and how by the end, there is movement toward a changed way of looking at the questions triggered by work.

LOH: I had the privilege of watching this book form over the months and years and many drafts and revisions of essays compiled in these pages. When did you know you had completed the manuscript? How much restructuring and revising did you do for the book as a whole?

NJN: My Relief essay, “A Place at the Table,” was written in 2007 – with some of the writing from other essays dating back further than that – and the manuscript was accepted for publication by Kalos Press in 2014. The process took a long time, as you’ve noted, not only because I work full-time at another job, but also because the issues at stake took a long time to think through, work through, and find ways to write about. I was writing it organically and not from a pre-project outline. I haven’t even kept track of how many times each essay was rewritten or revised. There were two milestone moments that are worth mentioning here. The first was about mid-way through the project when I figured out the over-riding three-part structure. That helped me see the movement or trajectory of the book but also helped me see where there were gaps that needed more thought and writing. The second milestone moment came at the project’s final step. I had thought the book done, but something still didn’t seem right. At a writing friend’s recommendation, I hired an editorial consultant to read through the manuscript and give me her opinion. To sum up her response: the reader needed more help; the leaps I took may have been obvious to me, but the reader needed more landmarks, more pass-offs. I followed her advice. I checked into a hotel in the Mill district of Minneapolis and worked for 4 days. After that – but for a few more reader helps added a couple months later – I knew the manuscript was complete. The book still relies on the reader’s ability and willingness to take imaginative leaps, but I hope the reader senses that during those leaps, I’m there holding a hand.

LOH: Do you have any advice for writers who have themed essays or meditations – something that’s not a didactic treatment or straightforward memoir?

NJN: From my experience with this project, the advice I’d give to a writer of essays or meditations is to write broadly, deeply, and organically for a long time – be patient with yourself and the project – but then at some point, submit to a guiding structure. In revision, respectfully help the reader follow your thought train but do so in keeping with the project’s voice.  

LOH: And when an essay is complete, send it off to a literary journal! Essays from Finding Livelihood have appeared in both spiritual and secular journals, including Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Relief, Comment, Under the Sun, and Indiana Review. Did you consciously write for a Christian audience, or did you temper your writing to speak to a broad audience? How aware were you of audience or market as you were writing? What would you have to say to a Christian writer who is interested in publishing broadly for a religious and secular audience?

NJN: I didn’t set out to write for either a Christian or non-Christian audience; I set out to write something that would help me, and later readers, to explore this complex issue of work. Since I’m a Christian, that faith is at the core of what and how I write, but holding that faith in common is not a pre-requisite for a reader to join me on the page to ponder work, as evidenced by the secular journals that printed essays from the book. When editing and revising the book, I very much wanted the book to be accessible to readers who may not share my faith and so I made choices in favor of on-the-page hospitality. Those choices typically involved a check of voice and tone as well as quality improvements, rather than compromises of belief. I also wrote with the assumption that despite our culture’s religious diversity and the large numbers of people who claim no faith, Christianity is an ancient religion that continues to have an active place in the world today; therefore, its tenets and practices are still a kind of cultural currency and are not foreign to most readers.

LOH: After nearly ten years of friendship focused around writing and faith, I want to publicly express my gratitude for you, Karen, and Jill, and for what our critique and support group has meant over the years. We formed out of a far-flung handful of writers who connected via this startup literary journal and a Yahoo listserv. I’m honestly not sure I would have kept writing through the months and years of rejection and discouragement if I hadn’t had the three of you in my corner.

NJN: Writing is such a solitary endeavor, and there are so many rejections along the way, that there is something nearly miraculous that happens when you are connected with other writers who only want to further each other’s work and together you are a community. I think back to the week you and I were roommates, a pairing we did not orchestrate, at that summer writing workshop at the Collegeville Institute. The most important part about that week in the story of this book is that it gave me a place to talk about it with people who were writers and thinkers and who cared about this topic of work. I remember talking with you about my new table of contents when we were roommates, and your response assured me the book was now more whole and unified. What a gift and relief that was. What a gift our email-based writing group has been. What a gift the community that has grown up around the Glen workshop and the SPU MFA program has been. What a gift the community around Relief has been. Back in 2006, I read about the launch of Relief in a post on someone’s blog (I think it was J. Mark Bertrand’s blog) and submitted an essay, “Nothing Can Separate,” for its inaugural issue. It was accepted – my first ever published creative nonfiction essay – and received the Editor’s Choice award. I later served as a nonfiction reader for a little more than a year. The vision of Coach and Kimberly Culbertson to create Relief opened the opportunity for a community of writers and readers to meet together on the page, as well as in person and online. I'm excited for the future of Relief with Daniel Bowman at the helm as editor-in-chief. I know Daniel through SPU and have long admired his great passion for connecting art and faith and for connecting people to create community. That is what Relief has always been about.

Guest: Limited Access

I have a friend who was once viewing an article on Mother Theresa. Somehow, the advertisements on the webpage were not set to “Catholic approved,” since, alongside the picture of the now saint, was an ostentatious full screen ad for Plan B. Seriously. It was a perfect example of “what’s wrong with this picture.”  Recently, as I was merrily skipping/clicking links that looked interesting, I came to a well-known religious leadership publication. Maybe it was the devil, because he knew it would assuredly annoy me, but the thing my eye caught under the name of the journal was the two words placed next to each other. It looked like this:

GUEST|LIMITED ACCESS

Now, I know this sounds prideful, but as someone who has a handy prime college access, one thing I rarely see when spending time in online journals is “limited access.” Mine isn't limited, it’s full—at least in academic journals. And yet here I was being called a guest, with “limited access.” I was instantly offended. Then I felt guilty about being offended. Here is the thing though, nobody wants to be knowingly excluded to the outer regions of power. This got me to thinking.

I have for a while wondered over the seeming insatiable lust which seems to be incited over positions of leadership. Maybe “lust” is too strong a word; perhaps positions of leadership are more of a thing “craved” than lusted over ... but that would be a hard call. It doesn't matter what setting these leadership positions are in either: be they at a university, church, community, in politics or whatever, the desire to be in a location of leadership seems to be fairly intense. As if to confirm this, more than ever before, I am seeing leadership courses being taught at public libraries, colleges, universities, and even churches. They are popping up everywhere. You can take them in-class, online, or over Skype—whatever method is best for your busy schedule.  And such courses fetch good money, too. If you’re worried about your job, don't; you can even get a Masters in Leadership while working full time!

Now, I am not dissing people in positions of authority at all: we need profs and pastors and presidents and prime ministers. Neither am I picking on leadership courses, from what I hear, they bring in much needed funding for places of education. However, I am curious: why the upsurge in interest over leadership? I wonder if the interest is driven by advertisers—like the craze over teeth whitening products. Or is it driven by average Janes or Joes who are suddenly realizing that they would like a title or a position of respect?

Here is the question churning inside my head though: are people becoming more curious about getting into leadership because they feel that it is the primary way they will actually be heard? I.e. that the only way to be listened to, in whatever place they happen to be in, is to be a leader? I realize that there are a few more possibilities than that, but I do wonder if being heard is one of the main reasons.

And if that’s the case, isn't it saying something about our culture? Like, maybe we haven't been willing to pay attention—literally!—to people around us because we assume they don’t have something of worth to say? And if we all think that, then one seemingly reasonable way to get other people to listen to us is not to be an everybody, but a somebody—specifically a leader. After all—leaders have to/must be listened to, right? Again, I am not implying that those in leadership don't have worthy things to say, I just wonder how many times I have contributed to another person not feeling listened to, and thus unwittingly encouraged him or her to seek more formal routes to not only speak, but ensure being heard.

An Unexpected Journey

I am reading The Hobbit for the first time. I am 40 now, and I am reading it because I have to teach it to 7th graders.

I believe it’s important I tell you my age and my motive for reading J.R.R. Tolkien because it’s embarrassing. I should’ve discovered the Misty Mountains, I should’ve gasped when Bilbo slips “a golden ring, a precious ring” on his finger, I should’ve considered how to blow smoke rings and having second breakfasts years ago when summers meant riding my bike and chasing fireflies until my mom called, “Callie, come home!”

I was not a reader growing up, and I have so much to catch up on: Tolkien and Eliot, and Shakespeare, and I haven’t even read all of Judy Blume’s books.

Reading is hard for me. I have to read The Hobbit with reading guides and synopses of each chapter. One night my husband came home from work to find me sobbing, my head in my hands, moaning, “I don’t get this. I’ll never understand it. I hate those damn elves!”

That evening, he made his from scratch taquitos and strong margaritas (he only knows how to make them strong) and he found Peter Jackson’s film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey online.

“Oh,” I said when the red paper kite dragon flew into view. “That’s foreshadowing. The paper dragon’s there because it’s the dragon that stole all that gold.” I took a sip of my drink then said, “I think I remember that dragon can’t do anything with the gold. Is that right?” I looked at Jesse for a moment, then back at the TV. “I mean, I think the dragon can’t enjoy what he’s stolen. He just lies in it and makes sure it doesn’t go away.”

I haven’t finished reading the book; I’m about a chapter ahead of my students (I have a friend who tells me all I have to be is a tad smarter than my class), but I like to think I have a lot in common with Bilbo Baggins.

I have a side that’s been lying dormant for years, too. It actually comes from my mom and my dad, the Ayanoglou and the Lewis side. Both are great readers who did their best to surround me with the finest literature. For Pete’s sake, I lived next door to a library. It was no use, though. Reading wasn’t something I did. Reading has always been hard. Oh, I can sound the words out just fine (usually). It’s processing and understanding what I read that’s difficult. I’ve been tested for everything but “poor reading comprehension” was all that showed up.

“I’m not bright,” I told Jesse during the part where Gollum and Bilbo were giving each other riddles (none of which I understood). Jesse told me Gollum used to be a hobbit, but after he found the ring, he became the freaky, scrawny, big-eyed thing we were watching on TV. I started to cry imagining Gollum as a happy hobbit smoking a pipe and wondering about after dinner seed cakes.

“Why are you so hard on yourself?” Jesse asked putting another taquito on my plate and pouring more margarita in my glass.

“It doesn’t bother me to say it. I’m not sad,” I explained as I squeezed lime into my drink. “It takes me a while to process things, but maybe that doesn’t make me any less of a person.”

It was probably the tequila talking, but I’m looking at what I’ve underlined in my copy of The Hobbit now: “The Took side won. He suddenly felt he would go without bed and breakfast to be thought fierce.” And, “You think I am no good. I will show you…Tell me what you want done, and I will try it.” And maybe my favorite, “There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself.”

I think what I’m learning from Bilbo is that it’s not so much that you think you’d be good at something if you just had a chance. Rather, it’s trying what you don’t think you can do, and are probably afraid of, and doing it anyway because the door is open and the Lonely Mountain is waiting with a dragon who believes all that glitters must be fiercely protected.

MLK's Masterclass

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

*

Twenty years ago, as part of an undergraduate history course my freshman year in college, I read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, Where Do We Go From Here? : Chaos or Community, I remember highlighting many passages, and I read the book twice, as was my habit being a college freshman. While specifics have escaped from my mind over two decades, I remember being awed by it, stirred by it, moved by it at my dorm room desk while the wind swirled snow across the open spaces of the college town on the Minnesota prairie.

A white kid of Scandinavian background, I grew up sixty miles from there in a town of 3,500+ people. In my 13 years of public schooling, there was one African American kid—three years older than I—in the K-12 of 600+ students. All that to say that my knowledge of the Civil Rights’ Movement was rudimentary, and my interactions with African Americans was minimal, if non-existent. *

“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’”

*

Ten years later I encountered King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” when I was an adjunct instructor at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. It was one of the selections in my newly adopted textbook, A World of Ideas, a textbook that contained work from great thinkers and writers. That Christmas break I hunkered down at my in-laws’ Minnesota farmhouse reading through several hundred pages, determining which selections to include in my course. King’s letter was one of my favorite pieces, and I knew I would be a fool not to assign it.

If my math is correct, I taught this piece in a total of twelve courses in colleges and universities in Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, and Texas. When teaching it, I used a variety of writing assignments, but by far my favorite assignment was asking students to write a rhetorical analysis and appreciation of one of the letter’s paragraphs.

Why is the paragraph important to the whole? What rhetorical and stylistic techniques does King employ and to what ends? What makes this passage an example of good writing? What makes this letter a model for argument? In short, I was trying to help my students pay attention to the writerly maneuvers that King makes, the “how.”

*

“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering that outright rejection.”

*

Each time I taught "Letter From Birmingham Jail” I was awed by the cohesiveness of the letter, his emotional appeals, his logic, his credibility, his ability to incorporate the ideas of many important thinkers, his style. When I read it yet again, as I did in preparation for writing this piece, I am freshly awed. It’s a masterclass on argument that has as much to teach us about writing as it does about justice, goodness, and love in the face of bitter opposition.

*

“So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

*

When I asked my students each semester which assigned reading was their favorite, King’s letter was always at the top. Each semester I assigned it, I anticipated the class period(s) we would discuss the essay more than any other class session. These are all comments on the craft and technique, but of course those elements are aids to the delivery of his messages, messages which, over sixty years later, still resonate and give us pause. These messages resonated with me, a person who grew up without any injustices, with the exception of the occasional bully, but even that was picayune by comparison.

*

“Let us hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”

Feel the Pull of Darkness

I volunteered to drive the night shift during a cross-country road trip last year. That meant the long drive through South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Maybe my enthusiasm to take the short straw was the prospect of what singer/songwriter/writer Josh Ritter calls being “pulled by the American darkness/the mountains, the rivers, the fields at harvest”. Or maybe it was the goal of meeting the sunrise in Missoula. (I had long ago been lured in by A River Runs Through It.) I didn’t want to come to such joy by sleeping until the morning.

A writing mentor told me once, “You really like to write about losers.” I do. I like stories whose characters experience the weight of evil and suffering dragging them down far short of redemption. I like stories and books and movies where evil— and I’m simplifying here—wins.

In a recent conversation in Granta, Ben Marcus and George Saunders discuss ‘dark’ literature. Both writers make no apologies about being pulled to stories that, in quoting Joy Williams, deal with “the horror and incomprehensibility of time.” Stories not fleeing from fear or hopelessness or sadness. Characters whose experiences do not bloom into rainbows and sunrises at the end. Marcus sums it up best, “Relishing this kind of writing does not mean we do not love life. It means we love life enough to want to be present to its difficulty and complexity. We experience pleasure when we feel that someone has arrived at something essential.”

Growing up with faith I have been assured I am part of a great cloud of witnesses. But too often this “cloud” is paraded around as a heavenly choir singing only of “glad tidings of great joys”. Faith, like literature, if it is to “arrive at something essential,” needs to be honest with darkness, allow space for doubt, and ponder questions with answers that leave us far short of redemption. As Madeleine L’Engle says, “pretending there is no darkness is another way to extinguish the light.”

It was nearly 2 a.m. when I crossed the Montana border in March 2014. Rolling hills were covered in frost and sparkling in the starlight. Just passed the state sign I pulled the car over and stepped outside. And, right now, as I’m thinking about what I felt out there, another of Josh Ritter’s lyrics rings true,

A sky so cold and clear the stars might stick you where you stand and you’re only glad it’s dark ‘cause you might see the master’s hand you might cast around forever and never find the peace you seek.

Letters to Self

At some point each semester, I talk to my writing class about the importance of keeping a journal.So much of what writers produce must be attached to deadline or assignment.  Under these conditions, we check our tone, weigh risks, and write beneath the shadow of an imagined and rolling eye. Under that kind of constraint, it’s important to have a place where our voices can crack with the terror or silliness or strain of the immediate moment without the pressure of public presentation.   

So, I press fresh paperback journals into young hands and quote Flannery O’Connor famous words, “I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I tell them to write without burden because keeping a journal will make a space for discovery that even the most exacting assignment might not produce.And while I fully believe the possibility of this sort of discovery is real and true, I almost forget to expect that sort of discovery for myself.  

In a letter to college freshman, Alfred Corn (now a famous poet), Flannery O’Connor addresses Corn’s concern for new and intense doubts about his Christian faith. As any reader of O’Connor would expect, her responses are profound and thoughtful. Assuring him that real faith must encounter real doubt, she reminds him that “doubt is an experience that belongs to faith.” Using her method of letter writing as a catalyst for a free-write, I direct students to “write a letter to your past self that suggests experiences of doubt and faith without using either of the words doubt or faith.” And when I go home and search my own shelves for an old journal, I am surprised to discover that I have been writing these kinds of letters to myself for a long time.   

For a fevered hour, I sit with my own journals, the stiff-spined and the scraggly paged, cheap composition books and mahogany moleskines. I read and reread and find that beyond the images and ideas I left for myself to develop into poems and papers, I have also been writing very personally to my own self. I stare a long time at four sentences that lament the doubt a past self felt about my capacity to “really” write, and I begin to remember, flanked by my own words, that the doubt I experience today in my writing life is nothing new. Suddenly, I wanted to hug the author who admitted this struggle, to high-five her, embracing “yesterday’s” voice with an abandon I would never direct at “today’s”. The experience of having my own past voice directly address my present one was like encountering an inheritance someone else had earned and carefully saved for the benefit of another generation. Yesterday’s voice admitted angst that today’s voice still understood. There was such relief in that mutual understanding.

A letter, in its nature of direct and intimate address, clasps my imagination in the same way my grandmother’s old hands cup the face of my daughter. There is something about a voice that belongs to a moment I intimately know; I can believe in that voice because I can believe in the reality of the moment from which it speaks. How shocking, for the writer, so used to falling in love with other voices, other stories, to find her own voice worth listening to.

Metaphysical poet, John Donne, writes that “More than kisses, letters mingle souls.” While the act of writing letters naturally lends itself to the passionate longing of lovers, I am moved by the letters that I have, even unknowingly, been writing to myself. I am breathless for notes scrabbled in margins and smudged blue into spidery paragraphs. How vital our own voices can become, shimmering in margins of shelved journals, waiting to reach across time and distance like a letter addressing us in a moment we most need to hear from a friend.

Cat Dish Leadership

My first introduction to Anne Lamott was her statement, “I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.” There was something about this punky comment that wooed me.

I admired and appreciated her honesty; her lack of pretence made me feel like this was an individual I could share camaraderie with. This is not to say I don’t sometimes sniff about for the dangers of false authenticity: the idol our culture has made of “being authentic" when “keeping it real” can just be another façade. Still though, I can't suspect everybody and Lamott feels like somebody worth listening to, perhaps even a leader of sorts.

I admire her for her truth telling ability: for her willingness to expose her faith, foibles and failures. She articulates the exhausting degree of vulnerability required in giving ourselves to loving and being loved. Her discussions of life drip with gore and hope, and help me see beyond the brute side of mortality. She hints that some interactions and memories and experiences can be processed in so many different ways that we may not be as tied to personal history as it sometimes appears. The food of our souls, like the food of our mouths, can be fermented and stewed or boiled and roasted or chopped and salted. In short, in Anne I hear echoes of something that is flesh and soul affirming. And, the invitation to explore both the heights of Love's radiance and the grass betwixt my toes engages me.

But even with all this, I inwardly tense up a little on the idea of Lamott as leader. A companion on this life's journey? Sure. A leader? I have an uncomfortable time with her informality; her willingness to expose her inward processes and come right out and verbalize her struggles. Perhaps my discomfort is rooted in one idea of what separates leaders from followers.

Several years ago, Christian Century ran a post by Adam J Copeland. In his article, "Why Lead," he suggests that we might do well to reinvigorate our current conceptions of leadership with a bigger emphasis on "followership."  Leaders, then, are faithful followers on the path of love, wisdom, humility and self-sacrifice. For Copeland, leadership is a lot less about accomplishment, power, innovation or public relationship potential; it is about openly and heartfully following the one who is Love. But what does that look like in practical terms?

Henri Nouwen depicts leadership in very personal terms. For him, leading is the ultimate act of vulnerability. He understands the mantle of leadership as one that requires the laying down of one's life: the complete abdication of ego,  individualism, control and power. That is,  "making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life” (In the Name of Jesus). 

I wonder if Nouwen's profound insight on leadership has something to do with the feeling one gets in rehabilitation groups. I've briefly glimpsed their power myself, and I've heard others comment on the same phenomenon. Being in the presence of people with such intentional honesty and openness about physical, emotional, social and spiritual struggles has a lasting impact. Pursuing the path of wellness requires honesty, both with others and ourselves. We do not grow when do not examine our hearts, hurts and hopes. A social worker who I am privileged to call my friend has commented on the potential of some workers to fall in love with their clients. The reason? Honing the vocabulary of honesty is deeply attractive. Most of us recognize that we all have proclivities to certain types of destructive behaviors, but not all of us have the courage to examine and voice them and seek guidance and share our hearts with others.

If I understand Nouwen correctly, it is the calling and duty of a leader to bare his or her heart and soul: to be a leader is to lay down facades in the hopes others will find their way to faith through that act of sacrifice. In this perspective, I hope that one day my own followership can mirror a meagre degree of honesty that Lamott has revealed to multitudes.

Emotional Truth in Memoir

For months now, I’ve been trying to write about my dad walking me down the aisle. I’ve been failing miserably and I haven’t known why. Of course it’s partially family loyalty: any time I talk about his depression, even casually, I feel like a kid cussing on the 6th grade playground. There’s also the fact that my wedding was the best and most fabulous day of all the days—why focus in on the bittersweet?

The smoldering wreckage of this draft was on my mind when I booked tickets to see Mary Karr, the patron saint of memoir, speak at the L.A. Library’s lecture series, Aloud. I hoped just being in her presence would help me.

I was right. At the risk of sounding like a super-fan, pretty much everything she said was awesome. (And she said it all while wearing killer gold-chain-bedecked boots.)

I was especially struck by her ideas on truth. She began by reminding us that all writers fight the tendency to sensationalize. In extreme cases, this leads to James-Frey-level disaster. Of course, most of us know not to cross that line. (Whenever I’m tempted to, I imagine a giant, sprinkle-coated hand descending from the sky to choke me.)

Most of us struggle with a subtler lie: the lie we’re telling ourselves. We find our own experience a bit boring, so we tell little lies as escape. We undervalue the real story, so we ramp up the drama.

On some level, I already knew to be on the watch for both these pitfalls. What surprised me was Karr’s claim that our truth is actually more interesting than our dramatizations. As she writes in The Art of Memoir, “A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He’s missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.”

To illustrate this point, Karr told us about her process of writing Lit. She said she wrote several drafts vilifying her husband. Then she wrote one vilifying herself. Neither felt true. Many drafts in, she realized the real story was how she’d held on to hope for her marriage long after she had reason to. Her hope was so strong, she said, it embarrassed her.

Here she turned to the audience, in her very warm way, and said, “you know?”

The whole crowded nodded—one motion, like a group heartbeat.

And I got it. I got what she meant. The power in memoir isn’t in the tallness of the tale, but in the knowing together, author and audience. And to get to that point, what you say has to be true.

So I looked back at my draft. Most of it was a lie. Not a sprinkled-hand-level lie. The sneaky kind…a lie to myself. I’d been wrapped up in being dramatic, and I’d been writing myself as the saintly, victimized daughter.

What, if anything, do I really know about the ten years we’ve lived with my dad’s depression?

This is what I know: 1.) His depression has hurt me 2.) I can’t seem to find the words to describe that hurt. And I don’t just mean writer’s block. I mean that whenever I try to write about it, I clam up, emotionally. If I resent him, I’m selfish (and also a cliché…another female writer with daddy issues). Do I get to feel anything other than thankful he’s alive? Do I get to feel abandoned? Can I claim this story, or is it only his to tell? And if my words don’t heal him, what are they even worth?

Alright. So all I know is I don’t have the words. For a writer, it’s a very odd discovery. Even weirder: it’s the first thing I’ve written about him that actually feels true.

I should note that there’s a sharp distinction in Karr’s book between interior truth and cold hard facts. In The Art of Memoir, Karr clarifies this—we are not supposed to be producing “crisp external events played from a digital archive. It’s the speaker’s truth alone. In this way, the form constantly disavows the rigors of objective truth.” However, this is not permission to ditch our emotional honesty. As she says, “I couldn’t report a malicious quip from my ex-husband without mentioning that he never spoke to me that way.” We don’t have to obsess over getting every practical detail right, but we do have to let truth guide our narration.

Armed with all this, I begin another draft.

Here is a memory of my wedding day: I’m at the top of the Carmel Beach stairwell. I’m watching the choppy waves and straining to hear my entrance music. Dad turns to me and says, “Did you know I had several seizures today.” And I say, “I’m sorry. Are you proud of me, though?” And he says, “Yes.”

But just now, as I write this down, a different memory surfaces. This time he says, “Remember how we used to come here on vacation? This is so neat. This is just so neat.” He squeezes my hand.

This essay will take me a long time, but I’m okay with that. Now, more than I want to write something dramatic, or something sad, or something to publish, I want something true.

Out of Clumps of Books

Twenty minutes is enough time to visit a bookstore. Especially when your son asks to go to the bookstore and you only have twenty minutes. He scoured for spy books, startled me fifteen minutes later, pointing to a book on a top shelf in the fiction stacks.

“You’ve got that book,” he said. “It’s on the coffee table.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude. Read this when I was very close to giving up on writing.

“You’ve got that one, too.”

A few rows down, to my left, I removed a book.

“Yeah. You have that one. And the other one.”

East of Eden. John Steinbeck. A coworker and I started an unofficial book club on weekends when the news was slow. I didn’t finish it because we were moving and you had just been born. I finished it two years later, around the time your sister was born.

Color me impressed that my eight-year-old son recognized my books on those shelves. But he should. He and his younger sisters have made my modest study into their play area. They take my books off my shelves and use them for staging forts, small plays with puppets, pillows for dolls, items to buy from the store, planet surfaces for their pocket-size civilizations of legos and barbies.

With enough time Isaac may have been able to point to more books on the shelves of the bookstore. And I, perhaps, may have curiously realized I was not telling him about the book itself, but where I was and who I was and what I was doing when I read the book.

Orthodoxy. G.K. Chesterton. College Senior. Feet propped on a dorm desk. I had just started dating your mom.

City of God. Augustine. Unemployed and depressed, trapped for a weekend in an apartment above two chain smokers while the street outside was under six feet of water.

Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling. All seven books while trying to get you to sleep in your bed through the night.

Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace. Read when your aunt and three cousins came to live with us in our old house. This book kept me sane with so many lives in complete disarray.

The poet Anna Kamieńska’s Astonishments sits on a special shelf in my study. A shelf that the kids know is untouchable. In “Small Things”, she records a number of images quivering, thrusting, seeping, pricking, splashing from the detritus of everyday life. And these minuscule things, “[grow] enormous/as if Someone was building Eternity/as a swallow its nest/out of clumps of moments.”

Properly shelved or piled on the corners of yet another fort, I may not be able to tell you about all of my books as someone with a “graduate degree in books” should be able to. Still, it is clear what has taken shape around these spines. That day my son asked me to take him to the bookstore I bought a George Saunders novella. It was and is an awful book. But it is no small thing.

The One You Know vs. The One You Need

I had a really good idea a few weeks ago. I was going to dance, teach dance, and sell brightly-colored spandex thereby reinventing and mastering the concept of a triple threat. I was already doing the first two, and was spending the few minutes before a job interview meandering around a store of overpriced workout attire so I could accomplish the third. The hiring manager rounded up two other hopefuls and led us to an empty table in front of a Nordstrom’s Cafe.  

“Did you know this was going to be a group interview?” one of them asked quietly. “I had no idea,” she said. “But maybe we’ll all get hired together.”  

“That would be so cool.” The other girl said. I smiled and nodded wondering just how many positions there were to be filled. 

“So this is a super casual interview,” the manager said smiling. “As you guys probably know we are all about helping all types of women. We really want every woman to feel comfortable from the outside in, and we just want to get to know and figure out where you’d fit within the company. So just go ahead and introduce yourself and just tell us why you want to work here.”  

That is a question I have always hated. "I like to eat food, and my landlord won't let me pay him in experience and bragging rights," though perfectly true, isn’t exactly the answer potential employers want to hear. 

During a mock group interview, in college, the presenter posed a question, “If you could be any type of tree what kind would you be and why?”  

"I'd be a Christmas tree,” I said, “because it's a symbol that represents a time of year that makes a lot of people happy regardless of whether celebrate the actual holiday."   

The boy next to me answered, “I’d be a carrot tree because I’m unlike other you’ve ever seen.”  He was pleased with himself, and the workshop leader thought his answer was memorable and clever. I disagreed. The reason you have never seen a carrot tree is because carrots do not grow on trees, and if they did it would be an entirely different plant. The fact that he didn’t know this mean that he either did not absorb or retain information or didn’t eat vegetables which would result in a host of health problems and neither of those things would be very useful to the company. 

That, however, is the type of thing we do in those situations. We try to be remembered and impressive. We paint a picture of ourselves that adheres to what we think people want to see. I’d argue that one of the most detrimental things you can do in an interview is believe them when they say, “We want to see that real you.”  In most cases, what they really want is to see if you fit into the strangely snapped box they created before they knew that you ever existed. And we want to fit. No one seems to grow out of the elementary school need to fit in with the kids who have what we don’t, and so, like the line of dancers, in the musical, A Chorus Line, we step-kick-kick and smile on cue all while singing “I really need this job. Please, God, I need this job. I’ve got to get this job!”

“Tell us about a time when you received great customer service at. It can be at any store. It doesn’t have to be here," said the manager.

“Starbucks,” I said, automatically. I told them how the baristas knew my name, would notice when I hadn’t been in for a while, and how they knew that something was wrong when I ordered a white mocha. “I know they aren’t my friends,” I said, “but I would go out of my way to go to that Starbucks because it felt like they knew me.”  

The other girls nodded and hummed, and then they proceeded to say that they loved shopping at the very establishment that had gathered us together that afternoon for an interview. As an explanation, they both offered individualized versions of what sounded to me like “Blah blah blah blah blah bloppity bloopity bloop bloop.”  The manager applauded the other applicants for their answers and said how their experiences were really what the company was about, “We just want to help each person find that one item of clothing that makes them feel beautiful on the outside so they can start to make changes on the inside.”  

I felt so betrayed and annoyed, naming the company you are interviewing for as your favorite store is the equivalent of reminding your teacher that he forgot to give you homework. It is sucking up 101. It is deplorable behavior that warrants being ignored at recess, and for the life of me,  I cannot tell you why I didn't do it.

In the introduction of Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warnings: Fictions and Disturbances, he writes, “I find myself, at the start of each flight, meditating and pondering the wisdom offered by the flight attendants as if it were a koan, or a tiny parable, or the high point of all wisdom.” With a mother as a flight attendant and the Philadelphia International Airport on my list favorite places I grew up hearing the pre-flight instructions, but until that moment they had never been about more than oxygen. Secure your own mask before helping others. “I think about the need to help others,” Gaiman writes, "and how we mask ourselves to do it and how unmasking makes us vulnerable.” He goes on to describe people who “trade fictions for a living.” He was talking about authors, but sitting in the group interview answering questions that aimed to prove that I would be of some value to this national corporation, I’m pretty sure everyone does it. 

The manager rolled our applications into a tube and shoved them into the pocket of her jacket. “It was nice to meet you girls.We will call you by Monday if we have a place for you.” Instead of walking back to my car, I rode up the escalator and walked to Starbucks.

“Hey!” the barista said pulling out sharpie and preparing to mark the familiar green and white cup. “What are we doing for you today?”  

“Hi,” I said, “Can I have a grande white mocha, please?”  he nodded, scanned my phone, and told my drink would be ready soon. When the cup came, I took a swig. On the white lid was the shape of my mouth printed in a wine-colored shade of lipgloss called "Desire."  I took another sip and sighed. 

Why Alexie was Right to Be Wrong about Yi-Fen Chou

It’s been about a month since people were outraged by the Yi-Fen Chou/Michael Derrick Hudson thing (read more here, here, and here). A white guy pretending to be Asian merely to game “the system” has clearly made a moral error, and of course the fires of Internet outrage were quickly kindled, and of course whatever kernel of justice that outrage began with quickly turned ugly and arbitrary as that ire blasted its easy target.

I like to mull and ponder, so the online tinderbox rubs me the wrong way even when it has a point. I also have little faith in the state of public discourse right now. But if we believe in democracy and the public square, if we Christians care about both racial justice and the integrity of the arts, then I suppose we contribute once in awhile, especially if we want to see more civil, measured discourse than we usually do. So, here goes . . .

My own sense is that Hudson was certainly wrong, but that Sherman Alexie was also wrong to have been influenced by the poet’s name. It’s just that Alexie was wrong in the right way, whereas Hudson was not.

What I mean is that we have a real history of racial injustice in this country that requires redress but that our efforts to redress it will necessarily be imperfect and possibly incur further injustices.

Consider Alexie’s criteria for selecting the “best” American poems, which aim for an objectivity defined against his existing preferences and according to a more or less familiar desire for fair representation. There’s nothing objectionable about his list—I had similar aims when I was poetry editor for Relief—but they do highlight the difficulty of really choosing “the best” when that term encompasses more than just the work itself, which is to say when the term refers not just to poetry but to the social context, America.

Alexie admits that Hudson was right; the Chinese name influenced his decision—not his appreciation of the poem, just his application of his criterion of diversity. He himself calls it “nepotism,” by which he means the privileging of an ingroup member over an outgroup one, and he understands the connotations of injustice. That is, he admits to committing an injustice but saw it as preferable to an alternative injustice.

And, honestly, I think that’s fair. We live in a fallen world where we do our best to correct past mistakes but cannot control the consequences of our choices. Once Alexie made his choice based on his criteria, to reject the poem on the basis of new information would only have muddled the issue by making it seem all about identity, which truly would have brought the other poems under a distracting scrutiny. The volume needs to be about poetry first, as much as possible, though it can never be about only poetry.

To be clear, I believe it is legit to imagine oneself in other identity positions as a writer or even as an ethical human being, but we’re not talking about an artistic choice; we’re talking about a blatantly cynical attempt to garner attention by co-opting an identity with perceived advantages and without regard for the lived experience of that identity. Hudson didn’t “reveal” anything about the world of poetry that we didn’t already know or that Alexie himself wouldn’t freely admit. It’s not even clear he had any such critical aim in mind.

Instead, he perpetrated a further aesthetic injustice by making us think the important question was what to think about him as opposed to what to think about the poems themselves. Because, as Alexie testifies to, there is always plenty to get upset about in any Best American volume, just as there is much to enjoy. So, go ahead and buy the book and read Yi-Fen Chou’s poem, but don’t stop there. Justice requires you give the other poets a fair shake.

Intern to Managing Editor in One Year

During the winter of 2014, I was 18 and doing the same thing every other college student was: scrambling for a summer internship. Unlike most other college students, I didn’t have a lot of options. Editing internships for English majors in NYC are lovely, except for when they’re unpaid and super competitive.

So I crafted a casual tweet hoping to catch the eye of some small company that wanted a college sophomore with no experience. Dan Bowman, who happens to be a professor at the college I attend, responded. He told me he had contacts at some literary journals, and to let him know if I was interested. I responded in five seconds with a very emphatic yes.

He gave me a couple names and told me to tell him what I was interested in. Relief caught my attention immediately and I couldn’t stop reading the mission statement: “The goal of this publication is to pursue a complete picture of Christ and life –- real, gritty, painful, wonderful, this-side-of-heaven life...Christ’s goal was never to keep us sheltered and comfortable.  He did not pull his punches.” Relief was everything I wanted from Christian writing and art—honest, unflinching examples of reality and grace. I emailed Dan and told him that Relief was my top internship priority. He said he would make it happen. And he did.

I spent the summer of 2014 doing many things, but interning with Relief was my favorite. I worked under the blog and social media editor and helped keep blog posts coming in on deadline and doing some minor edits. I had been interested in the publishing industry before Relief, but this internship confirmed that this is where I was meant to be. So at the end of the summer, when my boss told me that I had done good work and asked if would I like to come on as an assistant editor, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

Junior year was fantastic. Not only was I back at school, but I got to continue working for the journal that was now one of my deepest passions. I started making friends with my bloggers, who continually poured immense wisdom into my life, whether they knew it or not. I was and still am continually flabbergasted that I get to work with such incredible writers.

This January, Relief started transitioning. Brad Fruhauff, our editor-in-chief at the time, asked me if I could fill in as Interim Managing Editor and Web Editor, ultimately transitioning into Managing Editor. I quickly said yes. I started running the Relief blog solo and helped get everything finalized for issue 8.1. I loved every single second of it. I got to intimately be a part of furthering the conversation of art and faith through the blog and the print issue. I have never flourished like I have here. 

I started my senior year at Taylor University this month. I’m working on writing my senior thesis for my BA in English Literature and I’m also a contributing editor to Writer’s Digest Online. I am beyond thrilled and honored to be the managing editor for Relief. I get to continue working with incredibly wise and talented people to promote the thing I love most. There are excellent plans in place for this journal and I am on the edge of seat.

“For authors who cry out for an appropriate venue and readers who long for stories that don’t make them gag, we present Relief.”

An Update (Finally!) from Relief’s New Editor-in-Chief

Dear readers, writers, and friends:

Many of you know that Relief Journal is in the process of transition. I’m here to give an official update on the situation. After a number of years of service, Brad Fruhauff felt it was the right time to step down as Editor-in-Chief of Relief. I will be taking over in that role, and transitioning Relief’s operations to Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. This will enable the journal to benefit from an unprecedented level of structural support while retaining in full its editorial autonomy and unique spirit.

Before I continue: If Relief has meant something to you—moreover if the conversation at the intersection of faith and art means something to you—please make a point of thanking Brad for his work. His contributions have done nothing short of helping shape the contemporary landscapes of Christian faith, imagination, and creativity that are critical to many of us. Brad has agreed to stay on in the capacity of Board member and the special role of Senior Editorial Adviser. We’ll lean on his experience and knowledge as we move forward with the transition. Again, please take a second to thank him at brad@reliefjournal.com. *                *                *

Allow me to introduce myself, then discuss my vision for the next era in the life of Relief. I want Relief’s longtime readers and contributors to know that this journal is ultimately landing in the right hands, even as the transition has meant we’ve been in a holding pattern for a number of months.

My name is Dan Bowman. In the mid-1990s, as a freshman at a small Christian liberal arts college in upstate New York, I took a literature class that changed the course of my life. Through the truth and beauty of the poems and stories, and our probing discussions of them, I realized that if I could choose a place to stay, a place where I would have the chance to flourish, it would be at the intersection of literature and Christian faith. I haven’t looked back since.

My path led me to an MA in comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University. My debut collection of poems is A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country (Virtual Artists Collective, 2012), and I’ve since completed a novel called Beggars in Heaven along with a good number of essays.

My work has appeared in several recent books, such as How to Read a Poem (TS Poetry, 2014) and Not Yet Christmas: An Advent Reader (Seedbed, 2014), and in periodicals like The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Books & Culture, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong/London), Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), The Midwest Quarterly, Pyrta (India), Rio Grande Review, Saint Katherine Review, Seneca Review, and others. I’ve blogged here at Relief, and occasionally at Image Journal’s Good Letters; I currently blog for Ruminate.

I grew up in Mohawk, New York, and live with my wife Bethany and our two kids in Hartford City, Indiana, where I’m Associate Professor of English at Taylor University.

Like many of you, I am sustained and inspired by art-and-faith events (in particular the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe and the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College); by many, many books; and by magazines like Relief. In those spaces I’ve been both comforted and challenged, always nudged toward my best self. I couldn’t be happier to take the helm of a journal that exists to further those very conversations, to explore and inhabit the richness of, as we say in our mission statement, “a complete picture of Christ and life—real, gritty, painful, wonderful, this-side-of-heaven life.”

*                *                *

Beginning in the 2016-17 academic year, Relief will return to its publication schedule of two issues per year. But starting now, and ongoing throughout this year, the Relief team is working toward these long-term goals that we believe will enable the journal to come into its fullest expression:

• Moving operations into permanent physical office space on the campus of Taylor University (to be opened at select times for visits from writers and readers),
• Expanding readership of the blog and the print journal (including expanding subscriptions to individuals and libraries),
• Expanding the pool of submissions to include more literary writers from around the world whose works attain excellence and engage faith in evocative ways,
• Enhancing our presence on social media, ensuring consistent and meaningful platforms that allow crucial conversations and relationships to develop and thrive,
• Attending key national conferences, including Festival of Faith and Writing, AWP (lack of funding has precluded Relief’s attendance in recent years), and several regional gatherings in the Midwest,
• Engaging the next generation of art-and-faith writers and readers by involving passionate, talented university students in key support roles of Relief’s weekly operations,
• Empowering Relief’s editorial team with trained interns so that genre editors can read and respond to every submission carefully and quickly, and
• Developing a small literary press, Relief Books, to publish 2-3 full-length books of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry each year (stay tuned for submission details!) and offering our authors a high level of support in connecting with readers.

As you can see, these are not cosmetic changes, but substantial objectives that will put Relief in a position to facilitate better than ever the kind of art that’s been at its core since the journal’s inception.

In the short-term, our goals are more modest but equally important:

• Completing the transition of the nonprofit to Taylor and the state of Indiana,
• Applying for substantial grant monies,
• Onboarding Aaron Housholder as new fiction editor and Adele Konyndyk Gallogly as new blog editor,
• Reading and responding to every current submission in all genres,
• Rebuilding, and reconvening regular meetings of, the Board of Directors as well as a new Advisory Board to oversee operations, give counsel, and help shape the future of the journal and press,
• Publishing a sizeable issue in the late winter/early spring of 2016 (submissions in all genres are open and will be attended to very carefully in the coming weeks!),
• Finding some way to thank/compensate/retain one-time-intern-turned-Managing-Editor Hannah Haney for her incredible dedication and hard work over the past year,
• Thanking, retaining, and better supporting the diverse, extremely talented, and soul-stirring writers who have given their time and talent to Relief’s blog, and
• Winning back the goodwill of readers and writers whose work or correspondence may have slipped through the cracks during this long holding pattern of the last year.

To that last point…please send me a note (dnbowman@taylor.edu) if your submission is sitting in our queue and you still do not hear from us by Thanksgiving. It’s my goal for us to attend to every submission by then, and we’ve scheduled several meetings in the coming weeks toward that goal. From there on out, we will have somewhat shorter reading periods, with a break in the summer, to ensure that every submission can be carefully considered in a timely manner in the future.

I will be back here with updates soon! Thank you for your patience. I believe it will be worth it for us all as we move forward.

Yours,

Dan

The Somedays Between Now and Then

When I committed to writing about getting older, I thought the words would come easily. After all, aging is something that has been happening to me for my entire life. I was born. I turned 10, 16, 18, 21, and 25, and someday I will be 40, then 60, then maybe 85. But before that, I will turn 27.

When I was 11, I had a very clear picture of what I thought my life would be in my twenties. I remember thinking I would be married and living in New York City. I expected that I would drive to my job as a ballet dancer in a black SUV with tinted windows. I thought that I regularly would take in deep breaths of clean air, revel in unobscured views of blue skies, and shove my manicured fingers into the pockets of one of my many puffy vests. These seemed like perfectly realistic goals.

Now that I am actually in my twenties, here are the things I can check off: puffy vests (without the manicure). There are some days—these are the days when I choose takeout over a Pinterest recipe or store bought cookies over something baked from scratch with love, or the days when I post a picture of coffee instead of a selfie of me and my other half—I feel like a failure as an adult. I feel like, in the words of Nora Ephron in “I Remember Nothing,” “On some level, my life has been wasted on me.”

I have to take a break from musing and confess that, much like my life, this piece is not going as I planned. I thought that at about this point this collection of feelings would culminate into some really hopeful and clever words of wisdom. I was thinking something like, "Here I am, soon to be 27, floating in the ocean of time as my Someday (this is a When Harry Met Sally reference) approaches. I cannot gauge the upcoming wave, but I know how to swim, and I am ready for whatever the future brings.” Every time I read it, my voice changes to something that sounds like the narrator of a My Little Pony audiobook, the one that comes with a booklet of scratch-and-sniff stickers. It is irritating and kind of dumb.

I am struggling to tie these pieces together into a box that looks like it came from Pottery Barn. I am searching for story development, the clear plot structure, the moment where the ending becomes clear. I do recognize that I am searching for this ending in the middle of my story, but it is easy to feel that time is moving faster than my ability to acclimate to being grown up. It turns out that aging, much like writing, is hard. At some point in my life, probably when I thought that writing would be fun, I became obsessed with deadlines. While you can impose deadlines on creative pieces about life, you cannot, it seems, always apply them to life itself.

That's pretty tidy. I could end it there, but the question that I'm trying to answer is what exactly I'm supposed to do with that information. At this age, I should know things, but I don't think I do. I haven’t gotten to the point where I feel like I know what I’m doing. That is probably more frustrating than life's need to ruin my plans.

In “The O Word,” an essay Ephron wrote at 69, she says she spent a bit of time thinking about the secret to getting older. “I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven’t. I just try to figure out what I really want to do every day…I aim low. My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard at Shake Shack and a walk in the park (followed by a Lactaid).”

When it comes to conjuring up a profound ending to my own musings, I too come up short. At 26, there's no way to talk about aging without sounding like those newlyweds that love to give out relationships advice. While I may be old to my five-year-old students, and old enough to switch to an anti-aging moisturizer, according to the expected lifespan in the US, this is only a quarter-life crisis and not one in the middle. So here is what I am going to do. I will call the Thai restaurant down the street. When the owner asks for my name, I will tell him, and he will say “Ah, yes, Chrysta Spicy Gluten-free,” as if that is what is printed on my ID. I will find it endearing and also a little embarrassing, but I will get over it long enough to find satisfaction in eating the food straight from the container and not having dishes to wash afterwards. Then I will go to sleep, and when I wake up, I will be one day older.

Pre-sales of Issue 8.1

Issue 8.1 is officially ready for pre-sales!

Issue 8.1 features knife fights, Christian charity fails, and poems between friends. Interviews with poet Julie L. Moore and author Robert Vander Lugt. New poems from the dames of Christian poetry: Luci Shaw, Jeanne Murray Walker, and Tania Runyan.

Crossing the Threshold

He came into my office as he often does, or as I often do to him in return, to avoid actual work, to talk about the fun stuff—the difference in Raymond Carver after Gordon Lish, how the Pinckney Benedict story “Mercy” is perfect for our students—and/or complain about the unfun stuff, also fun in its way. We work in the same pod and his office is directly across from mine. We’re not rivals; he’s fiction and I’m creative non. Truly, we’re friends.

“So, I’ve finished another major rewrite of my novel, and I’ve got a few people lined up to copyedit it one more time,” he said. “Then, hopefully . . .

“How’s the thing with the agent?” A while back, an agent wanted a one-sentence pitch from him, and he’d agonized for a bit over it, also a topic of conversation.

“It’s fine, yeah, so hopefully it’ll be done-done, and then by the end of the semester, I’ll land it.”

“That’s so great,” I said, or something like it. “Really amazing to teach and do something like this. You’re the man.”

***

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recounts the goings-on in Paris when he was an expat. I read it in Paris when I was twenty-one, an intoxicating affair. But for all its inclusion of other artists—Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald—A Moveable Feast is a romance about the solitary artist, the artist who is a faithful lover only to his art. And it’s a damned lie.

***

The next day, my colleague came back. “So when I was in here earlier, what I meant to ask was if you’d read it—if you’d be one of my readers. I came in to ask that, and then I chickened out and I didn’t.”

“Oh, really? Oh, well, sure. Of course. I’d love to.”

***

My dad loved the trumpet. In the early 50s, my grandma set aside egg money to buy him one, and he practiced it in the barn, “mastering” it—his word—in six months as a sophomore in high school. His band teacher was his favorite teacher, and this band teacher encouraged him to join the army band. He tried to run away to do so, but since he had a brother who died in Korea and since he was a minor, he needed my grandpa’s signature to join. Thus ended my dad’s dreams of the trumpet.

In an end table in our living room, I came across some of his trumpet music, tracked with sixteenth note and—whether this is memory or imagination, I no longer know—thirty-second note runs. This, too, is a romantic story. Better yet, it’s tragically romantic.

How much art dies on this hill? How much withers for lack of a good reader or the withholding of a signature of blessing? How much art is sacrificed on the threshold of fear and pride?

***

A day later and I went into my colleague’s office, identifying my part in these near misses.

“So, I could have offered to read it, too, you know,” I said, “but I didn’t because, you know, I didn’t want to presume. I guess I thought of it as private, didn’t want to interfere.”

He’s gracious and incisive about the situation. “It’s like we’re still stuck in the model of the solitary artist,” he says. “It’s not like anyone has taught us how this works.”

Is God there?

The days that I write start like this: I drop my girls off at school, and as I drive away I turn on the song, “Time” by the Abstract Giants. I know a few of the guys in band. I grew up with them. I know Andy Lempera, the drummer, from junior high band where our director promised that if we worked hard, Andy could free style while we cleaned up our clarinets and oboes, trumpets and trombones during the last five minutes of the period. I never had so much fun cleaning the spit out of my flute than when Andy played.

Matt Conway and Cary Kano are some of my brother’s childhood buddies. I think I’ve known them since before their voices changed. And Andres Roldan, one of the vocalists in the band is the sibling of my best friend from junior high and high school. There were very few days when I was over and Andres and most of these guys weren’t: playing basketball in the alley, or video games in the basement, or running after the ice-cream truck—Celena and I running with them.

I play the song because I’ve watched the years of revision these guys put into getting their songs together. I’ve listened to them riff in smoky bars in Chicago (when smoking in bars was legal), when the words were there, but the melody wasn’t. When the beat was catchy, but the words needed to be figured out. When everything fit together and the crowd let them know their music was perfect. Watching and listening to them was a lesson in writing: the more I practice laying down words, the more triumphant the story becomes, the more I believe in it. So I play their song for courage: if these guys can do it, so can I.

I crank the song because I love loud music and also because I love the looks I get when people hear the bass booming down the street. They expect someone else, and what they see is an almost 40-year-old woman driving a Mazda 5 with two car seats in the backseat. “Surprise!” or “Gotcha!” is what I want to yell out the window, and this is the sentiment I carry to my writing: What will I surprise myself with when I write today? What will I be brave enough to tell? What will I find out? I love the moments when my story grabs me by the ears and pulls me towards its words and yells, “Gotcha!”

While I’m writing, I listen to music that’ll keep me in my seat: Miles Davis, Sujfan Stevens, David Gray. I can’t call these guys my friends, but their music speaks to things I try to figure out in my writing. They’ve created a setting for me to sit with the things that make me wonder and what makes me uncomfortable, and I aspire to do the same thing with my stories.

That is, until a group of boys come walking down my street. Truth be told, they strut. There are usually five or six of them, and if it’s warm, they’re wearing undershirts with flannels or sweatshirts slung over their shoulders. In the cooler weather they’re wearing sweatshirts and knitted caps. Never jackets, though it hasn’t been terribly cold in DC yet. Their pants are always low. I can usually see their underwear. I’m old enough now to see the baby in everyone 21-years-old and younger, so I can’t tell if they are school age or not. They hold no book bags if they are going to school. They hold nothing. They saunter down the sidewalk, taking up all of it, the grass, and enough of the street that cars would need to slow and swerve around them.

They are always rapping. Usually it’s one of the boys in the group, and the rest are silent while the one articulates precisely each word, as though it’s liturgy. I always stop writing and listen. I wince when they drop “f” bombs. I get afraid when the tone suggests violence. If these boys were walking down the street when I was in my car, I’d probably wait in it, pretending to check my phone, until they passed. But from my desk on our second floor, I listen intently with my head bowed and my hands folded.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if one can pray without knowing that is what one is doing. Is God at work when we hear a song that makes us bop our heads and swivel our hips before we know we are doing it? Is He there when a song names something we don't understand? Is God the spark that ignites an urge for us to create something beautiful in a world that baffles us?

And what about the times when we are so angry, or so scared that all we can do is walk down the street shouting words we’ve clutched onto because there is nowhere else to go and nothing else to do? Are we heard when we are calling and reaching towards a God we don’t know?

Coleridge, Lecrae, and #BlackLivesMatter

Imagination Can Lead Us to Hate or to Love

 When reading many of the calloused, angry comments posted on internet articles about the Ferguson verdict, the death of Eric Garner, and the #BlackLivesMatter protests, my mind kept going back to one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most famous poems, “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison.” It must sound odd to couple the reading of cruel internet comments with a 1797 poem from a British Romantic poet—but I am convinced that if more commenters would take time to read, contemplate, and act upon the deeply Christian assertions of this poem, perhaps conversation would be more kind, productive, and most importantly, loving.

This is because Coleridge’s poem is a short narrative that instructs us how to follow what Christ calls the second most important commandment, to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). And the poem also shows us that, in order to truly love our neighbors, we must also learn to effectively use our imaginations.

In a note directly before the poem, Coleridge tells us that his dear friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, had come from London to visit him in the Lake District. Shortly before their arrival, the poet had an accident and injured his leg, preventing his going on preplanned outings with his visiting friends, leaving him alone to ponder his misfortune. The poem has a wonderfully whiny start as Coleridge shows us the power that emotion (in this case, bitterness and anger) has on our perception: “Well, they are gone, and here I must remain,/ This lime-tree bower my prison!”. Although a lime-tree bower (in the Lake District, no less) is traditionally associated with the idyllic rather than the carceral, the pouting poet sees it through the distorted lenses of disappointment and resentment. He becomes even more dramatic as he fumes over the fact that these are friends that he may never more “meet again”—yet they have chosen to leave him to his prison while enjoying the beautiful settings of the countryside “of which I told.”

Coleridge’s self-pity commingles with near hatred of his “friends” as he imagines all of the fun things that they are doing and the “beauties and feelings” that they are experiencing without him.

But once the narrator begins to truly imagine his friend’s faces and to especially remember Charles’ great love of nature (which he has longed for while in the city), his feelings abruptly change. The poet then thinks fondly on the “gentle heart” of his friend “to whom no sound is dissonant which tells of Life.” Coleridge remembers that he loves his friend deeply and begins to empathize with him as soon as he is able to envision himself in his friend’s place, enjoying nature. He goes on to say that, “A delight/ Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad/ As if I myself were there!”. And once his imagination has somehow dispelled his hatred and anger, he can see that the lime-tree bower that he is sitting in is actually beautiful and soothing. His perception has shifted dramatically, and he is now able to both empathize with another—and to see Reality more clearly.

Although Coleridge was not sharing these experiences with his friends, he was able to imagine as if he was—and his love for them became selfless rather than self- serving. But Coleridge, unlike fellow Romantic poet, William Blake, does not deify the imagination. In Coleridge’s writing, there is a deep connection between the spiritual realm and the imagination—and the imagination cannot be used correctly to enable us to see more clearly until somehow connected to that larger spiritual reality. In “This Lime-Tree Bower,” we see that the imagination can be either destructive or edifying; it can lead to hatred or to love.

This brings me back to the venomous comments that were all over the internet in response to the sad events of late November. After reading many of these comments, I am convinced that there is a tragic deficit of the right kind of imagination. We need to learn how to imagine just as we need to learn how to read. Of course, the kind of racial stereotyping/profiling that made its way into some angry comments is a type of imagining, but it is the result of a constricted imagination, limited mostly by fear of the difference.

In reading comments in response to the Ferguson and Garner verdicts, I was discouraged to see so many Christians with constricted imaginations. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the two verdicts, there is still a responsibility to listen to the stories of those who are hurting in order to understand why they are hurting. Coleridge was able to imagine and empathize with his friend, Charles, because his imagination had previously been fed with the truths of Charles’ experiences and feelings through listening to his story and spending time with him (thus understanding his “heart”). White American Christians now have an opportunity to listen to the stories of African American brothers and sisters in order to know how to imagine their experiences more truthfully. Only then can we begin to empathize.

As we all know, the protests that followed these two verdicts were not just about the verdicts themselves; they were about lamenting the fact that the two cases were not seen as important enough to go to trial, which perhaps reflects a belief that black lives have less value. The protests are also visible laments that the stories of racial profiling are silenced with the dismissive “race card” label rather than being heard and believed.

Christian hip hop artist, Lecrae, posted many comments on his Facebook and Twitter pages in response to the verdicts; he also wrote an article for Billboard and made his way onto the streets of Atlanta in order to join the protests while helping to keep the peace. But as he did this, he was continually attacked by many fans on his Facebook page for being “divisive” and told he that he needed back off and not speak about injustice because he was a Christian musician. Interestingly, Lecrae’s posts were not overtly about whether he thought Darren Wilson was innocent or guilty--but mainly about the pain and frustration his community felt because of the lack of communication, care, and understanding in response to their voices concerning the frequent possibility of injustice.

Some of the responses on Lecrae’s Facebook page did eventually become more empathetic when he finally posted some of his own story of interactions with the police—and his fans took the time to listen. He explained that, “Part of my testimony is how I was harassing people with a pellet gun as a 13yr old and was apprehended by the police. But I’m still ALIVE! I wasn’t shot down. Those cops did a good job. One officer decide not to arrest me years ago but instead challenged me to get in my bible.” After thanking God for “His grace,” he went on to explain that he has still been pulled over without cause and profiled on numerous occasions.

These specific examples from Lacrae’s story enabled his readers to imagine his experience. And many other young African-American men shared some of their own experiences on Lecrae’s Facebook wall(most, if not all, had shared experiences similar to Lecrae’s). When Lecrae’s story was finally heard, the imaginations of many of his fans began to enlarge rather than constrict. And in these moments, they were able to love their neighbor(s) in a much more substantive, rich way.

As novelist Michael Chabon explains, “To me, imagination is the key to morality.  If you can’t imagine yourself as someone else, to walk in their skin, you’re more likely to hurt them or demean them or legislate against them.  The golden rule depends on the power of imagination.”

(Photo taken by Travis Terrell Harris, pictured in the photo)

What This Is

“What is that?” It’s more of a reprimand than a question. Across the street is an abandoned umbrella. Its metal arms are upturned and outstretched like a toddler who has only just learned to walk, or even better, to fall.

“It’s art,” I tell him. “This site-specific installment asks when an object, idea, or even human, is broken past the point of value.” We stop. I shift my green umbrella to cover more of me and less of us. Sharing umbrellas has never been a part of my skill set. Perhaps this too is a metaphor.

“What?” he shakes his head. “It’s not art. Somebody’s umbrella flipped and rather than walking five steps to the garbage they threw it on the sidewalk.”

“You are the enemy of metaphor,” I tell him indignantly.

I am only joking, but at the same time I want there to be more to the story of the discarded umbrella. I need the object in front of me to be a sign or a symbol, which I think may be to say that I need it to be something else, something universal, at the very least, something worthy of an academic nod-and-hum. This is the same need that read the Winnie the Pooh quote, “No one can be uncheered by a balloon,” and wondered, “What does the balloon mean?” Of course it means something because it is not at all possible that A.A Milne saw a balloon against a rainy-day sky and thought, “Well, that’s nice.” No, the simplicity of that explanation is unacceptable, even if it may be true.

During the 1950s, modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham did something revolutionary with his dances. Where prior to this popular productions were about the dancers’ relationship with a story or the music, Cunningham created dances about dance. He gave dance the opportunity to be valuable and important by giving it the freedom to be about itself. In doing so, he challenged audiences appreciate what was right in front of them. “For me,” Cunningham wrote in an essay titled “Space, Time and Dance,” “it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen, is what is.” What a challenge this is for minds programmed to value the implication rather than the object. Can we challenge ourselves to look at a thing and value it for what it is, and not what we, for whatever personal reasons that color our experience, need it to be?

Our walk stops on a pier. Boats are docked at the edge of an ocean where wind rouses waves to dance back and forth against a vacant beach. A peach-shaded sun pokes its rays through a sky swirled with blues and grays. I want to comment on textural juxtaposition. I want to talk about beauty in the midst of such an ominous scene. I suppose I want to be thought of as clever and cosmopolitan for noticing it all. But what I need to do is be quiet. This is not a catalyst for an ancient discussion. This is a storm and a shore. This is water and sky. This is us standing quietly and watching it all.

(Art by Maggie Taylor)